[Animats]

The tasks under "physical intelligence" are an indication of how bad off that part of AI is. "Physical robot that can survive for a week in an urban environment" is more than an initial goal. Although, arguably, a Waymo or Cruise Automation self driving car could do it now if provided with an automated charging station.

I'd suggest, as near term goals:

- A robot that can pick and pack at least 90% of what Amazon sells without needing human intervention more than once a day. (Get acquired by Amazon at a 9-figure valuation.)

- A robot that can clean a store or office building's floors or carpets without needing human intervention more than once a week. (That is, a useful industrial-strength Roomba.)

- A robot that can, by feel, do single-pin lock picking. (Currently, getting a key into a lock is an advanced robotics task.)

- A robot that can restock grocery store shelves.

- Small forklift robots which can cooperate to move larger furniture. (Good way to get into multi-robot coordination in unstructured environments.)

- A small robot with the agility of a squirrel.

More advanced:

- Assemble IKEA furniture.

- Cooperating robots which can do basic house construction tasks, such as installing wallboard or running electrical cable or pipe.

The author writes:

"In the early days of artificial intelligence, the field was defined by a single goal: to build a machine that could think and behave like a human. We call that AGI, or artificial general intelligence, and it’s humanity’s final tech frontier." That's too human-limited. There are stages beyond that, such as running a large coordinated multi-robot operation, or a whole society of robots.

[DesiLurker]

> - Assemble IKEA furniture.

Nope this should be last, this is how you get the AGI revolting against the masters and killing us off.

[bane]

For some of these examples, I suspect that the short term transitional solution will be to simply reshape our spaces to make them co-accessible to humans and robots. For example, a robot could much more easily stock shelves in a fully automated grocery if items came in more standard package sizes (think standard like shipping containers or paper sizes), where guaranteed to have readable barcodes, and were part of a fully automated loading dock to shelf system-of-systems with all standardized pieces.

Could probably handle automated inventory management, expiration dates, recalls, etc as well.

In fact, with enough standardization it would probably be conceivable to go directly from factory to store shelf without a human in the loop.

With enough automation the stores could be made more JIT and take up less space. Keep more things in a warehouse section, have smaller shelves, and restock rapidly throughout the day.

There are really two problems though:

1. we're working too hard to try to get these things to work in a human designed or adapted world. This kind of store would probably be pretty boring for humans to interact with (think less interesting than a Costco)

2. all this automation is way more expensive than a handful of low paid humans across 2 or 3 shifts. Anecdote: I remember when I was younger some highly automated test sites for fast food franchises. They'd completely automated the drink pouring, or cooking and assembly of some menu items. They all disappeared very quickly and were never repeated. The TCO, including downtime loss of business, was crushing to the businesses...think your average McDonald's soft serve machine but the entire business depends on it working perfectly all day, every day of the week.

But if this is solved, or acceptable, a good test target product set would likely be cereal, soda, or canned goods. It makes up the bulk of the store interior. Could probably be extended to the bakery pretty quick. This would leave harder to handle products like meats, produce, and so on to human hands for a while, but those could probably eventually be overcome with enough millions in R&D or behavior changes in the public.