Boston Dynamics causes a viral sensation every time it posts a new video of one of its robots moving around the lab. But with a little advice from some experts, you can begin to separate the hype from the facts and appreciate Boston Dynamics's work (and your own humanity) better. If you want to act like a robotics expert when viewing one of these videos, one of the first things you should do is be critical about how Boston Dynamics, a private company rather than an academic entity, doesn't publish enough of its findings. This makes it hard to know what's really going on inside the robots. "We have an idea about what approaches they are using" says Ioannis Havoutis, a researcher in robotics focusing on leg locomotion at the Oxford Robotics Institute, "but apart from a few papers, we can only guess what they are doing." Once the complaining's out of the way, start by understanding the calculations and margins involved in the robots' activities.

"A collection of smart devices may not make you smarter. There seems to be a gap between what technology has to offer and what we are naturally able to do" Suranga Nanayakkara slips a black ring onto his finger and points. This ring, he explains, helps visually impaired people read by converting text into speech. Nanayakkara points at a poster on the wall more than a metre away, clicks a small button on the side of the ring, and almost instantaneously a female voice starts reading out the poster's header through the headphones he's wearing. Such optical character recognition technology, or OCR, already exists but is often locked inside clunky highlighter-style devices that are slow and cumbersome.