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>The question, though, is what will be the analogy to mobile (and the cloud), which exploded demand and led to one of the most profitable decades tech has ever seen? The answer may be an already discarded fad: the metaverse.

People haven't really noticed that building a general-purpose (humanoid) robot has become 1000x more feasible now even compared to 1.5 years ago.

Check out https://www.lerf.io/ for a taste of the future

5 comments

To me, humanoid robotics seems to be the 'flying cars' of our era.

They seem cool and futuristic at a glance, but upon close inspection, they are kinda not pragmatic at all, and there are simpler, cheaper solutions that will beat it in the market.

For example, we could build a humanoid butler robot to do chores around the house, or we could build a dishwashers + roombas + washing machine. These simple appliances do 90% of the work for 10% of the headache (including the consumer side headache of performing maintenance on a humanoid machine!).

My dishwasher does not come close to doing 90% of clearing the table, washing the dishes, drying and putting them away.

My laundry machine is certainly better than by hand, but folding laundry and putting it away is significant.

You clearly need both? You'd never task a humanoid robot to wash clothes by hand. But you would task it to remember to check whether its time to do laundry, load the laundry, run it, move it to the dryer, fold the clean clothes and put it away.

It's not the case that existing robots (dishwasher, washing machine, etc) do 90% of the work when you consider the full task in its entirety. Humanoid robots would just replace the work that humans are doing assuming they have access to the specialized robots.

> You clearly need both?

I don't think you "need" either. It's just a conversation about what the market will reward.

> Humanoid robots would just replace the work that humans are doing assuming they have access to the specialized robots.

Or, there won't be any replacement and the majority of people in domestic households just keep doing that little remainder part because it's not really a big deal.

This all holds perfectly with the flying car analogy -> ground cars are pretty much fine. We could try way harder to make them flying-grade at a consumer level, or we can just keep driving road cars (or taking public transit) and be happy. That's the fundamental thing that 60s futurists missed when envisioning the future.

Man that’s such a downer.

I guess that's one way to look at it.

Are you down that there's no flying cars?

I'm pretty happy with it tbh.

edit: btw, I'd like to add that from a design perspective, humans kind of have a crappy form, which is perhaps one of the reason that rarely does one design something which ends up humanoid. E.g. something with wheels can usually move farther with less energy (or even something like tank treads if rough terrain)

no. but flying cars aren't a really good solution for a bunch of reasons.

a humanoid robot, i think, is a good solution for a bunch of problems.

the comparison is kind of useless and doesn't really help us.

a humanoid robot is a clunky solution to all problems. You'll always have more specialized equipment that just does the job better. The "all purpose very complex" mediocre solution is not something that will stick in my opinion.

The self driving cars of our era, even.

Moravec's paradox is the usual counterargument given to this line of reasoning. We've had far less progress in embodied robotics, where a robot has to interact with the real world in any kind of generalized, tactile way, compared to visual, audio, and language processing tasks. The history of AI is littered with predictions that <a reasoning or computation AI breakthrough> will lead to a humanoid robot, and the predictions always end up in the regime of ~real world data collection and integration is harder than we thought.

Maybe this time it's different, and maybe it's not, but that's why most recent robotics predictions fail to convince the ML industry broadly.

I don't think that's true. I recall when Amazon acquired Kiva robotics for their warehouse operations one of the people involved said something like "If you want something that can pick assorted objects out of a box and put them in another box, I'll need a NASA research team and 5 years, but moving the boxes around, we can do that with our Kiva robots." Here we are 10 years later and Amazon does in fact have the picker arms, though I'm not sure how production-ready they are, Amazon has demoed them.

Honestly I think there's been very dramatic improvements in robotics alongside ChatGPT but ChatGPT is easy to demo with nothing but an internet connection so it's just a lot less visible.

That first quote is right on-the-money, in my experience with competitive FRC and automation. It's extremely easy to work with a limited set of parameters like a cardboard box; you can easily estimate object volume and bounding-box collision in software. Making a robot that manipulates millions of Amazon products is a suicide mission by comparison; especially if you expect it to behave consistently.

Computer vision, AI and inverse kinematics have all come a long ways in the past few years. That being said, it's still easier by an order of magnitude to design the box-pushing robot.

For anyone with Firefox trying to open the link- it seems slow or broken in FF. Use Chrome and it loads instantly.

No thanks.

> building a general-purpose (humanoid) robot has become 1000x

Why? I'm not even sure how ChatGPT is that relevant for this? Sure if you want a scifi style "intelligent" robot, which is capable of basic reasoning, you can talk to it's useful.

However I don't see how does it help with it being able to pick up fragile stuff without crushing it, operate in dynamic 3d environments etc. LLM don't seem to be that useful for these kind of problems.

Yep, there's a giant pile of training (and inference) that has yet to be done because we've barely touched real-world data (audio, visual and tactile). GPT-4 already demo'd a multimodal version, and I don't see a reason why GPT-N won't be able to seamlessly work on video and tactile input and output actuator commands. I also don't see a reason why humanoid bodies would cost more than a car.

Maybe people don't realize how low the bar for mass-adoption is? We're kinda mesmerized by Boston Dynamics' Parkourbot, but the real-world is made for people of many different abilities, you don't need to do summersaults, or run, or lift a lot to be able to do useful work. A $30k robot with a lifespan of 8 years would cost $10/day. $10 is very little money for in-your-house work, being able to do basic cleanup will be worth it for a vast number of households.

> Boston Dynamics' Parkourbot

> you don't need to do summersaults, or run, or lift a lot to be able to do useful work

I agree that it's a gimmick, but every time I see it I'm reminded of how far we are from having an in-home robot that can do useful work like wash the bed sheets and clean the toilet.

Raking leaves, very basic yard upkeep and mowing, is worth around $10 / day to most people (if it's close to basic human performance at those tasks). One can debate the year it will arrive (less than 30 years, more than 10 years), the utility value of a robot that can do that well is extremely high though.

And bring on the snow shoveling bots. Nearly every 50+ year old in cold climates will want one. Will we have to outfit them in specialized winter gear?

> mowing

Robots which do this are already cheap and widely available, I see them everywhere.

Snow blower robots seem to be a thing too, not sure how useful are they. Racking leaves is probably also solvable problem.

It just seems that it might be more effective/cheap/viable to have a bunch of way more simple specialized 'robots' than a very complex/expensive general purpose one.

Not particularly good though. I did a fair bit of looking at them and tried a few on loan a couple years ago. At the time at least, you have to set up an electronic fence to set boundaries, which is very annoying if you have scattered garden beds or other obstacles it cannot bump into.

Also like Roombas (the brand, not robot vacuums in general) they have poor sensors and no real coverages algorithms, they just semi randomly roam around.

Battery life is also terrible, outdoor charging stations are harder to maintain etc.

All I’m saying is, there is a long way to go before they become defacto better than a person with a mower, they are a fair bit of work and fuss right now to set up and keep running.

> they have poor sensors and no real coverages algorithms, they just semi randomly roam around

Husqvarna supports that, but yeah it might struggle on very complex areas (I've only really have any experience with it on fairly simple lawns). It's certainly not just randomly roaming around:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLdSLJu8acg&ab_channel=Husqv...

I'm not even sure what other brands exist. They seem to completely dominate the market where I am.

I'm pretty convinced we can do snow removal robots now for a few thousand dollars plus a few hundred a year of maintenance (snow and electronics don't mix well), but you are competing with a 25-year-old with a truck and a snowplow blade who comes by and clears it for $100/month.

You can already get one for around $7000 which seems a bit steep:

https://www.yarbo.com/shop

Lawnmower bots are relatively cheap, so the cost for snow ones will probably go down as well over time (then again the market for them is probably much smaller and yeah, snow removal is cheaper and easier for a human to do compared to lawn mowing)

With all due respect to that company, it also doesn't look like it can stand up to removing very thick snow or operating on a large surface area. My house (and a lot of others who would pay for this) regularly gets more than 12 inches of snow in one event every winter, so the robot would have to operate in the middle of a snowstorm to keep the driveway and sidewalk clear on the day that matters.

Snow removal is also lot more physically strenuous than most other yard tasks, meaning much bigger motors and batteries, almost approaching car-sized.