Plug and Play: How Power Is the Last Great Hurdle for Synthetic Companions

AI? Check! Lifelike movements? Ditto! But what about what makes sexbots go?

From unaesthetically blocky humanoid robot prototypes incapable of walking across a stage let alone ascend a couple of stairs, to today’s elegantly strolling, seductively stylish Xpeng’s IRON model, it certainly looks like our dreams of super lifelike, fully autonomous, artificial-intelligence-driven, synthetic companions may be right around the corner.

But we have one unfortunately large technological hurdle yet to overcome. That is, in order to untether our wildest, independently functioning sexbot dreams, we need to figure out how to keep them charged—at least for more than a few minutes at a time.

Electric Avenue

Compared with making robots move less like machines and more closely resemble a sort-of-living, kind-of-breathing person with natural movement, and covering their inner mechanisms with a supple, lifelike skin, you’d think building a suitably powerful and necessarily compact battery would be a proverbial snap.

RECOMMENDED READ: Microsoft AI’s CEO Swears To “Never Build A Sex Robot”

The problem is power isn’t an exclusively robotic dilemma. The electric vehicles industry, for instance, has been struggling with it for years, and while companies utilizing lithium-iron-phosphate (LFP) or nickel-manganese-cobalt (NMC) batteries are achieving truly impressive mileages, the technology remains far too big, heavy, and especially expensive for artificial companion developers to ever use.

With that in mind, it seems we might have two possible solutions. The first is to wait until technology reduces the cost, size, and weight of high-capacity LFP or NMC batteries—which may take so much time as to be practically impossible.

Electric Love

The other is to take a page from life itself by making tomorrow’s artificial companions move efficientlyas well as realistically—so they could function longer with much less juice.

For example, soft robotics swaps complicated arrays of bulky, energy-hungry mechanical motors for fewer, generally lighter, hydraulic systems that essentially mirror how human muscles work. Not only that, but soft technology also looks, feels, and acts more naturally. 

Meaning next-gen artificial companions wouldn’t have to squander priceless joules making—and likely failing—to make a clunky collection of servos and miles of wiring move like a human when soft robotic engineering can already do precisely that.

Then there’s the issue of their brains. As we’re growing increasingly aware, artificial intelligence hardware requires a lot of power which, in turn, needs another lot of cooling—resulting in even more lots of weight.

Of course, we might see the development of newer, more energy-efficient AI hardware in the not-too-distant future, or perhaps the software side won’t need so much of the former to run.

Nice to dream, but we also might take a different approach by making tomorrow’s artificial companions brainless.

Plug In Baby

What I mean is rather than cramming all those electricity-hungry chips into an artificial companion’s noggin, we instead take a page from another, already well-established, energy-efficient technology.

Ever use a Chromebook or MacBook Air? If you’re not already familiar, both are basically web browsers masquerading as laptops and while nearly useless without Wi-Fi, their minimalization also means they need far less power than their larger, hungrier brethren.

So why not use their approach and build artificial companions with high-speed Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, whichever is faster and more reliable, and not big, power-demanding brains? While there might be a few obvious trade-offs, like needing to have a constant, high-speed internet connection, they also might be able to do everything we want for hours or possibly days of nonstop use rather than scant minutes at a time.

She’s electric

Likewise, we could ditch batteries altogether—or at least not have to build them to do all the heavy lifting. Inspired by another, already familiar bit of household tech, why not construct our artificial companions with a bevy of well-placed induction charging points?

Installing them in … well, their backsides might be ideal as all they’d have to do to top off their batteries is sit down on a complementary-equipped chair or stretch out on their own charging bed. Though it might mean they couldn’t walk, talk, or do all the other fun things we might like them to do for days at a stretch, their considerably smaller batteries would make them lighter and more efficient.

Will we eventually solve the artificial companion battery problem? Of course, but if developers tried thinking outside their technological boxes, we might have them walking, talking, and loving us much sooner than later.

Image Sources: Depositphotos