About 10 years ago, Canadian robotics professors unleashed a hitchhiking robot to roam the globe. HitchBOT, as it was dubbed, snapped photos of whatever it was observing, which were then uploaded to social media. After a sojourn throughout Europe, where it made brief conversation with passersby and took in the sights around the Netherlands and Germany, the robot landed on the East Coast of the United States. Eventually, it hoped to wind up in San Francisco.

Then the bot arrived in Philadelphia, where someone pummeled it and took it apart, practically down to the screws. There lay HitchBOT, who never got to trounce up the Rocky Steps with a water ice clutched in its robot claw.

A decade later, I think of the crumpled robot as I’m standing inside the airy, new permanent Meta outpost in West Hollywood, watching roughly a dozen people try on pairs of the company’s new artificial intelligence “smart glasses.” Although Los Angeles County could not be further from Philadelphia in a spiritual and geographic sense, I felt whiplash from how swiftly culture had pivoted since the bot’s demise. On the one hand, Americans rejected a robot art project coming to their city, and writ large, they’ve previously been slow to embrace voice-assisted bots such as Alexa and Siri: The Pew Research Center reported back in 2017 that 46% of Americans were using voice-assisted tech in their lives.

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The Meta Lab on 8600 Melrose Ave. in West Hollywood, Calif., on Nov. 6, 2025.

A look at the Meta Lab on 8600 Melrose Ave. in West Hollywood, Calif., on Nov. 11, 2025.

A look at the Meta Lab on 8600 Melrose Ave. in West Hollywood, Calif., on Nov. 11, 2025.

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More recently, that skepticism about new-gen tech has evolved into acceptance — excitement, even — about AI, including recording and being recorded by $459 smart glasses. A report from the Pew Research Center, which was issued earlier this year,

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