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- Hacker News
- 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.by jongjong
- Substantial displacement of human labor is still very far away, yes, but I'd say it's not due to the lack of dexterity and precision. GenAI is making such rapid advancements that the robotic control systems part may soon be "solved." The real blocker is supply chain constraints for physical parts -- specifically, rare earth elements.
Those are essential for the powerful yet accurate electromagnetic motors that make these robots feasible. Oh, and batteries too. However, their supply is severely limited, even without China flexing its strangehold on the market. Last I checked there are no real alternatives or solutions on the horizon for the raw material shortage. Some estimates suggest the global supply currently is a small fraction (like 2% or even lower?) of that needed for mass deployment of the type Elon hallucinates about to pump TSLA stock.
The company that solves this or otherwise figures out a way to mass produce dexterous robots is going to be the next trillion dollar company.
by keeda - Humanoid robots are the new qugv (quadruple UGV aka dogs), they are pretty much useless in anything functional but the show off and wow factor. I remember around covid times we got one of these qugv and everyone in the team wanted to be the one working on it, except me, I kept my focus on UAVs and even told them that UAVs are and will be the only robots that has actual use cases (not to include cobotics). That being said, it’s probably a good thing that they only remain as a showoff only, I mean, look at drones, the moment they proved to be functional, humans immediately used it as killing machines rather than something useful. Before that, I remember it was really hard to get a million dollar budget for any UAV project, no one cared about drone delivery, drones that can deliver health equipment to save lives when seconds matters, but as soon as they are used for killing or surveillance you see billions pouring in! So yeah, let humanoid robots be only for shows and hopefully they never become functional or “catch up” any time soon.by tamimio
- I think the article takes a completely wrong lense for viewing the Humanoid Robotic Games, and general progress that is being made right now (though admittedly, many robot companies make it challenging with their marketing as well). Most of the advances being demonstrated right now are about establishing a robotic _platform_. They don't necessarily individually have to be able to complete all tasks end to end, but pushing the boundary forward on one of them at a time as a step of progress.
The different challenges presented in the article are almost all orthogonal to each other. Some of them are hardware engineering challenges, some of them are software / AI challenges, and most of them ultimately economic challenges. They can all be solved in a mostly independent manner, meaning that they won't be decades away to be resolved, but more likely years.
I think robotics is in a space that very much falls into the "people overestimate the progress in one year but underestimate the progress over 5 years" category.
A lot of the problems to solve regarding effectiveness (not efficiency) of humanoid robots even as outlined in the article (manipulation = short term spatial planning; long term task planning) greatly benefit from the current advances in AI, and in my estimation are already solvable with better harnesses with the current generation of models.
by hobofan - 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.by sashank_1509
- 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".by C06aka
- Moravec's paradox remains undefeated.by AlexandrB
- 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.by mdberkey
- 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.
- > they just have to be good enough on a narrow set of tasks to be worth the trouble
Depends on the context. If they are to work around human beings, particularly in the home, then they must be safe... to work around humans.
If a humanoid robot hits a human being, knocks one over, or even falls down on top of one -- especially a child, who is more fragile and whose movements are unpredictable -- then the industry as a whole faces a huge setback. Just look at what happened when a "self-driving" Uber ran over and killed a pedestrian in Arizona.
by teachrdan - 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.
by tootie - > Number one is that humanoid robots are probably a dead end.
Our shape is very flexible.
It's probably not the end-all most flexible format out there, but whatever format we end up with will probably be more similar to a human than to a 6df robotic arm mounted on a car. (It will probably have legs, for a start, not wheels.)
by marcosdumay - > 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.
by dosisking - 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.
by magicmicah85 - > 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.
- 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.
by vessenes - 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)
- > 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.
by gjsman-1000 - 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.
by DennisP - > 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.
by troupo - 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.
edit: realised there's a part 2: https://generalrobots.substack.com/p/benjies-humanoid-olympi...
by samlinnfer - Also hand washing!by wwwtyro
- 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.
by seydor - In the united states, workers have traditionally been super expensive to the point that manual labor such as manufacturing has all been exported.
could any of this be reversed?
by m463 - 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.
- Sexbots. That's it, that's the whole thing. And slaves in general but yeah.by ModernMech
- 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".
- 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.
by dawnerd - > 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.
- A LOT of real humans still assemble machines across the globe. Probably also what you have at home.
There are plenty of YouTube videos available were you can see how many hands a rice cooker is going through.
And we talk about a real robot costing 5 figures being able to shown what it should do and then it just does it 24/7.
It will fill the gap of no automatisation to full automatisation.
Besides that, in theory it would also allow the remote-gig economy: A robot at home, a helper sitting somewere else.
Take some random problem: You want some automatistaion for painting a wall. What do you do? You buy the full automat from a special company which comes with its own support contract, and fllow up costs.
Now you buy one 5 figure robot, explain to them that they should paint the room and they will do it. Not today, but do you think this will take 50 years and is a non solvable problem? I don't.
by Manglo