Three reasons why it’s good news that robots are getting smarter

THE ROBOTS are coming! In science fiction that is usually an ominous warning. In the real world, it is a prediction—and a welcome one. The field of robotics has made impressive progress in the past year, as researchers in universities and industry have applied advances in artificial intelligence (AI) to machines. The same technology that enables chatbots like ChatGPT to hold conversations, or systems like DALL-E to create realistic-looking images from text descriptions, can give robots of all kinds a dramatic brain upgrade.