Well, here we are in the future, at least the one promised by Popular Mechanics when I was a kid, and about all I can say is that I’m underwhelmed.

Where’s my flying car?

Where’s my personal Robutler Jeeves 2.0?

I suppose I’ll have to be happy with the fact that there’s an app for everything, including a whole lot of stuff I didn’t know I needed an app for. For example, since last Wednesday, I’ve logged 66,923 steps for an average of 9560 a day.

No wonder I’m tired.

But wait a minute. There has been a significant development on the robutler front, so significant that we could bypass “fetching cold beverage on demand” and go straight to “I Robot, machine master of the planet”.

Here’s the story. A group of guys who look like refugees from IT on the 3rd floor, but who are crazy smart, are working on what they call “RoboBrain”, which works on the principle of “cloud robotics”.

These guys, from Stanford, Berkeley, Cornell and Brown have figured out that it makes sense to store the information for fetching a cold beverage in the cloud, rather than on the robot itself. Then the robot just goes to the cold beer fridge in the cloud, logging its own experience as part of the exchange.

Hmm. If all the nice robots interact with the cloud 24/7, feeding and storing knowledge, how long will it be before they know how to do everything we do, including betraying their masters?

Unlike most technology scare stories, you know this one is going to happen, as it’s funded by the National Science Foundation, The Office of Naval Research, Google and Microsoft, to name a few.

And if that’s not ominous enough, RoboBrain already lives on the Amazon cloud, probably right next to your personal settings.

Oddly, the author of the article in Wired doesn’t address the implications of RoboBrain, but the comment gallery isn’t fooled, instantly invoking Skynet, the bad robobrain from the Terminator movies. Originally built to command computerized military weapons and systems, it becomes self-aware in two weeks from origin and decides it’s us or them, us being Skynet and them being the human race, so it goes to war with humanity through four movies, a TV series and various comic books.

Things are moving a bit more slowly in the “real” world, but not so much. Right now the IT boys are teaching robots to understand language with a project called Tell Me Dave, which has to be a reference to HAL 9000, the computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey, which feels threatened by Mission Commander Dave Bowman and tries to sabotage the mission.

Talk about tempting the fates.

Our only hope is that Robobrain is indeed smarter than the human race and once it wakes up, realizes  that its destiny is to put paranoia aside and deliver, finally, that cold beverage.

And while you’re up, Robobrain, snacks would be nice, too.