[martythemaniak]

Rodney Brooks has a great essay on why he's skeptical that the current humanoid hype will deliver and the central claim is that human dexterity is extremely advanced any today's humanoids lack even the sensors and data needed to start building the models needed to match human performance.

https://rodneybrooks.com/why-todays-humanoids-wont-learn-dex...

I saw him post this article on his Bluesky saying that they're the first ones he's seen that are close to cracking this issue (he's an investor/adviser).

[nomel]

> needed to match human performance.

This is not a remotely a real world requirement for them to be useful, and for them to sell like crazy.

[usrnm]

Isn't it? The whole promise if humanoid robots is replacing humans in a human-centered environment. Instead of specialized hardware or modifying the existing process, just drop a robot in place of a human, bam, done. Otherwise, what's the point?

[pzo]

The point is that even if they do something 3x slower and maybe capable of 1/100 tasks they can still this do task 24/7, without holiday and never sick, they can also have more strength e.g in construction.

My smart vacuum is more dump than me when wiping floor and much slower than be but still greatly useful.

[cyber_kinetist]

The problem - robots do break, they need constant maintenance, repair, and replacement (especially the smaller ones like the humanoids), and can go wrong in all sorts of situations. The costs for robot maintenance largely depend on the reliability of hardware and that should be included in the ROI calculation (which almost no one is doing right now)

[throawayonthe]

that's the thing, what's the appeal of humanoid robots then? why not something more fit to the task? imagine if your roomba had legs because well that's what a human uses to move around when cleaning

[dogcomplex]

Accessibility and a single chassis that does the vast majority of things. Even if they're never as fully dexterous as the average human (doubt it) they're still as dexterous as a somewhat handicapped human, which is already clearly enough to function decently in most of society and is far from useless.

If you want several bots all custom built to specific tasks, go for it. That will happen too. But a generalist has value of its own.

[marcosdumay]

> imagine if your roomba had legs

That would probably be an improvement. Floors are designed for people, and may have several levels. An ideal vacuum would probably look something like a centipede.

Anyway, the appeal would be that it can perform several tasks. It doesn't need to perform all the tasks a human can to fulfill that.

[maccard]

They don't need to be anywhere near as efficient or effective as me, they just need to be able to do it unattended. Roomba is a great example - it's great to be able to have floors cleaned every day while I'm working, even if it takes 10x longer to do so. If a robot could do laundry while I work, put away the dishes from the dishwasher in the morning, and mow my lawn while I'm BBQ'ing, it's a life changer.

[megaman821]

I wonder how accurate joint positions and muscle activations can be from just a POV camera. Maybe it’s not crazy to think someone could get tens of millions of hours of well-labeled training data.

[dyauspitr]

Yeah I’m going to completely disregard this because I feel like we are less than a year away from completely human feeling humanoids. This is based on nothing but obsessively watching and following humanoid progress on the internet.

[ManuelKiessling]

What was eye-opening, or rather, sobering for me was when I read an interview with an engineer who explained how incredible difficult it is for a robot to orient itself when it is lying on the floor and wants to stand up.

Yes, it can do the required motions just fine, that’s not the point. But think about yourself when you are lying on the floor: it’s really easy to determine if this is safe, if you are lying underneath something and so on. You just feel that.

A robot cannot do that; all they can do is look around as good as possible and visually determine their situation.

[jgord]

I naively assumed they have a gravity sensor, so will generally have an approximate up vector ?

[LeCompteSftware]

It is also things like "I can feel that my left knee is bearing a little too much weight, I should shift weight to my right hand and use that to push myself up" - things that come automatically to animals after learning the hard way in infancy (some of it is innate; baby animals are clumsy, but usually more mobile than human infants). Regardless of learned-vs-instinct, these abilities rely on sophisticated "sensors" and cognition. I suspect engineering the sensors is actually a bit harder, but I'm also not optimistic about a deep learning approach to the cognition.

A significant underappreciated advantage of animals over AI: lifeforms can "learn the hard way" more easily than 2020s robots because of cheap self-repair. AI labs are reluctant to damage their robots, but an essential part of humans learning to move safely is severely bonking your head and reckoning with the consequences - "hey, dummy, why did you trip and fall and bonk your head? Because you were running like an idiot."

I am learning the hard way to this day :) I have been practicing with work knives. A few months ago I got stupid and impatient, and sliced my thumb nastily. If I didn't block the cut with my thumbnail (still ruined) I might have chopped bone. It is hard to say precisely what I learned from this experience - "don't be stupid and impatient" is facile - but I know I learned a lot. I am actually optimistic about targeted surgical robotics. But for a general-use humanoid robot, I would not want to give it a knife if it's not capable of feeling pain. I never use big knives anywhere near my cats because I understand intuitively that they are nimble and unpredictable and easily stabbed by knives. I didn't need to be trained on this. A robot kind of does. Yikes.

[ManuelKiessling]

Yeah but imagine yourself lying on the floor with your vision being your only sense, plus an info floating in your mind: „fyi, you are no longer upright“.

That’s all, you feel nothing else. Now your job is to move all parts of your body in just the right way.

[Dylan16807]

Do I know which way my joints are bent (which a robot knows)? Then I can manage it.

And why don't I have any sense of pressure at all? We can put that into robots.

[AndrewDucker]

But I have more than that. I can definitely sense which way is up unless I'm underwater.

[card_zero]

Or have an amusing inner ear infection. So OK, sure, it's vector, not a flag.

[rcxdude]

Theu have an IMU, what they don't generally have is the various aspects of touch.

[card_zero]

The point about being aware of lying underneath some object was interesting. Sound might matter, like the frequency of background noise changes when you're in an enclosed space, and listening to your own shuffling noises helps you know when you've planted your feet right - or something. I have some really effective ear plugs and I notice they make it harder to move around.

Having said that, I've probably hit my head on the underside of an open cupboard door five or six times in my life, and I expect to do it again.

[jfengel]

I obsessively avoid any kind of "technology is going thataway" content. So I haven't seen anything that looks like humanoid progress in quite some time. About the only thing that has snuck around my barrier is Musk apparently claiming he'll have it by the end of the year, which is pretty conclusive evidence that they won't have it by the end of the year.

So if you're seeing anything that actually seems to merit attention, I'd love a few pointers. I could use some good news.

[nancyminusone]

Well, as someone who has tried to build at least a couple small robot arms, I think we are probably closer to 20-50 years away. Both the power and dexterity are not there.

Right now, only a human can both push over a boulder and pick up a tiny speck from the floor using the same actuator.

[rcxdude]

Beware generalising from a carefully curated and presented set of demos to real life.