edit: realised there's a part 2: https://generalrobots.substack.com/p/benjies-humanoid-olympi...
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.
I think it’s probably also easier to raise money on a humanoid robot because everyone has some intuitive understanding of the form.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.