[mikepurvis]

I'm pretty sure the pitch here is "a robotic being with human perception, dexterity, and manipulation, but who doesn't breathe air and never gets tired."

So the idea is that you don't need to specialize it to the thing it's meant to work on, because it works on whatever a human works on. A similar idea drove a lot of the DARPA Robotics challenge, with its emphasis on being able to drive a normalish vehicle, open a door, climb a ladder, use a regular power tool, etc.

Anyway, I think the state of the art for all this is still pretty far away, which is why the instinct is to assume we're talking about something specialized.

[sailingparrot]

> I think the state of the art for all this is still pretty far away, which is why the instinct is to assume we're talking about something specialized.

Yes, that's exactly what I thought. If we are talking about AGI + human level robotic dexterity, then the use of "simply" becomes even funnier.

[parsecs]

I'm not sure about AGI. You can just control the robot remotely from earth. Sure, there will be a minor lag but definitely won't justify need of AGI.

[writeslowly]

NASA was experimenting with this in the past with Robonaut (apparently it also started as a collaboration with DARPA)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robonaut

[mikepurvis]

I believe Robotnaut is back on earth as of sometime in 2018, but it was briefly at the ISS and even ran ROS— there was an official NASA-supplied Gazebo simulator for it: https://www.slashgear.com/nasa-robonaut-2-simulator-stack-no...