Comment by elil17
6 hours ago
Right, but:
1. Asimov wrote that because he needed robots to be indistinguishable from humans for plot reasons.
2. We do 99% of our tool use with our arms and hands. We are already very good at building robot arms. We are getting better at robot hands. We can build robot legs, but they're very expensive and they pose a major safety risk for the robot itself and surrounding humans (because the robot can fall if there is a failure). For most applications, why not just put biomimetic hands and arms on a rolling base?
Of course, all this humanoid robotics research is still useful because if you can build a fully humanoid robot you can trivially build a torso-on-rolling-base robot. I sort of suspect that most of the humanoid robotics companies already know that the vast majority of their sales will be in that category.
It's 100% a HMI and moving costs to the other end of supply chain.
We can have optimized automation in warehouses/logistics, but if you talk to any site manager you learn very quickly that no one wants any downtime or impact to their operation to introduce new machinery or optimize traffic, etc. If it is not built with that from the start it's very hard to introduce it later on unless there is a very clear deployment path and cost structure.
And boy, robotics currently has any of those today. Sure, move those billions in to R&D. Time will tell.
You can still have a humanoid robot that looks very different from an actual human (and most robots from Asimov's novels were of that kind, although one of the main characters wasn't - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._Daneel_Olivaw).
Ok, so maybe a robot with wheels could solve most tasks, but it would still be severely limited: couldn't climb stairs (which would make it unsuitable as a domestic robot in a house or multi-storey flat), couldn't drive a car, truck or any other vehicle designed for humans etc.
Remember the Segway?
Its predecessor was a stair-climbing wheelchair: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBOT
One of the codenames for Segway was "Ginger", a reference to Ginger Rogers, because the codename for iBOT was "Fred Upstairs" (a pun on Fred Astaire).