With the exception of Boston Dynamics, a US company that has become famous for its publicity-hungry YouTube videos of dancing cyborgs, most robotics businesses prefer to operate under the radar. With good reason, too. Robots do not find themselves in many workers' good books. Both blue- and white-collar workers fear being replaced by them, as advances in mechanical engineering and artificial intelligence software continue. Alarm at robots' potential impact on the workforce has led to calls for them to be taxed, which has created a rare alliance of Bill Gates, UK opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn and economist Robert Shiller. They argue that taxing human workers, and not robot ones, will place the fleshier of the two at a disadvantage when the inevitable battle between them comes. So it is easy to see why the companies that are creating the next generation of robot workers are keeping quiet about it, fearing they will be viewed as evil job-stealers rather than innovators. Robots are no...
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