I dream of robots

This past weekend, one of the few I don't have to work in any given month, my wife and I went to IKEA. I'm not sure what percentage of the population in the United States has been to an IKEA store, but I was in the group that had not. I suppose I can count myself in the IKEA family now, being that I've not only been, but spent hard earned cash (plastic) there as well.

Up in the Living Room section, they had what we were looking for, a chair. Specifically, we needed a new chair for one specific purpose, gaming in front of the T.V. in our living room. It came down to the fact that both my Wife and I were both playing Witcher 3 a lot, and felt the need to sit closer to enjoy it more. So we headed to IKEA. Next to the chair we ended up buying was a display cube, with a robot in it. While it was a pretty simple one, none the less it was a robot that seemed quite useful. If you've been to an IKEA (and assuming they have those in more locations than just the one I went to), you know what I'm talking about.

Put simply, this robot ass sits a lot. Marketing ploy or actual testing? Hard to say, but I felt like it was genuine, being that it looked like it was one of the chairs from just there around the display, not some differently looking or specially prepared model. Did that influence my decision to buy? I'm not sure, I was set on needing a chair when I walked in, just making sure I got the right one.

This type of use for robots, in testing of extremely menial tasks that would not be feasible for any human to do holds the greatest potential for actually impacting our lives. I guess you could say that I dream of robots that provide tangible benefit to human-kind. In this example, it is doing just that, no matter if it is there for marketing (it is, at least to some degree) or actually there to show how their chairs are really tested in some lab somewhere in Scandinavia. Robots have this potential, to help people by doing the things that we as consumers (or they, as companies) don't want to do, or don't have the time to do.