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jillesvangurp 4 minutes ago [-]
They don't have to catch up, they just have to be good enough on a narrow set of tasks to be worth the trouble. Perfect is the enemy of good here. Everything I've seen suggests that the prototypes are already pretty good at simple tasks that involve recognizing, picking up, and putting things into/onto other things in some way.
All the dancing, jumping, running, etc. is nice for marketing but not actually that urgent for such tasks. Dexterity is nice. There are plenty of examples of humanoid robots doing pretty fiddly stuff like folding t-shirts and other things.
The rest is just optimization where these things gradually get faster, efficient, do more complex things, etc.
seydor 1 hours ago [-]
I dont get the investment in humanoids beyond trying to create some kind of stock market bubble again. Factories that have already heavily robotized their production, employ a minimal amount of humans to do niche work. It's going to be immensely difficult to replace that niche work with any kind of robot, let alone humanoids.
These humanoid robots (or generally limbed robots) could be useful for the two sectors that are craving for cheap workers, worldwide: agriculture and construction. Yet all the demos i see are fragile lightweight robots not made for rugged work. That makes me conclude that the whole sector is currently like the Metaverse.
somenameforme 33 minutes ago [-]
Imagine LLMs reach their potential and the general field of 'cognitive work' starts to be able to be largely automated. What happens then? I think there's some precedent with the Industrial Revolution. The increased productivity and the like did lead to some 'super farms' and the like, but the real change is that it left a vacuum in the economy. That vacuum was filled by industry such that even the 'super farms' started to be a vanishingly small part of the overall economy.
I think the same will happen with LLMs. They're going to create a vacuum in the economy, on a global level. And I think what will come next is something in the real world (as opposed to the digital) filling it. Humanoid robots might be myopic, but I think it's, at worst, a pretty decent guess. One basic goal would be able to automate typical service jobs, both in terms of normal employment - but also even within households. A low cost highly capable robotic maid would have a massive market.
I'm hand-waving away the dystopia of this all, because I ultimately think humans will still play a key role - but trying to predict what that role may be is impossible from where we're standing. Imagine trying to predict mass industrialization when you've lived you're entire life in an agrarian society. There's just no real basis for an intelligent prediction, besides 'way different.'
relevant_stats 37 minutes ago [-]
> I dont get the investment in humanoids beyond trying to create some kind of stock market bubble again.
Our entire world is heavily adjusted towards bipedal humanoid creatures. Having a moving humanoid tool who could replace some of our physical tasks without the need to build additional infrastructure in proximity around it is BIG. Noting your reservation about fragility, even the possibility of cheap construction and agriculture work is VERY BIG.
dawnerd 48 minutes ago [-]
And not to mention those robots will require an expensive subscription and maintenance contract which I’d imagine wouldn’t actually save money vs traditional labor. Any company that can optimize labor costs pretty much already has to the point of diminishing returns.
The only sector I see any of these selling in any meaningful number is military and police.
NegativeLatency 1 hours ago [-]
They’re probably hoping for some hardware version of the software “bitter lesson”
I think it’s probably also easier to raise money on a humanoid robot because everyone has some intuitive understanding of the form.
ModernMech 16 minutes ago [-]
Sexbots. That's it, that's the whole thing. And slaves in general but yeah.
treis 44 minutes ago [-]
Housework is the obvious use case.
imglorp 33 minutes ago [-]
Hands yes, for all the human actuated things. You don't need 2 legs to do that. Cantilevered wheels might be better for stair climbing around the house.
A better obvious use case for fully humanoid is vehicles. Jump into a forklift, combine, or golf cart and be immediately productive. Then jump out and a human can use the vehicle still.
strken 23 minutes ago [-]
That seems kind of nuts when you could stick a few solenoids on the pedals and steering wheel, mount the sensors from the head onto the chassis, and skip the need for a humanoid robot.
imglorp 4 minutes ago [-]
You could say the same about the dishwasher, lathe, and whatever else. I guess the use case is a humanoid bot can use all the human things without modifying them.
unethical_ban 38 minutes ago [-]
Literally crawl, walk, run... fight?
The physical world is currently designed for human interaction, and people who want to make money see the potential to replace humans with property. They'll get there.
"Your scientists were thinking so much about whether they could, they didn't stop to ask if they should".
samlinnfer 2 hours ago [-]
I really want to see that robot door-opening, shirt-folding, orange-peeling and sandwich making competition. It would be like the housework championships. If your robot works it would sell like hotcakes right there.
This is a recent essay on robotic workers that does not mention Figure’s 24+ hour livestream of a robot doing package management on a live assembly line.
The real reason it’s hard to assess where we’re at with industrial robots is that some of the people who’ve gone hardest at it are secretive, and also believe in power law scaling. So, the first 1,000 robots will only be used to build the next robot factory, which also will be used to build the next really big robot factory. When we see humanoid robots actually out in the wild for sale at retail, they are going to come very very quickly, at scale.
Figure and Boston Dynamics sold out next year’s production runs almost instantly sometime last year; I think it’s just incredibly hard to overestimate the impact humanoid robots are going to have on the global economy.
DennisP 1 hours ago [-]
It was a team of robots. One has battery for three or four hours.
I don't think it really addresses the article's concerns about long-horizon tasks or complex object manipulation. The objects were just bags and boxes, the manipulations were very simple, and each task was a few seconds long.
throwitaway222 2 hours ago [-]
There still seems to be questions around if that was faked. (scorch me if I'm wrong I last looked at this a month ago)
tokai 56 minutes ago [-]
Questions? It's clear it was faked. The robot kept pushing its non-existent vr googles back up.
troupo 1 hours ago [-]
> When we see humanoid robots actually out in the wild for sale at retail, they are going to come very very quickly, at scale.
Building factories and other robots is trivial. Just go and watch videos of any modern factory.
What's nigh impossible is doing complex interactions requiring finesse, "human touch", and at speed.
Even if you build a million robot-building robots, not a single one of them will be able to fold clothes, for example.
dawnerd 45 minutes ago [-]
Re: folding clothes, there’s machines that can do that already at the industrial scale.
troupo 39 minutes ago [-]
But probably not when those clothes come out if the dryer, or (in the retail) when someone just throws a shirt on a shelf
gjsman-1000 2 hours ago [-]
> So, the first 1,000 robots will only be used to build the next robot factory, which also will be used to build the next really big robot factory. When we see humanoid robots actually out in the wild for sale at retail, they are going to come very very quickly, at scale.
This is one of the dumbest ideas I've read here. Seriously; do you honestly believe, that we will be able to linearly scale all of the materials that go into robots?
You can't have a factory without motors, aluminum, steel, copper, quality control, CNC manufacturing, precision bearings, ball screws, harmonic drives, semiconductors, batteries, and skilled people to design, install, and maintain all of it. Every one of those is its own supply chain with its own bottleneck, and almost all of them are already constrained and at risk.
If anything, I would bet you $500 we will not be able to jump to the robotics age because we don't have enough skilled humans on this earth, due to the excitement about not training them because of their imminent replacement. That's before geopolitics - do you think China, if we actually built working humanoid robots, wouldn't immediately claim all supply for themselves and lock down the supply chain? Of course they would, it would be stupid not to. In the event of a working humanoid robot, every single dependency needs to be onshore, or it's not scaling.
MisterTea 1 hours ago [-]
> You can't have a factory without motors, ...
This might hold true if the nation building the robots did not have a well established manufacturing base. However, I can see this working in China who has a strong manufacturing base where they can rapidly source all of theses components. It would make for a great experiment but you need working robots first. And that is where I think this idea falls short -- there are no capable robots to accomplish this self-replicating task.
DiggyJohnson 1 hours ago [-]
You could have made the same point without starting with the insult.
gjsman-1000 1 hours ago [-]
The original commentator works at a private equity fund, admits he has lost $1B twice, and yet any blue-collar laborer has a better grasp of the material world. The insult is earned.
5 minutes ago [-]
sashank_1509 25 minutes ago [-]
I would have said the same of coding and yet here we are. If the only bottleneck is data (we’ve already spent a trillion in compute), I think it’s going to happen in a few years, a decade at most.
As someone early in their SWE career (hopefully), I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Knowledge work as a career seems like it’s becoming a less viable option with every advancement. It’s hard to predict the future, but sometimes I wish I took the med school route and just pursued tech as a hobby.
maigret 1 hours ago [-]
Med school has its own issues and is a very demanding learning and career path. Lots of stress, long shifts etc. I am very impressed by the people doing it but it’s not for everyone.
Anyway, who can predict the future? There are still lots of things to do in IT in the age of AI - actually, more than before. The question is most whether you like writing software and doing planning and bug fixes all day for the next decades.
tootie 1 hours ago [-]
I have a few thoughts. Number one is that humanoid robots are probably a dead end. It's movie stuff. It makes me think of Henry Ford saying customers want "faster horses". It is the fault of evolution that we don't have wheels but we don't have to repeat that mistake.
Secondly I think robot butlers are a bridge too far. The article explains pretty well why the spatial reasoning is problematic but so would things like battery life. And there'd be zero margin for error. The first time a robot steps on someone's cat or, god forbid, baby there will be a massive backlash. They have to be perfect. We accept LLMs hallucinating once in a while but a physical robot in your home cannot ever be wrong.
I think if we want to pilot autonomous robots it will be factory floors and other rote tasks. Maybe installing solar fields or something. Let them achieve a perfect safety record in someplace with more risk tolerance then take the next step.
magicmicah85 34 minutes ago [-]
The evolutionary mistake that allowed us to walk on our feet and use our hands enabled us to build tools, conquer our environment and tackle hard problems. A humanoid robot provides a good blueprint for creating a robot that can do anything.
A solar field robot can only do one thing. A humanoid robot with a software model that allows it to install solar fields and then switch to a new model is a much more compelling use case. Eventually you're going to run out of solar fields to install, then you need a solar field repair bot, a solar field cleaning bot, etc. General purpose robots that can switch models to perform different tasks is not a dead end, but definitely a very hard problem.
johannes1234321 1 hours ago [-]
> It is the fault of evolution that we don't have wheels but we don't have to repeat that mistake.
With wheels you can't climb up a steep mountain. Hands and feet allow to hold tight.
With wheels you can't hold as much. Feet can be used as a replacement for an arm for some functions when arms are broken.
If a wheel is partially broken it's close to impossible to use. If a foot is broken I can walk on heel or toes only and bypass some issue.
It's not the best solution for many things, but the flexibility is a big win.
That flexibility isn't needed with machines, though. I can have many machines, I can replace machines, ... so I can optimize for the use case.
And sometimes the use case might be to simulate a human to trick instincts, which recognize "humans" subconciously. Be it in health care or be it an army of machine soldiers walking towards an enemy.
dosisking 1 hours ago [-]
> I think if we want to pilot autonomous robots it will be factory floors and other rote tasks. Maybe installing solar fields or something. Let them achieve a perfect safety record in someplace with more risk tolerance then take the next step.
No, these autonomous robots will be used by the military as soldiers. There will be no attempt to achieve a "perfect safety record". These soldiers are already here, pay attention to what is happening in Ukraine.
elictronic 20 minutes ago [-]
The conversation is about humanoid robots, not wheeled/tracked objects with a gun or carrying cargo.
We have had remote controlled objects like this in various forms going back to WW2 and a few instances before. A wireless/fiber/starlink connection was added recently making them more robust.
This is not a humanoid because they don't make sense from a power/weight carrying/so many other perspectives.
The only thing unique to the Ukrainian situation is the widescale usage.
C06aka 48 minutes ago [-]
My first job out of high school was in a factory. Every aspect of production was automated by a machine with extremely high (five 9s) reliability. Despite that, things went wrong constantly because there was so much going on, usually in novel ways that couldn't be optimized away by tweaking or enhancing the machines. Something with human level dexterity and human level intelligence is necessary to fix the machines when things go wrong. On top of that, so many production tasks need that dexterity. I'd love to see a robot that can crochet. This is a good article about where we're at and where we need to be, but I do get frustrated with commenters who say "we don't need humanoids".
jongjong 37 minutes ago [-]
My main concern is that as people lose their jobs and can't find new ones, an increasing number of people may be forced into a life of crime. We need UBI ASAP.
All the dancing, jumping, running, etc. is nice for marketing but not actually that urgent for such tasks. Dexterity is nice. There are plenty of examples of humanoid robots doing pretty fiddly stuff like folding t-shirts and other things.
The rest is just optimization where these things gradually get faster, efficient, do more complex things, etc.
These humanoid robots (or generally limbed robots) could be useful for the two sectors that are craving for cheap workers, worldwide: agriculture and construction. Yet all the demos i see are fragile lightweight robots not made for rugged work. That makes me conclude that the whole sector is currently like the Metaverse.
I think the same will happen with LLMs. They're going to create a vacuum in the economy, on a global level. And I think what will come next is something in the real world (as opposed to the digital) filling it. Humanoid robots might be myopic, but I think it's, at worst, a pretty decent guess. One basic goal would be able to automate typical service jobs, both in terms of normal employment - but also even within households. A low cost highly capable robotic maid would have a massive market.
I'm hand-waving away the dystopia of this all, because I ultimately think humans will still play a key role - but trying to predict what that role may be is impossible from where we're standing. Imagine trying to predict mass industrialization when you've lived you're entire life in an agrarian society. There's just no real basis for an intelligent prediction, besides 'way different.'
Our entire world is heavily adjusted towards bipedal humanoid creatures. Having a moving humanoid tool who could replace some of our physical tasks without the need to build additional infrastructure in proximity around it is BIG. Noting your reservation about fragility, even the possibility of cheap construction and agriculture work is VERY BIG.
The only sector I see any of these selling in any meaningful number is military and police.
I think it’s probably also easier to raise money on a humanoid robot because everyone has some intuitive understanding of the form.
A better obvious use case for fully humanoid is vehicles. Jump into a forklift, combine, or golf cart and be immediately productive. Then jump out and a human can use the vehicle still.
The physical world is currently designed for human interaction, and people who want to make money see the potential to replace humans with property. They'll get there.
"Your scientists were thinking so much about whether they could, they didn't stop to ask if they should".
edit: realised there's a part 2: https://generalrobots.substack.com/p/benjies-humanoid-olympi...
The real reason it’s hard to assess where we’re at with industrial robots is that some of the people who’ve gone hardest at it are secretive, and also believe in power law scaling. So, the first 1,000 robots will only be used to build the next robot factory, which also will be used to build the next really big robot factory. When we see humanoid robots actually out in the wild for sale at retail, they are going to come very very quickly, at scale.
Figure and Boston Dynamics sold out next year’s production runs almost instantly sometime last year; I think it’s just incredibly hard to overestimate the impact humanoid robots are going to have on the global economy.
I don't think it really addresses the article's concerns about long-horizon tasks or complex object manipulation. The objects were just bags and boxes, the manipulations were very simple, and each task was a few seconds long.
Building factories and other robots is trivial. Just go and watch videos of any modern factory.
What's nigh impossible is doing complex interactions requiring finesse, "human touch", and at speed.
Even if you build a million robot-building robots, not a single one of them will be able to fold clothes, for example.
This is one of the dumbest ideas I've read here. Seriously; do you honestly believe, that we will be able to linearly scale all of the materials that go into robots?
You can't have a factory without motors, aluminum, steel, copper, quality control, CNC manufacturing, precision bearings, ball screws, harmonic drives, semiconductors, batteries, and skilled people to design, install, and maintain all of it. Every one of those is its own supply chain with its own bottleneck, and almost all of them are already constrained and at risk.
If anything, I would bet you $500 we will not be able to jump to the robotics age because we don't have enough skilled humans on this earth, due to the excitement about not training them because of their imminent replacement. That's before geopolitics - do you think China, if we actually built working humanoid robots, wouldn't immediately claim all supply for themselves and lock down the supply chain? Of course they would, it would be stupid not to. In the event of a working humanoid robot, every single dependency needs to be onshore, or it's not scaling.
This might hold true if the nation building the robots did not have a well established manufacturing base. However, I can see this working in China who has a strong manufacturing base where they can rapidly source all of theses components. It would make for a great experiment but you need working robots first. And that is where I think this idea falls short -- there are no capable robots to accomplish this self-replicating task.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox
Anyway, who can predict the future? There are still lots of things to do in IT in the age of AI - actually, more than before. The question is most whether you like writing software and doing planning and bug fixes all day for the next decades.
Secondly I think robot butlers are a bridge too far. The article explains pretty well why the spatial reasoning is problematic but so would things like battery life. And there'd be zero margin for error. The first time a robot steps on someone's cat or, god forbid, baby there will be a massive backlash. They have to be perfect. We accept LLMs hallucinating once in a while but a physical robot in your home cannot ever be wrong.
I think if we want to pilot autonomous robots it will be factory floors and other rote tasks. Maybe installing solar fields or something. Let them achieve a perfect safety record in someplace with more risk tolerance then take the next step.
A solar field robot can only do one thing. A humanoid robot with a software model that allows it to install solar fields and then switch to a new model is a much more compelling use case. Eventually you're going to run out of solar fields to install, then you need a solar field repair bot, a solar field cleaning bot, etc. General purpose robots that can switch models to perform different tasks is not a dead end, but definitely a very hard problem.
With wheels you can't climb up a steep mountain. Hands and feet allow to hold tight.
With wheels you can't hold as much. Feet can be used as a replacement for an arm for some functions when arms are broken.
If a wheel is partially broken it's close to impossible to use. If a foot is broken I can walk on heel or toes only and bypass some issue.
It's not the best solution for many things, but the flexibility is a big win.
That flexibility isn't needed with machines, though. I can have many machines, I can replace machines, ... so I can optimize for the use case.
And sometimes the use case might be to simulate a human to trick instincts, which recognize "humans" subconciously. Be it in health care or be it an army of machine soldiers walking towards an enemy.
No, these autonomous robots will be used by the military as soldiers. There will be no attempt to achieve a "perfect safety record". These soldiers are already here, pay attention to what is happening in Ukraine.
We have had remote controlled objects like this in various forms going back to WW2 and a few instances before. A wireless/fiber/starlink connection was added recently making them more robust. This is not a humanoid because they don't make sense from a power/weight carrying/so many other perspectives.
The only thing unique to the Ukrainian situation is the widescale usage.