‘A fork in the road’: laundry-sorting robot spurs AI hopes and fears at Europe’s biggest tech event

Humanoid called Digit fuelled boosterism at Web Summit, but also raised concerns about jobs, safety and climate

This year’s Web Summit, in Lisbon, was all about artificial intelligence – and a robot sorting laundry.

Digit, a humanoid built by the US firm Agility Robotics, demonstrated how far AI has come in a few years by responding to voice commands – filtered through Google’s Gemini AI model – to sift through a pile of coloured T-shirts and place them in a basket.

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