Comment by robotresearcher
1 day ago
> I'm sure they'll figure that out for us though.
Imagine I give you for free the perfect trash picking robot control AI software. Works great. Benchmark smashed.
Now imagine what the rest of the robot is like, and how much it would cost. I mean really imagine, not just picture C3PO with a bucket and litter spike. How many motors and what are the torque vs. mass requirements? How is energy stored? It goes on, not all of it is solved, and none of it is cheap. Except compute.
AI likely does accelerate robotics usefully - certainly in sensing and control. But there are major bottlenecks that are not software, that AI can only help with as a generic engineering tool, same as it helps planes and fridges.
I don't follow. What's the implication?
Imagine I give you a perfect roadmap to build that robot...
Responding to your edit, none of those things strike me as any more challenging than the control software.
Maybe the perfect roadmap says the trash picker needs $600B investment and will cost $4M per unit in 10 years time, if we solve all the problems.
That trash picker may never compete with a human. There's no reason to assume it will.
edit:
> none of those things strike me as any more challenging than the control software
Maybe the difficulties of motors and batteries are not intuitive. Look at their improvement rates over time. It's a far cry from transistor counts or FLOPS. And look at the performance and efficiency of humans and other animals. We are absurdly strong, light, efficient and cheap to maintain. The gap is huge and not closing quickly.
We already have versions of these robots. I don't think it's as wildly unsolved as you make it out to be. A few key efficiencies gained in any part of the process could tip the scales. I would bet something decent is on the market within 10 years.
If it's not C3PO it's a Boston Dynamics dog with a couple appendages, better software, and automated manufacturing.
3 replies →
The problem is that your roadmap requires things that don't exist yet or only exist at prohibitive prices, and it's not knowable how much time or money you will need to solve either one. So a concrete roadmap is impossible.
Advanced robotics would need to become quite cheap for them to become more affordable and convenient than a minimum-wage employee. And physical fields like materials engineering are known for moving quite slowly and at their own pace, so I'm not sure how much automation could help there.
That's the last barrier we have right now that prevents the total obsolescence (and therefore destruction) of the common worker.
Our starting assumption was "Imagine I give you for free the perfect trash picking robot control AI software." If AI can deliver that, why can't it figure out how to take a Boston Dynamics dog, design it for trash picking, and optimize manufacturing costs?
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> Responding to your edit, none of those things strike me as any more challenging than the control software.
Do you have relevant experience in any of those fields?
Nope. I don't know what that proves. I couldn't have come up with a solution to Navier-Stokes either.