The star attraction at the University of Hong Kong's brand new robotics lab is a six-foot-two, 330-pound humanoid called Atlas. The dean of engineering, Normen Tien, is Atlas' baby sitter.

Tien foresees a world populated by nimble and knowledgeable robot butlers, smart wheelchairs, mechanical maintenance workers impervious to the stench of rotting garbage and radiation-proof rescue workers immune to the dangers of nuclear catastrophes such as the Fukushima reactor melt down. They would do jobs humans don't want or can't do. Tien also believes that Hong Kong will become the wellspring of the robot revolution.

HKU's Atlas is bigger and badder than any two-legged two-armed automatons seen so far. It is one of the most advanced humanoid robots ever produced by Boston Dynamics. Atlas will compete in the Robotics Challenge mounted by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

Tien lobbied hard to bring Atlas to Hong Kong, a first for Asia. Atlas, built at a cost of US$2 million, is the first commercial export for Boston Dynamics. Until now, the company has worked exclusively with the US government. Atlas was reclassified as a commercial export from its previous designation which barred it from being shipped to countries including China, Iran, North Korea and Sudan.

DARPA's Robotics Challenge aims to develop robots that can be used in disaster relief. They must climb stairs, scale ladders, move over uneven terrain and operate motor vehicles and handle tools. Already Atlas is able to operate powered screw drivers with his human-looking hands.

Bipedal robots were the stuff of dreams, mostly nightmares, and confined largely to science fiction until quite recently.

Robots of fiction invariably respond to humanity's self-destructive nature by usurping their human masters' authority, as was the case with Isaac Asimov's iRobot.

"Machines are becoming devastatingly capable of doing things like killing. Billions of dollars are being spent on that. Character robotics could plant the seed for robots that actually have empathy," David Hanson said at a 2009 TED Talk at Long Beach, California.

Ben Goertzel adds that once artificial intelligence becomes "smarter and more powerful than humans - which I think is essentially inevitable - the outcome looks more likely to be positive if they have been raised to have positive emotional relationships with humans."

Whether or not there is a transfer of global dominance from homo sapiens to robo sapiens - a scenario dealt with in New York Times best-selling author and robotics engineer Daniel Wilson's tongue in cheek How to Survive a Robot Uprising - there will be a time when robots will be content, and needed, to do the tasks humans don't want to or simply cannot.

(HK Edition 08/23/2013 page1)