The Robots Cometh–Or Are They Already Here?

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The robots are coming, the real robots–or are they already here?

This is asked because of that viral video clip of Susan Dell, wife of the Dell Computer founder, who with her husband announced a massive donation in the Oval Office.

In the clip, Susan looks, let us say, a bit uncanny.

And it took social media a nano-second to debate whether it was really her, if the strangeness was the result of greatly overdone cosmetic surgery, whether she was an alien, or whether—and this let’s explore—the founder of the computer company was goofing on us all.

In other words, had his company created an ultra-realistic bot modeled after his spouse in a demonstration of the unreality settling all around us?

This is what she looked like a few years ago:

That seems a bit preposterous—a hoax involving a robot, especially at such a prominent event (and with no one spilling the beans)?—and yet mechanical technology and artificial intelligence have in fact reached the point of virtual reality.

And it becomes uniquely curious when one considers that besides laptops and other computers, Dell is immersed in doing just this: creating realistic robots. Two particularly interesting examples are the Unitree G1, a walking, dancing humanoid robot trained using Dell computers, and the Reachy Mini, a smaller interactive AI robot supported through a Dell partnership.

Below are some examples.

To make matters doubly intriguing, a YouTube clip in which the “real” Susan Dell comments on the controversy (knocking the theories down) is itself fake: generated by A.I. Susan has not yet broken her silence.

Oh, what a time. What a web is being weaved. What a time when (as the Beatles once sang) “nothing is real.”