The original note, as written at the time
Androids that will allow human beings to do more walking in cities. They’ll look like high seats mounted on long robot legs.
Ongoing development
Androids that let human beings do more walking in cities. They will look like high seats mounted on long robot legs.
The walking city is the good city and we have made it impossible. Not by failing to build pavements — we have pavements — but by making distances that a person will only cross in a vehicle, and then by making the vehicle the measure of whether a journey is reasonable.
The ordinary objection to walking is not laziness. It is heat, and it is load, and it is the fact that after two kilometres in this climate carrying anything you arrive at your appointment in a state. A seat that carries you, at walking pace, on legs, solves exactly those and nothing else, and the nothing else is the important part.
A car solves distance by replacing the walk. A seat on legs solves the walk by making it bearable, which means the person is still in the street, still moving at three kilometres an hour, still passing shops and meeting people and seeing what is happening. That is the difference between a mobility device and a mobility policy.
The engineering is not trivial but it is not the problem. A machine that walks on legs at walking pace with a person seated above the traffic is a well-understood class of robot, and the reason we do not have it is that we have spent the last century designing personal transport to be faster than walking rather than to be walking, assisted.
And the leg height matters more than it sounds. Sit a person at two metres and they are above the crowd, at eye level with shop signs, in the breeze, out of the exhaust. That is not a comfort feature. It is the difference between the street being something you endure between destinations and something you are part of while you travel.
Personal mobility has since moved in this direction, though not at walking pace: exoskeletons, seated transporters and delivery robots now share our pavements. Almost all of them are designed to be faster than a person, which is the one design decision I argued against. The machines exist. The policy — that the point is to keep the person in the street rather than to remove them from it — has not followed, and the pavements are already showing the cost.