Comment by golol
2 days ago
You are considering issues of like 0.25x - 4x efficiency gain or loss while ignoring that the real issue is possible vs impossible. If I have a household tobit that can vacuum the floor taking 4x as time as me I don't care. It's still extremely useful. This is why we human-imitatinf approached are used everywhere. It won't be the most efficient solution but the data contains information that helps make it possible at all.
No, I'm not considering speed. I'm considering efficiency. A simple example: I tried to do plastering for a room in my house a few months ago, and as a first-timer, I did a terrible job. There are many things I learned later by hiring a professional plasterer:
- Mix type.
- Mix consistency.
- Mix timing and water amount (which he adjusted as he worked).
- Uneven walls.
These things are based on experience, room type, wall type, wall alignment ... etc. There is no way that a robot will do the same job as a man; it has to be done differently. Using the same space as humans will not make generic robots useful. Your vacuum example is perfect, I have one and had to manually add/remove the water container as the robot will not be able to do that. Even if it does, it has to return to the dock, unload, and start again. A human would remove it at any point and place it somewhere else.
I don't understand why you think a human-inspired general purpose robot won't be able to learn to deal with the issues in your bullet point list.
We're already seeing in AI that given human examples they can "learn" to act the same way, and a robot wouldn't have to go from never having done any plastering to being an expert plasterer in a single shot. They can be trained once using the expertise of professionals (both explanations, and videos of them doing work) such that they don't make the same mistakes you make on a first attempt - and once trained once, that knowledge can be rolled out to all robots running that software rather than needing to teach each one individually. Hell, even without expert advise in the training, they could even learn how to do it by trying it in a demo room (or a virtual environment) thousands of times until they figure out what does and doesn't lead to the desired end result...
Ok but these are going to be humanoid robots, so it makes sense for them to use the appliances that have been designed for use by humans. I don’t really care if tasks like doing the dishes or doing the laundry take 1 hour or 10 hours, as long as they get done.
These are orthogonal to form.