Comment by rowanG077
1 day ago
You are not understanding what humanoid robots are about. Those are specialist robots you are describing. The promise is of course one robot that can do the plumbing, clean your house, do the dishes, build a house, and basically every physical job a human can do. It's extreme lly likely that at least a somewhat humanoid shape is required for that.
My octopus will outperform your humanoid by doing the dishes, fixing the plumbing, and preparing a Caesar salad, all at the same time!
Ah, but my "five guys" will outperform your one octopus!
Yeah. Can't wait to see three or four armed robots. Or five or six!
How do you train a robot to use three hands effectively when we only have two? Then again, why is the robot limited to being one robot? If two humanoid robots are in the same area, they don't have to be distinctly controlled. If they're both controlled by the same AI, a third arm on one body is the same as that arm being attached to another body.
Humans are really bad at everything we do compared to the specialized creatures in nature, it’s just that we can do many things that sets us apart. A humanoid robot is incredibly dumb for that reason. At least add a set of arms and legs and 360 vision. And obviously dislocated joints than can move freely and hands should have two thumbs and more fingers.
It’s not hard to come up with a bunch of improvements for humans, it’s just that making robots in our image is a lot more trivial because you only have to solve for those same averages attributes that we have.
Adding arms and 360 vision is not free. Look at octopi with their insane nervous system required to support their tentacle. The one who wins is not the one that makes the best robot ever. The one who wins is the one who builds a robot that can do the most, while being the cheapest.
> Adding arms and 360 vision is not free.
Vision is hard regardless of the angle, but scaling it from a normal camera to 360° doesn't add much cost or difficulty once you've done the hard part of turning pixels into a suitable latent space.
> Look at octopi with their insane nervous system required to support their tentacle.
500 million neurons across the whole animal, brain included. We'll only know the synapse count when someone does a full connectome scan of one, but based on the vague estimates I see with a quick search, their whole mind is less complex than a SotA LLM today.
> The one who wins is the one who builds a robot that can do the most, while being the cheapest.
This is a reason for specialists, not generalists.
A literal Swiss army knife is a perfectly reasonable thing to own, but you don't want to hire a builder who only has that and nothing else, not even if it's the silly model: https://www.vintageknives.nl/p/wenger-giant-swiss-army-knife...
The best container ship is a terrible pleasure yacht, and vice versa. You use container ships pretty much constantly, even though you (almost certainly) don't own one, by the power of indirection. You can rent a pleasure yacht as desired without owning own.
In both cases, the cheap option is to use the right tool for the right job, rather than to take a holiday on the Hanoi Express and get your next international shipment delivered by this: https://www.boattrader.com/boat/1996-hatteras-82-convertible...
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Things you need to take into account that you've almost certainly glossed over:
Safety. Human-robot interactions are generally dangerous and avoided, unless the robot is specifically designed to interact with people. In those cases you often sacrifice speed, strength, and flexibility for safety and softness. Having someone come in with a specialized plumbing robot makes sense, you owning one probably doesn't, and you owning a generalize android capable of plumbing makes less sense still.
Cost. The more compact, complex, and interactive your robot is the more it costs. Make a strong, compact, complex robot safe for interactions with people in the wild is non-trivial and adds costs. The software required to do all of this is hypothetical, but obviously also costly.
Need. I understand the dream of a robot to do whatever you want is very much part of our culture, but when you consider the downsides do you really need it? I don't need a plumber living in my house any more than I need a carpenter or a landscaper to live on premises. At most these are services I would need occasionally or on a schedule. I also doubt my need for them will overlap much, unless we're talking about building a new dwelling.
So why do I need a generalist in my life that's going to cost more than you can imagine, when the means to hire existing human generalists is cheap, quick, and frankly less likely to accidentally punch a hole in you.