Will the Age of Robots (Finally) be Arriving?

Recently, I was walking in a little park in downtown Mountain View, right in the heart of Silicon Valley, when I saw something unexpected. They were little robots, well little "automated carts", really, with a flag on top and there were a few of them lined up near the library. Every now and then, one of them would leave the line and navigate the sidewalks and crosswalks of downtown. Being in what is essentially ground zero of Silicon Valley, I guess I shouldn't have been that surprised. When I moved to Mountain View in 2007, I remember being surprised at seeing Google's fleet of autonomous cars driving around (now called Waymo). This was a precursor to the boom in self-driving car companies that happened over the past decade, and which has yet not quite borne fruit.