Today millions of these industrial machines bolt, weld, paint, and do other repetitive, assembly-line tasks. Instead, the real robots that were being set up in factories were very different. When I was a child in the 20th century, hoping to encounter a robot when I grew up, I expected it would look and act human, like C-3PO from Star Wars. Right: Others create machines that imitate humans in detail-like Harmony, an expressive talking head that attaches to a silicone and steel sex doll made by Abyss Creations in San Marcos, California. “These control signals get passed down to the computers that usually respond to the joysticks and pedals in the cab.”

“This is where the AI runs,” he said, pointing into the collection of circuit boards, wires, and metal boxes that made up the machine: Sensors to tell it where it is, cameras to let it see, controllers to send its commands to the excavator, communication devices that allow humans to monitor it, and the processor where its artificial intelligence, or AI, makes the decisions a human driver would. Inside was his company’s product-a 200-pound device that does work that once required a human being. Ready-Campbell, co-founder of a San Francisco company called Built Robotics, clomped across the coarse dirt, climbed onto the excavator, and lifted the lid of a fancy luggage carrier on the roof. It had no eyes or ears either, since it used lasers, GPS, video cameras, and gyroscope-like sensors that estimate an object’s orientation in space to watch over its work. It had no hands three snaky black cables linked it directly to the excavator’s control system. The seat in this excavator, though, was empty. In North America, skilled excavator operators earn as much as $100,000 a year. Every dip, dig, raise, turn, and drop of the 41-ton machine required firm control and well-tuned judgment. The Cat piled the dug-up earth on a spot where it wouldn’t get in the way it would start a new pile when necessary. In front of me was a hole that would become the foundation for another one.Ī Caterpillar 336 excavator was digging that hole-62 feet in diameter, with walls that slope up at a 34-degree angle, and a floor 10 feet deep and almost perfectly level. To the south, wind turbines stretched to the horizon in uneven ranks, like a silent army of gleaming three-armed giants. I met one on a windy, bright day last January, on the short-grass prairie near Colorado’s border with Kansas, in the company of a rail-thin 31-year-old from San Francisco named Noah Ready-Campbell. If you’re like most people, you’ve probably never met a robot. This story appears in the September 2020 issue of National Geographic magazine.

Bunni how we first met 2015