This is my week of debriefs. CES has a way of hurling you into the new year, kicking and screaming, and it can be hard to find your bearings as you emerge on the other side. As the dust has cleared, one thing remains very clear: No two people have the same notion of what does and doesn’t constitute a robot.
That’s not a problem, per se. Language evolves and so does technology. I was on the Equity Podcast this week to talk CES with Haje, one of our hardware reporters. He posited that much — or even most — technology is essentially a robot at this point. One can fairly credibly make the argument that “robot” as a term is much broader than how we tend to deploy it. Certainly, machine learning is becoming pervasive in ways few imagined.
The upside of casting as wide a net as possible is that one can also make th...
