The real benefit is how quickly it can learn a new task. Atlas has tasks given to it and waypoints to reach. It does do some of the work itself. I agree though, not nearly as threatening as a fully AI controlled model, though we are headed down that path at full throttle already.

I could see these being useful in lots of situations where you need something like a human, but that you won't feel as bad about killing if things go poorly. Things like hazardous waste cleanup or future space missions where a human pilot just has to point a joystick and move their arms to grasp things via the robot are what I think of first.

For real though. My robotics team was able to train a driving model to run a little robot off of ultrasonic sensors and an Intel Realsense camera, which is crazy. It ran on a little Ryzen V1000 embedded board, so not much processing power at all in that little 15W CPU.

Once it was trained all we had to do was give it a heading and a point to reach and it would get there with reasonable accuracy. We ended up hard-coding smaller motions due to limited training resources, but for assisting the human driver's inputs it worked great.

But, a robot may not be able to carry all the tools it needs at once either. In that case having either a tool-changer station or something that can come over and swap them out where the robot is becomes useful.

I'm picturing them chucking boards up the levels of a building in perfect unison like a cartoon. Just a vertical assembly line up to a top group that hammers them into the roof or something. What are they building? Who knows.

Nah, it's just going to make some little clumps of plasma that float around in your microwave. Those are stupidly hot though and could scorch the inside of the microwave. It shouldn't explode, but your microwave will be unhappy.

Nope, the grapes are about the right size and shape to act like a 'lenses for the microwaves. The point where they touch gets really hot and produces plasma.

Plasma is easy. Just put a pair of grapes together in your microwave, touching each other, right in the middle of the turntable. Cover them with a glass if you value your microwave, and don't do it at all if you actually value your microwave. Or do it anyways, I'm not your mom.