Unimate, the first industrial robot

In 1961 a two-tonne arm began pulling hot die-cast parts out of a machine at General Motors' plant in Ewing Township, New Jersey, and stacking them. It was the Unimate, built by George Devol, who had patented a "programmed article transfer" device in 1954, and Joseph Engelberger, the engineer and salesman who turned the patent into a company. Its instructions were stored on a magnetic drum; it could be taught a sequence of positions and would repeat them indefinitely.

The Unimate had no perception and no learning. It is on this timeline because it fixed an idea of what a robot was, a machine that replaces a human body at a task, that ran in parallel with, and mostly separately from, the machines that were meant to replace a human mind. The two lines rarely met for fifty years. Shakey at SRI in the late 1960s was the exception, and it took hours to cross a room.

They are meeting now. The humanoid robots of the 2020s run on the same transformer models that write text, trained on video of people, and the question Engelberger was asked on television in 1966, whether a robot could pour a drink, is being answered by machines that learned to do it by watching.