A complete visual register of the mechanical kin walking among us — from the gleaming foundries of Shanghai to the quiet research halls of Zürich. Forty-seven units catalogued, indexed, and dispatched for the curious reader.
This is the fourth volume of the Index, and the first in which the contents have begun to outrun the cover. We catalogue here forty-seven distinct platforms; the year prior, thirty-one. The year before that, eighteen. The curve is the sort of thing editors used to plot on graph paper in low-lit rooms; now we plot it on glass, in rooms even lower-lit.
What follows is a record of those platforms — assembled from press kits, factory visits, leaked schematics, and the kind of long, patient looking one does at a robot standing still. The reader will notice, as we did, that the line between industrial and social has begun to dissolve. The Optimus welds. The Ameca smiles. Somewhere in between, an entire profession is being invented, and then immediately, re-invented.
We have organized the catalogue by ascending model number, but the platform is searchable. Filter as you wish. The future, as ever, is being shipped in a cardboard crate.
We have classified the platforms in this volume according to a five-letter taxonomy, applied in order of intent. An Industrial unit is one designed first for the factory floor; a Commercial unit, for service economies; a Research platform, for the laboratory; a Social unit, for the home and the public square; and a unit marked as Development is one we believe will exist in twelve months, but do not yet.
— THE EDITORS
The most-photographed humanoids of the year, almost without exception, are the ones with faces. Ameca, Sophia, the new AgiBot, and of course the perpetually-laughing prototypes from a dozen smaller labs. This is, perhaps, the wrong thing to photograph. The interesting mechanics are below the neck. But the camera loves a face; the camera has always loved a face; the camera will go on loving a face long after the face, in turn, learns to love it back.
— K. ABE, CONTRIBUTING
The earliest humanoids walked. The current generation, almost without exception, walks again — better, faster, with more graceful recovery from a misplaced footfall. We have spent the better part of a decade teaching the machine the simple act of putting one foot in front of the other, and we are, at last, beginning to succeed. What comes after walking is, of course, running. And after running, jumping. And after jumping, we will have to ask the question we have been postponing since the first humanoid crossed the first threshold: where, exactly, is it going?
— ANON., AN ENGINEER