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- Hacker News
- how is anyone going to afford robots if no one can work
- In case you haven't noticed. Almost everything is supply limited in the economy. You cannot currently work and make stuff that gets sold at a supermarket. None of that stuff is American. Or European. Or Russian. Or Moroccan. Yes, maybe the luxury cheese section is local. Maybe the draft beer section. But they are large exceptions, nearly everywhere on the planet.
It's a complete miracle that anyone can have any job today.
So: "how is anyone going to afford robots if no one can work?" Well, exactly the same way as today.
by spwa4 - People still work and/or something like UBI.by tim333
- For the last 2 days I've been trying to create a skill for Openclaw that would allow traditional control of the Adeept Tank's robot arm (a small open source toy tank that looks like a bomb disposal robot).
ASTRA HAS BEEN UTTER SHIT.
It is much more expensive than Sol 5.6 Medium / High and did nothing but write unit tests and junk code, despite having access to the vendor original source, an API, and the full tank specs.
Failure Examples:
* In two instances had the direction of the servos wrong.
* Calculated the maximum extent of the gripper wrong, and the closure, so it didn't grip.
* Code failed to take into account the gripper requires continuous torque when lifting a pair of socks, so couldn't lift.
* Failed to actually start physical testing more than opening and closing the gripper, and that was when I asked about progress.
* Code failed quite spectacularly to calculate camera gimbal extent range correctly.
* Code failed to use the ultrasonic in range to target until I pointed it out, the skill also didn't advise gimbal angle adjustment to correct range overshoot to the wall behind a small object.
The test environment has both an onboard ultrasonic for distance, onboard camera, and a bird eyes view camera (birds eyes only while training).
I've stopped using Astra Low (default) and gone back to Sol 5.6 low/medium/high for the training, it's cheaper and now I'm back to fine tuning, after it had to redo large chunk of the gripper/arm code and prevent unnecessary hard stop code kicking in based on the wrong profiling.
It's cost me around 1000 to 1250 credits (£50), burnt in around 2 hours, looking mostly at recorded video, and photos, and writing bad code based on bad assumptions. I've also burnt through regular Plus 5 hour quota in about 30-45 minutes with it.
- I'm not sure why this has been voted down, it's a counterpoint to the hype with factual anecdotes to back up the claim of it's performance Vs the article itself. I've got the source and video to prove it too.
- There is something deeply wrong with Astra. I can’t quite put my finger on it. On the one hand it is a lot more knowledgeable, which makes sense since it’s a larger model. On the other hand that knowledge doesn’t reliably translate to intelligence or insight. Certainly tasks like 3D modeling it does extremely well. Other stuff like complex coding problems in an existing codebase it stumbles more often than not. This morning it ran around in circles. It implemented a feature, then convinced itself that it should have followed “proper TDD”, deleted all the code it had written and wrote 8,500 LoC of unit tests. At that point I was down to 35% of quota so I stopped it and gave the task to Opus 5.
Really weird model. No idea how it did so well on all the benchmarks.
- LLM's are a funny technology because on the one hand this is all undeniably impressive at the rate of what's changed from them, and yet despite that I find myself disappointed by the lack of breakthroughs for things I don't find interesting. I like math and programming, and LLM's are pretty good at it, when are they going to get good at folding laundry for me? I think a lot of robotics work promises to solve this category of "boring" breakthroughs, and I'm optimistic we'll be able to achieve it, i just wonder whenby scronkfinkle
- It's because existing models are a brute-force approach to intelligence. With enough data and compute, a stochastic parrot will become very impressive.
But with robotics, there's no pre-made dataset that can be parroted. Notice that these datasets, e.g. how to fold clothes, need to be created by humans. That's as if humans needed to write algorithms like quicksort to teach LLMs how to code.
by RivieraKid - future is on the way, three to four generation ( one each year ?) will unfold this, primarily quantum computer improving material and battery, humanoids becomes standardised and modular enough to be easily replaceable ( think ibm pc ) ( most components are simple injection moulded advance plastics , mass produced in some corner of china, self detection of wear and tear and self replace that part ), other is optical computers ( 100x lower power x 100x speed = local inference ), problem is, when this will become reality, who will benefits more ? who will hold moat ?by iamgopal
- Unless we spend a bunch of money generating data, I can't imagine the machine steps to fold laundry are very big in the general training sets. Someone is going to have to find a hardware system, cheap enough to make it economically feasible then train it. As far as tasks people will pay a lot of money for a robot, this seems low on the list.by rileymat2
- f folding clothes, i wanna just have a robot be my personal chef. the amount of different tasks and capabilities a robot will need to make any meal that I can in my kitchen is huge and i feel like it’s still a while from being solved.by kart23
- The economic value in automating high skill and expensive labour that the most profitable corporations rely on is what attracts the most investment and effort.
Once you lose your job you'll find plenty of time to do all those menial tasks you hate wasting time on.
Jokes aside, programming and mathematics are just well ordered environments. Already digital and verifiable. Perfect for a GPU cluster to power through. The real world is big slow and complex in comparison.
- Pretty soon. Sunday Robotics had a 3 hour stream of folding clothes with 99% accuracy. You can watch it for yourself. There’s a lot of “hand” companies with very compelling videos just over the last two months. Then there was Figure’s multi day livestream of package manipulation that was very impressive. Physical LLMs are definitely coming. Given enough training data we know LLMs can output coherent data in any space, it’s just a matter of time.by dyauspitr
- I've learned that I spend significantly less time folding laundry than many of the people commenting about modern ai powered robotics. It's not meant literally is it? For instance keeping floors and counter-tops clean seems a much bigger time sink for me.
- The bottleneck is not really the intelligence here.
We can build robots that do the things you want. Arrange a visit to Amazon's robot warehouse tour.
We can't ship them because they break all the time with current technology. It would be a tough sell to have to being in a 100kg robot for servicing every few weeks.
This was cars in the first several decades of automobiles. The tide shifted as soon as you could just drive the car to a neighborhood dealership for servicing. It's fun to imagine the logistics of that for robots but the material science and engineering has to advance a bit.
by fooker - The limitations that they state shouldn't really make much of a impact. But it was nice of them (and not to mention, real unbiased research) to mention those. Kudos to them!by sudo_cowsay
- I enjoy hearing that they were ran on medium effort.by judge2020
- I’m honestly blown away by Astra, I told it to build me a fairly complex game I’ve been procrastinating on for more than a year and left it running overnight with computer use and full access enabled. Next morning I had a fully functional game built. It downloaded Unity, Blender and GIMP and built all the assets as well as the complete game without me having to do anything, the game is not trivial at all and nor are the assets.by rmonvfer
- I don't know much about robotics engineering, so I just wanted to give kudos to the Robocurve team on this write-up.
Even for an absolute robotics newbie such as myself, the article was interesting to read, and easy to understand. Plus it was straight to the point, with no unnecessary waffle.
Just a pleasure all round. Well done Robocurve.
by herodoturtle - It seems like human movements have the equivalent of small fast models to perform routine actions and balance but the higher brain is able to take over as needed. Is anyone trying to replicate that concept?by bilsbie
- The costs will need to go way way down either through chips (but then less updating) or something else. $2 to put away a block is very expensive labor.by gamerDude
- Ofcouse it will go down. Look at cost of Fable vs GPT-6 - it is already 2.3 cheaperby mydreamof
- Are LLMs going to eventually become the architecture that powers self-driving cars?
Seeing them play Portal and other video games, I'm curious if they will eventually help solve that last N% of self-driving.
by drakenot - It's not a coincidence that Waymo started becoming viable after GPT-3.by kakugawa
- GPT-6 is multimodal, LLMs alone have no vision capabilityby ac29
- I remain worried about prompt injection style attacks against self-driving cars.
Imagine if someone finds a weird image pattern that gets misinterpreted as instructions and hangs that off a bridge over a freeway.
by simonw - In a sense, they already are. The giant leap in self driving cars we've seen in the last handful of few comes from using transformer models.
- To my understanding gemma is shipped with waymo, in a highly modified fashion.
I'm skeptical, tho. Cost will push for right sizing, much like we have right sized a lot of things about modern cars.
by hiddencost - Fast forward to me sitting at a Green Light waiting for my usage to reset for the week so I can get to where I’m goingby Aboutplants
- A VLM (a vision-language model) is already being used by Waymo[1]. It's useful for scenarios that require reasoning and general knowledge.
[1] https://waymo.com/blog/2025/12/demonstrably-safe-ai-for-auto...
by red75prime