I dont get the investment in humanoids beyond trying to create some kind of stock market bubble again. Factories that have already heavily robotized their production, employ a minimal amount of humans to do niche work. It's going to be immensely difficult to replace that niche work with any kind of robot, let alone humanoids.
These humanoid robots (or generally limbed robots) could be useful for the two sectors that are craving for cheap workers, worldwide: agriculture and construction. Yet all the demos i see are fragile lightweight robots not made for rugged work. That makes me conclude that the whole sector is currently like the Metaverse.
Imagine LLMs reach their potential and the general field of 'cognitive work' starts to be able to be largely automated. What happens then? I think there's some precedent with the Industrial Revolution. The increased productivity and the like did lead to some 'super farms' and the like, but the real change is that it left a vacuum in the economy. That vacuum was filled by industry such that even the 'super farms' started to be a vanishingly small part of the overall economy.
I think the same will happen with LLMs. They're going to create a vacuum in the economy, on a global level. And I think what will come next is something in the real world (as opposed to the digital) filling it. Humanoid robots might be myopic, but I think it's, at worst, a pretty decent guess. One basic goal would be able to automate typical service jobs, both in terms of normal employment - but also even within households. A low cost highly capable robotic maid would have a massive market.
I'm hand-waving away the dystopia of this all, because I ultimately think humans will still play a key role - but trying to predict what that role may be is impossible from where we're standing. Imagine trying to predict the consequences of mass industrialization when you've lived you're entire life in an agrarian society. There's just no real basis for an intelligent prediction, besides 'way different.'
You're saying the vacuum in the economy (people without an income source) will be filled by something else that leaves people without an income source? Who's paying for the robots? If people find themselves with more time than money, they're not going to buy robots to free up more time
A LOT of real humans still assemble machines across the globe. Probably also what you have at home.
There are plenty of YouTube videos available were you can see how many hands a rice cooker is going through.
And we talk about a real robot costing 5 figures being able to shown what it should do and then it just does it 24/7.
It will fill the gap of no automatisation to full automatisation.
Besides that, in theory it would also allow the remote-gig economy: A robot at home, a helper sitting somewere else.
Take some random problem: You want some automatistaion for painting a wall. What do you do? You buy the full automat from a special company which comes with its own support contract, and fllow up costs.
Now you buy one 5 figure robot, explain to them that they should paint the room and they will do it. Not today, but do you think this will take 50 years and is a non solvable problem? I don't.
It works 24/7 till it breaks down or gets stuck in a situation it was trained for then the company that purchased it will likely have to wait at least days if not weeks for a repair tech to come down and fix it or adjust its training data.
I feel so many people bullish on these robots has never worked on physical things so they have this rosy picture of the smooth sailing once they get their humanoid robots delivered that it's going to just work forever without effort or input.
> I dont get the investment in humanoids beyond trying to create some kind of stock market bubble again.
Our entire world is heavily adjusted towards bipedal humanoid creatures. Having a moving humanoid tool who could replace some of our physical tasks without the need to build additional infrastructure in proximity around it is BIG. Noting your reservation about fragility, even the possibility of cheap construction and agriculture work is VERY BIG.
Bipedal is the easiest one: very few environments require 2 feet in particular. Sure, ability to cross uneven terrain is needed, but this can be done with 3, 4 or 8 feet. But in a lot of places, including most of the retail and a lot of factories, all one needs is an ability to move on flat surface and cross door thresholds (thanks to ADA, no stair climbing required). And than can work just fine with large wheels, or tracks. On the other hand with something like construction, you probably want many appendages with some sort of climbing attachments?
The "top" part of humanoid is more integrated into the world: our human infrastructure is really built for beings just under 2m high, and a many of actions need at least 2 human-like hands, with at least the same reach as humans (~3/8 body height long, attached at ~7/8 body height). But this is just a minimum - a lot of things would work better with 3 hands, or maybe with dissimilar hands - one "strong", one "fine manipulation" and one "misc"? I certainly wished to have a 3rd hand when building something...
And not to mention those robots will require an expensive subscription and maintenance contract which I’d imagine wouldn’t actually save money vs traditional labor. Any company that can optimize labor costs pretty much already has to the point of diminishing returns.
The only sector I see any of these selling in any meaningful number is military and police.
Hands yes, for all the human actuated things. You don't need 2 legs to do that. Cantilevered wheels might be better for stair climbing around the house.
A better obvious use case for fully humanoid is vehicles. Jump into a forklift, combine, or golf cart and be immediately productive. Then jump out and a human can use the vehicle still.
That seems kind of nuts when you could stick a few solenoids on the pedals and steering wheel, mount the sensors from the head onto the chassis, and skip the need for a humanoid robot.
You could say the same about the dishwasher, lathe, and whatever else. I guess the use case is a humanoid bot can use all the human things without modifying them.
The physical world is currently designed for human interaction, and people who want to make money see the potential to replace humans with property. They'll get there.
"Your scientists were thinking so much about whether they could, they didn't stop to ask if they should".
I really want to see that robot door-opening, shirt-folding, orange-peeling and sandwich making competition. It would be like the housework championships. If your robot works it would sell like hotcakes right there.
This is a recent essay on robotic workers that does not mention Figure’s 24+ hour livestream of a robot doing package management on a live assembly line.
The real reason it’s hard to assess where we’re at with industrial robots is that some of the people who’ve gone hardest at it are secretive, and also believe in power law scaling. So, the first 1,000 robots will only be used to build the next robot factory, which also will be used to build the next really big robot factory. When we see humanoid robots actually out in the wild for sale at retail, they are going to come very very quickly, at scale.
Figure and Boston Dynamics sold out next year’s production runs almost instantly sometime last year; I think it’s just incredibly hard to overestimate the impact humanoid robots are going to have on the global economy.
It was a team of robots. One has battery for three or four hours.
I don't think it really addresses the article's concerns about long-horizon tasks or complex object manipulation. The objects were just bags and boxes, the manipulations were very simple, and each task was a few seconds long.
I guess the VLA proposal is that frontier models will keep extending the planning and action horizon and that the action models will keep improving simultaneously leading to a moment when they suddenly get useful.
This seems likely to me, but I’m not a robot guy. We have certainly seen this 10x in value with 2-5x increase in context and horizon dynamic play out at least three times since 2019 with llms, and with self driving cars; having watched it I’m inclined to believe it can occur again.
Ooh interesting. Got a link? I guess you’d want to find out f that’s a weird motion tic falling out of rl training or the much simpler explanation. I thought figure was publicly clear the robots were operating autonomously.
Weave robotics (no affiliation) claims they are folding over 1,000 lbs of laundry a week in homes right now: https://www.weaverobotics.com. I have no idea how well these work.
> So, the first 1,000 robots will only be used to build the next robot factory, which also will be used to build the next really big robot factory. When we see humanoid robots actually out in the wild for sale at retail, they are going to come very very quickly, at scale.
This is one of the dumbest ideas I've read here. Seriously; do you honestly believe, that we will be able to linearly scale all of the materials that go into robots?
You can't have a factory without motors, aluminum, steel, copper, quality control, CNC manufacturing, precision bearings, ball screws, harmonic drives, semiconductors, batteries, and skilled people to design, install, and maintain all of it. Every one of those is its own supply chain with its own bottleneck, and almost all of them are already constrained and at risk.
If anything, I would bet you $500 we will not be able to jump to the robotics age because we don't have enough skilled humans on this earth, due to the excitement about not training them because of their imminent replacement. That's before geopolitics - do you think China, if we actually built working humanoid robots, wouldn't immediately claim all supply for themselves and lock down the supply chain? Of course they would, it would be stupid not to. In the event of a working humanoid robot, every single dependency needs to be onshore, or it's not scaling.
This might hold true if the nation building the robots did not have a well established manufacturing base. However, I can see this working in China who has a strong manufacturing base where they can rapidly source all of theses components. It would make for a great experiment but you need working robots first. And that is where I think this idea falls short -- there are no capable robots to accomplish this self-replicating task.
The original commentator works at a private equity fund, admits he has lost $1B twice, and yet any blue-collar laborer has a better grasp of the material world. The insult is earned.
If you tour SpaceX’s hawthorn factory they will tell you: “raw materials come in, rockets go out.” Spacex manufacturing had a mix of robots and humans manufacturing together on the floor the last time I was there, like six years ago. But it was definitely deeply vertically integrated manufacturing.
Similarly BYD in china has plants over an acre in size that run lights out with one human worker. My understanding is these are also vertically integrated, taking inspiration from Tesla and SpaceX.
I’m happy to learn more about the material world from people at any walk of life; right now we have humans building robots out of raw materials and robots building robots out of raw materials already in the world. My prediction is that humanoid robots building robots will scale rapidly in the next two years; please give me the bear case though, I’m genuinely interested.
I think the article takes a completely wrong lense for viewing the Humanoid Robotic Games, and general progress that is being made right now (though admittedly, many robot companies make it challenging with their marketing as well). Most of the advances being demonstrated right now are about establishing a robotic _platform_. They don't necessarily individually have to be able to complete all tasks end to end, but pushing the boundary forward on one of them at a time as a step of progress.
The different challenges presented in the article are almost all orthogonal to each other. Some of them are hardware engineering challenges, some of them are software / AI challenges, and most of them ultimately economic challenges. They can all be solved in a mostly independent manner, meaning that they won't be decades away to be resolved, but more likely years.
I think robotics is in a space that very much falls into the "people overestimate the progress in one year but underestimate the progress over 5 years" category.
A lot of the problems to solve regarding effectiveness (not efficiency) of humanoid robots even as outlined in the article (manipulation = short term spatial planning; long term task planning) greatly benefit from the current advances in AI, and in my estimation are already solvable with better harnesses with the current generation of models.
They don't have to catch up, they just have to be good enough on a narrow set of tasks to be worth the trouble. Perfect is the enemy of good here. Everything I've seen suggests that the prototypes are already pretty good at simple tasks that involve recognizing, picking up, and putting things into/onto other things in some way.
All the dancing, jumping, running, etc. is nice for marketing but not actually that urgent for such tasks. Dexterity is nice. There are plenty of examples of humanoid robots doing pretty fiddly stuff like folding t-shirts and other things.
The rest is just optimization where these things gradually get faster, efficient, do more complex things, etc.
> they just have to be good enough on a narrow set of tasks to be worth the trouble
Depends on the context. If they are to work around human beings, particularly in the home, then they must be safe... to work around humans.
If a humanoid robot hits a human being, knocks one over, or even falls down on top of one -- especially a child, who is more fragile and whose movements are unpredictable -- then the industry as a whole faces a huge setback. Just look at what happened when a "self-driving" Uber ran over and killed a pedestrian in Arizona.
Substantial displacement of human labor is still very far away, yes, but I'd say it's not due to the lack of dexterity and precision. GenAI is making such rapid advancements that the robotic control systems part may soon be "solved." The real blocker is supply chain constraints for physical parts -- specifically, rare earth elements.
Those are essential for the powerful yet accurate electromagnetic motors that make these robots feasible. Oh, and batteries too. However, their supply is severely limited, even without China flexing its strangehold on the market. Last I checked there are no real alternatives or solutions on the horizon for the raw material shortage. Some estimates suggest the global supply currently is a small fraction (like 2% or even lower?) of that needed for mass deployment of the type Elon hallucinates about to pump TSLA stock.
The company that solves this or otherwise figures out a way to mass produce dexterous robots is going to be the next trillion dollar company.
I would have said the same of coding and yet here we are. If the only bottleneck is data (we’ve already spent a trillion in compute), I think it’s going to happen in a few years, a decade at most.
As someone early in their SWE career (hopefully), I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Knowledge work as a career seems like it’s becoming a less viable option with every advancement. It’s hard to predict the future, but sometimes I wish I took the med school route and just pursued tech as a hobby.
Med school has its own issues and is a very demanding learning and career path. Lots of stress, long shifts etc. I am very impressed by the people doing it but it’s not for everyone.
Anyway, who can predict the future? There are still lots of things to do in IT in the age of AI - actually, more than before. The question is most whether you like writing software and doing planning and bug fixes all day for the next decades.
I have a few thoughts. Number one is that humanoid robots are probably a dead end. It's movie stuff. It makes me think of Henry Ford saying customers want "faster horses". It is the fault of evolution that we don't have wheels but we don't have to repeat that mistake.
Secondly I think robot butlers are a bridge too far. The article explains pretty well why the spatial reasoning is problematic but so would things like battery life. And there'd be zero margin for error. The first time a robot steps on someone's cat or, god forbid, baby there will be a massive backlash. They have to be perfect. We accept LLMs hallucinating once in a while but a physical robot in your home cannot ever be wrong.
I think if we want to pilot autonomous robots it will be factory floors and other rote tasks. Maybe installing solar fields or something. Let them achieve a perfect safety record in someplace with more risk tolerance then take the next step.
The evolutionary mistake that allowed us to walk on our feet and use our hands enabled us to build tools, conquer our environment and tackle hard problems. A humanoid robot provides a good blueprint for creating a robot that can do anything.
A solar field robot can only do one thing. A humanoid robot with a software model that allows it to install solar fields and then switch to a new model is a much more compelling use case. Eventually you're going to run out of solar fields to install, then you need a solar field repair bot, a solar field cleaning bot, etc. General purpose robots that can switch models to perform different tasks is not a dead end, but definitely a very hard problem.
> Number one is that humanoid robots are probably a dead end.
Our shape is very flexible.
It's probably not the end-all most flexible format out there, but whatever format we end up with will probably be more similar to a human than to a 6df robotic arm mounted on a car. (It will probably have legs, for a start, not wheels.)
> It is the fault of evolution that we don't have wheels but we don't have to repeat that mistake.
With wheels you can't climb up a steep mountain. Hands and feet allow to hold tight.
With wheels you can't hold as much. Feet can be used as a replacement for an arm for some functions when arms are broken.
If a wheel is partially broken it's close to impossible to use. If a foot is broken I can walk on heel or toes only and bypass some issue.
It's not the best solution for many things, but the flexibility is a big win.
That flexibility isn't needed with machines, though. I can have many machines, I can replace machines, ... so I can optimize for the use case.
And sometimes the use case might be to simulate a human to trick instincts, which recognize "humans" subconciously. Be it in health care or be it an army of machine soldiers walking towards an enemy.
> I think if we want to pilot autonomous robots it will be factory floors and other rote tasks. Maybe installing solar fields or something. Let them achieve a perfect safety record in someplace with more risk tolerance then take the next step.
No, these autonomous robots will be used by the military as soldiers. There will be no attempt to achieve a "perfect safety record". These soldiers are already here, pay attention to what is happening in Ukraine.
The conversation is about humanoid robots, not wheeled/tracked objects with a gun or carrying cargo.
We have had remote controlled objects like this in various forms going back to WW2 and a few instances before. A wireless/fiber/starlink connection was added recently making them more robust.
This is not a humanoid because they don't make sense from a power/weight carrying/so many other perspectives.
The only thing unique to the Ukrainian situation is the widescale usage.
Humanoid robots are the new qugv (quadruple UGV aka dogs), they are pretty much useless in anything functional but the show off and wow factor. I remember around covid times we got one of these qugv and everyone in the team wanted to be the one working on it, except me, I kept my focus on UAVs and even told them that UAVs are and will be the only robots that has actual use cases (not to include cobotics). That being said, it’s probably a good thing that they only remain as a showoff only, I mean, look at drones, the moment they proved to be functional, humans immediately used it as killing machines rather than something useful. Before that, I remember it was really hard to get a million dollar budget for any UAV project, no one cared about drone delivery, drones that can deliver health equipment to save lives when seconds matters, but as soon as they are used for killing or surveillance you see billions pouring in! So yeah, let humanoid robots be only for shows and hopefully they never become functional or “catch up” any time soon.
My first job out of high school was in a factory. Every aspect of production was automated by a machine with extremely high (five 9s) reliability. Despite that, things went wrong constantly because there was so much going on, usually in novel ways that couldn't be optimized away by tweaking or enhancing the machines. Something with human level dexterity and human level intelligence is necessary to fix the machines when things go wrong. On top of that, so many production tasks need that dexterity. I'd love to see a robot that can crochet. This is a good article about where we're at and where we need to be, but I do get frustrated with commenters who say "we don't need humanoids".
My main concern is that as people lose their jobs and can't find new ones, an increasing number of people may be forced into a life of crime. We need UBI ASAP.
I dont get the investment in humanoids beyond trying to create some kind of stock market bubble again. Factories that have already heavily robotized their production, employ a minimal amount of humans to do niche work. It's going to be immensely difficult to replace that niche work with any kind of robot, let alone humanoids.
These humanoid robots (or generally limbed robots) could be useful for the two sectors that are craving for cheap workers, worldwide: agriculture and construction. Yet all the demos i see are fragile lightweight robots not made for rugged work. That makes me conclude that the whole sector is currently like the Metaverse.
Imagine LLMs reach their potential and the general field of 'cognitive work' starts to be able to be largely automated. What happens then? I think there's some precedent with the Industrial Revolution. The increased productivity and the like did lead to some 'super farms' and the like, but the real change is that it left a vacuum in the economy. That vacuum was filled by industry such that even the 'super farms' started to be a vanishingly small part of the overall economy.
I think the same will happen with LLMs. They're going to create a vacuum in the economy, on a global level. And I think what will come next is something in the real world (as opposed to the digital) filling it. Humanoid robots might be myopic, but I think it's, at worst, a pretty decent guess. One basic goal would be able to automate typical service jobs, both in terms of normal employment - but also even within households. A low cost highly capable robotic maid would have a massive market.
I'm hand-waving away the dystopia of this all, because I ultimately think humans will still play a key role - but trying to predict what that role may be is impossible from where we're standing. Imagine trying to predict the consequences of mass industrialization when you've lived you're entire life in an agrarian society. There's just no real basis for an intelligent prediction, besides 'way different.'
You're saying the vacuum in the economy (people without an income source) will be filled by something else that leaves people without an income source? Who's paying for the robots? If people find themselves with more time than money, they're not going to buy robots to free up more time
A LOT of real humans still assemble machines across the globe. Probably also what you have at home.
There are plenty of YouTube videos available were you can see how many hands a rice cooker is going through.
And we talk about a real robot costing 5 figures being able to shown what it should do and then it just does it 24/7.
It will fill the gap of no automatisation to full automatisation.
Besides that, in theory it would also allow the remote-gig economy: A robot at home, a helper sitting somewere else.
Take some random problem: You want some automatistaion for painting a wall. What do you do? You buy the full automat from a special company which comes with its own support contract, and fllow up costs.
Now you buy one 5 figure robot, explain to them that they should paint the room and they will do it. Not today, but do you think this will take 50 years and is a non solvable problem? I don't.
It works 24/7 till it breaks down or gets stuck in a situation it was trained for then the company that purchased it will likely have to wait at least days if not weeks for a repair tech to come down and fix it or adjust its training data.
I feel so many people bullish on these robots has never worked on physical things so they have this rosy picture of the smooth sailing once they get their humanoid robots delivered that it's going to just work forever without effort or input.
> I dont get the investment in humanoids beyond trying to create some kind of stock market bubble again.
Our entire world is heavily adjusted towards bipedal humanoid creatures. Having a moving humanoid tool who could replace some of our physical tasks without the need to build additional infrastructure in proximity around it is BIG. Noting your reservation about fragility, even the possibility of cheap construction and agriculture work is VERY BIG.
Is it?
Bipedal is the easiest one: very few environments require 2 feet in particular. Sure, ability to cross uneven terrain is needed, but this can be done with 3, 4 or 8 feet. But in a lot of places, including most of the retail and a lot of factories, all one needs is an ability to move on flat surface and cross door thresholds (thanks to ADA, no stair climbing required). And than can work just fine with large wheels, or tracks. On the other hand with something like construction, you probably want many appendages with some sort of climbing attachments?
The "top" part of humanoid is more integrated into the world: our human infrastructure is really built for beings just under 2m high, and a many of actions need at least 2 human-like hands, with at least the same reach as humans (~3/8 body height long, attached at ~7/8 body height). But this is just a minimum - a lot of things would work better with 3 hands, or maybe with dissimilar hands - one "strong", one "fine manipulation" and one "misc"? I certainly wished to have a 3rd hand when building something...
And not to mention those robots will require an expensive subscription and maintenance contract which I’d imagine wouldn’t actually save money vs traditional labor. Any company that can optimize labor costs pretty much already has to the point of diminishing returns.
The only sector I see any of these selling in any meaningful number is military and police.
They’re probably hoping for some hardware version of the software “bitter lesson”
I think it’s probably also easier to raise money on a humanoid robot because everyone has some intuitive understanding of the form.
Sexbots. That's it, that's the whole thing. And slaves in general but yeah.
Housework is the obvious use case.
Hands yes, for all the human actuated things. You don't need 2 legs to do that. Cantilevered wheels might be better for stair climbing around the house.
A better obvious use case for fully humanoid is vehicles. Jump into a forklift, combine, or golf cart and be immediately productive. Then jump out and a human can use the vehicle still.
That seems kind of nuts when you could stick a few solenoids on the pedals and steering wheel, mount the sensors from the head onto the chassis, and skip the need for a humanoid robot.
You could say the same about the dishwasher, lathe, and whatever else. I guess the use case is a humanoid bot can use all the human things without modifying them.
Literally crawl, walk, run... fight?
The physical world is currently designed for human interaction, and people who want to make money see the potential to replace humans with property. They'll get there.
"Your scientists were thinking so much about whether they could, they didn't stop to ask if they should".
I really want to see that robot door-opening, shirt-folding, orange-peeling and sandwich making competition. It would be like the housework championships. If your robot works it would sell like hotcakes right there.
edit: realised there's a part 2: https://generalrobots.substack.com/p/benjies-humanoid-olympi...
Also hand washing!
This is a recent essay on robotic workers that does not mention Figure’s 24+ hour livestream of a robot doing package management on a live assembly line.
The real reason it’s hard to assess where we’re at with industrial robots is that some of the people who’ve gone hardest at it are secretive, and also believe in power law scaling. So, the first 1,000 robots will only be used to build the next robot factory, which also will be used to build the next really big robot factory. When we see humanoid robots actually out in the wild for sale at retail, they are going to come very very quickly, at scale.
Figure and Boston Dynamics sold out next year’s production runs almost instantly sometime last year; I think it’s just incredibly hard to overestimate the impact humanoid robots are going to have on the global economy.
It was a team of robots. One has battery for three or four hours.
I don't think it really addresses the article's concerns about long-horizon tasks or complex object manipulation. The objects were just bags and boxes, the manipulations were very simple, and each task was a few seconds long.
I guess the VLA proposal is that frontier models will keep extending the planning and action horizon and that the action models will keep improving simultaneously leading to a moment when they suddenly get useful.
This seems likely to me, but I’m not a robot guy. We have certainly seen this 10x in value with 2-5x increase in context and horizon dynamic play out at least three times since 2019 with llms, and with self driving cars; having watched it I’m inclined to believe it can occur again.
There still seems to be questions around if that was faked. (scorch me if I'm wrong I last looked at this a month ago)
Questions? It's clear it was faked. The robot kept pushing its non-existent vr googles back up.
Ooh interesting. Got a link? I guess you’d want to find out f that’s a weird motion tic falling out of rl training or the much simpler explanation. I thought figure was publicly clear the robots were operating autonomously.
> When we see humanoid robots actually out in the wild for sale at retail, they are going to come very very quickly, at scale.
Building factories and other robots is trivial. Just go and watch videos of any modern factory.
What's nigh impossible is doing complex interactions requiring finesse, "human touch", and at speed.
Even if you build a million robot-building robots, not a single one of them will be able to fold clothes, for example.
Weave robotics (no affiliation) claims they are folding over 1,000 lbs of laundry a week in homes right now: https://www.weaverobotics.com. I have no idea how well these work.
Re: folding clothes, there’s machines that can do that already at the industrial scale.
But probably not when those clothes come out if the dryer, or (in the retail) when someone just throws a shirt on a shelf
> So, the first 1,000 robots will only be used to build the next robot factory, which also will be used to build the next really big robot factory. When we see humanoid robots actually out in the wild for sale at retail, they are going to come very very quickly, at scale.
This is one of the dumbest ideas I've read here. Seriously; do you honestly believe, that we will be able to linearly scale all of the materials that go into robots?
You can't have a factory without motors, aluminum, steel, copper, quality control, CNC manufacturing, precision bearings, ball screws, harmonic drives, semiconductors, batteries, and skilled people to design, install, and maintain all of it. Every one of those is its own supply chain with its own bottleneck, and almost all of them are already constrained and at risk.
If anything, I would bet you $500 we will not be able to jump to the robotics age because we don't have enough skilled humans on this earth, due to the excitement about not training them because of their imminent replacement. That's before geopolitics - do you think China, if we actually built working humanoid robots, wouldn't immediately claim all supply for themselves and lock down the supply chain? Of course they would, it would be stupid not to. In the event of a working humanoid robot, every single dependency needs to be onshore, or it's not scaling.
> You can't have a factory without motors, ...
This might hold true if the nation building the robots did not have a well established manufacturing base. However, I can see this working in China who has a strong manufacturing base where they can rapidly source all of theses components. It would make for a great experiment but you need working robots first. And that is where I think this idea falls short -- there are no capable robots to accomplish this self-replicating task.
You could have made the same point without starting with the insult.
The original commentator works at a private equity fund, admits he has lost $1B twice, and yet any blue-collar laborer has a better grasp of the material world. The insult is earned.
If you tour SpaceX’s hawthorn factory they will tell you: “raw materials come in, rockets go out.” Spacex manufacturing had a mix of robots and humans manufacturing together on the floor the last time I was there, like six years ago. But it was definitely deeply vertically integrated manufacturing.
Similarly BYD in china has plants over an acre in size that run lights out with one human worker. My understanding is these are also vertically integrated, taking inspiration from Tesla and SpaceX.
I’m happy to learn more about the material world from people at any walk of life; right now we have humans building robots out of raw materials and robots building robots out of raw materials already in the world. My prediction is that humanoid robots building robots will scale rapidly in the next two years; please give me the bear case though, I’m genuinely interested.
I think the article takes a completely wrong lense for viewing the Humanoid Robotic Games, and general progress that is being made right now (though admittedly, many robot companies make it challenging with their marketing as well). Most of the advances being demonstrated right now are about establishing a robotic _platform_. They don't necessarily individually have to be able to complete all tasks end to end, but pushing the boundary forward on one of them at a time as a step of progress.
The different challenges presented in the article are almost all orthogonal to each other. Some of them are hardware engineering challenges, some of them are software / AI challenges, and most of them ultimately economic challenges. They can all be solved in a mostly independent manner, meaning that they won't be decades away to be resolved, but more likely years.
I think robotics is in a space that very much falls into the "people overestimate the progress in one year but underestimate the progress over 5 years" category.
A lot of the problems to solve regarding effectiveness (not efficiency) of humanoid robots even as outlined in the article (manipulation = short term spatial planning; long term task planning) greatly benefit from the current advances in AI, and in my estimation are already solvable with better harnesses with the current generation of models.
They don't have to catch up, they just have to be good enough on a narrow set of tasks to be worth the trouble. Perfect is the enemy of good here. Everything I've seen suggests that the prototypes are already pretty good at simple tasks that involve recognizing, picking up, and putting things into/onto other things in some way.
All the dancing, jumping, running, etc. is nice for marketing but not actually that urgent for such tasks. Dexterity is nice. There are plenty of examples of humanoid robots doing pretty fiddly stuff like folding t-shirts and other things.
The rest is just optimization where these things gradually get faster, efficient, do more complex things, etc.
> they just have to be good enough on a narrow set of tasks to be worth the trouble
Depends on the context. If they are to work around human beings, particularly in the home, then they must be safe... to work around humans.
If a humanoid robot hits a human being, knocks one over, or even falls down on top of one -- especially a child, who is more fragile and whose movements are unpredictable -- then the industry as a whole faces a huge setback. Just look at what happened when a "self-driving" Uber ran over and killed a pedestrian in Arizona.
Substantial displacement of human labor is still very far away, yes, but I'd say it's not due to the lack of dexterity and precision. GenAI is making such rapid advancements that the robotic control systems part may soon be "solved." The real blocker is supply chain constraints for physical parts -- specifically, rare earth elements.
Those are essential for the powerful yet accurate electromagnetic motors that make these robots feasible. Oh, and batteries too. However, their supply is severely limited, even without China flexing its strangehold on the market. Last I checked there are no real alternatives or solutions on the horizon for the raw material shortage. Some estimates suggest the global supply currently is a small fraction (like 2% or even lower?) of that needed for mass deployment of the type Elon hallucinates about to pump TSLA stock.
The company that solves this or otherwise figures out a way to mass produce dexterous robots is going to be the next trillion dollar company.
I would have said the same of coding and yet here we are. If the only bottleneck is data (we’ve already spent a trillion in compute), I think it’s going to happen in a few years, a decade at most.
Moravec's paradox remains undefeated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox
As someone early in their SWE career (hopefully), I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Knowledge work as a career seems like it’s becoming a less viable option with every advancement. It’s hard to predict the future, but sometimes I wish I took the med school route and just pursued tech as a hobby.
Med school has its own issues and is a very demanding learning and career path. Lots of stress, long shifts etc. I am very impressed by the people doing it but it’s not for everyone.
Anyway, who can predict the future? There are still lots of things to do in IT in the age of AI - actually, more than before. The question is most whether you like writing software and doing planning and bug fixes all day for the next decades.
I have a few thoughts. Number one is that humanoid robots are probably a dead end. It's movie stuff. It makes me think of Henry Ford saying customers want "faster horses". It is the fault of evolution that we don't have wheels but we don't have to repeat that mistake.
Secondly I think robot butlers are a bridge too far. The article explains pretty well why the spatial reasoning is problematic but so would things like battery life. And there'd be zero margin for error. The first time a robot steps on someone's cat or, god forbid, baby there will be a massive backlash. They have to be perfect. We accept LLMs hallucinating once in a while but a physical robot in your home cannot ever be wrong.
I think if we want to pilot autonomous robots it will be factory floors and other rote tasks. Maybe installing solar fields or something. Let them achieve a perfect safety record in someplace with more risk tolerance then take the next step.
The evolutionary mistake that allowed us to walk on our feet and use our hands enabled us to build tools, conquer our environment and tackle hard problems. A humanoid robot provides a good blueprint for creating a robot that can do anything.
A solar field robot can only do one thing. A humanoid robot with a software model that allows it to install solar fields and then switch to a new model is a much more compelling use case. Eventually you're going to run out of solar fields to install, then you need a solar field repair bot, a solar field cleaning bot, etc. General purpose robots that can switch models to perform different tasks is not a dead end, but definitely a very hard problem.
> Number one is that humanoid robots are probably a dead end.
Our shape is very flexible.
It's probably not the end-all most flexible format out there, but whatever format we end up with will probably be more similar to a human than to a 6df robotic arm mounted on a car. (It will probably have legs, for a start, not wheels.)
> It is the fault of evolution that we don't have wheels but we don't have to repeat that mistake.
With wheels you can't climb up a steep mountain. Hands and feet allow to hold tight.
With wheels you can't hold as much. Feet can be used as a replacement for an arm for some functions when arms are broken.
If a wheel is partially broken it's close to impossible to use. If a foot is broken I can walk on heel or toes only and bypass some issue.
It's not the best solution for many things, but the flexibility is a big win.
That flexibility isn't needed with machines, though. I can have many machines, I can replace machines, ... so I can optimize for the use case.
And sometimes the use case might be to simulate a human to trick instincts, which recognize "humans" subconciously. Be it in health care or be it an army of machine soldiers walking towards an enemy.
> I think if we want to pilot autonomous robots it will be factory floors and other rote tasks. Maybe installing solar fields or something. Let them achieve a perfect safety record in someplace with more risk tolerance then take the next step.
No, these autonomous robots will be used by the military as soldiers. There will be no attempt to achieve a "perfect safety record". These soldiers are already here, pay attention to what is happening in Ukraine.
The conversation is about humanoid robots, not wheeled/tracked objects with a gun or carrying cargo.
We have had remote controlled objects like this in various forms going back to WW2 and a few instances before. A wireless/fiber/starlink connection was added recently making them more robust. This is not a humanoid because they don't make sense from a power/weight carrying/so many other perspectives.
The only thing unique to the Ukrainian situation is the widescale usage.
Humanoid robots are the new qugv (quadruple UGV aka dogs), they are pretty much useless in anything functional but the show off and wow factor. I remember around covid times we got one of these qugv and everyone in the team wanted to be the one working on it, except me, I kept my focus on UAVs and even told them that UAVs are and will be the only robots that has actual use cases (not to include cobotics). That being said, it’s probably a good thing that they only remain as a showoff only, I mean, look at drones, the moment they proved to be functional, humans immediately used it as killing machines rather than something useful. Before that, I remember it was really hard to get a million dollar budget for any UAV project, no one cared about drone delivery, drones that can deliver health equipment to save lives when seconds matters, but as soon as they are used for killing or surveillance you see billions pouring in! So yeah, let humanoid robots be only for shows and hopefully they never become functional or “catch up” any time soon.
My first job out of high school was in a factory. Every aspect of production was automated by a machine with extremely high (five 9s) reliability. Despite that, things went wrong constantly because there was so much going on, usually in novel ways that couldn't be optimized away by tweaking or enhancing the machines. Something with human level dexterity and human level intelligence is necessary to fix the machines when things go wrong. On top of that, so many production tasks need that dexterity. I'd love to see a robot that can crochet. This is a good article about where we're at and where we need to be, but I do get frustrated with commenters who say "we don't need humanoids".
My main concern is that as people lose their jobs and can't find new ones, an increasing number of people may be forced into a life of crime. We need UBI ASAP.