[Schiendelman]

Humanoid robots that can do manual labor are going to be make or break for wealthy economies in the next two decades. Aging populations need help, and most successful nations do not have enough young people to do half the work they need done.

[Barrin92]

>Aging populations need help,

They're pretty good at helping themselves. Close to where I used to live in Bavaria we had a pilot project of communal living for the elderly in a community of about a hundred people that included people with quite severe conditions such as dementia.

Medical and care personell routinely checked in but they were largely self sufficient and did a remarkably job of taking care of themselves, maybe most importantly the were happy and quite dignified, something I cannot imagine is the case when your only contact is a humanoid robot.

Of course in an age where every solution is yet another technology rethinking social life isn't very high up the list.

[red75prime]

The "help" goes beyond taking care of themselves. What about food, clothing, infrastructure maintenance, and so on? An inverted population pyramid requires massive increase in the productivity of the economically active part of the population.

[mikem170]

Or a regression in the standard of living. Ideally to a comfortable sweet spot for people.

[Schiendelman]

The elderly already have a significant regression in standard of living, often catastrophically. That's a pretty big problem I would like to improve. There are so many people who don't leave their house because they struggle to get clean and they're embarrassed, and then their social connections collapse. It's going to be a long time before we have the technology to really help with elder care, but boy is it worth it.

It's also something we could help by getting rid of zoning in cities, of course, because we constantly push low income elderly out to the edges of urban areas where they can afford to live, rather than allowing supply to keep up with demand in dense, walkable, accessible places where people who can't drive can actually have quality of life.

[mikem170]

I agree, we could do so much better. Zoning can be a tremendous quality of life issue, and needing a car to participate in society is an expense other people in other places aren't burdened with.

[HerbManic]

This is the path that Japan tried to go down and it hasn't worked out yet, but we have also solved a lot more of the technical issues since they began. going to be interesting to see if we pull it off this time.

[missedthecue]

Humanoid robots barely progressed between 2000-2020. There have obviously been incremental improvements in things like dexterity, vision, self-balancing, and locomotion, but in terms of having a useful humanoid robot, Honda's ASIMO released in the year 2000 is not crazily behind what we had in 2020. So it's not surprise we haven't seen economic dividends yet in the real world.

I think AI is what could make humanoids turn from parlor tricks to huge amounts of utility, but we're really going to have to see how it plays out in the next 5-10 years.

[Schiendelman]

I think they mostly tried to go down this path before we had the transformer. With VLA models, or really now "Large Behavior Models", what's possible has changed dramatically. I've seen robot arms fold laundry now. Textile work is insanely hard, now it's just putting a lot of learned behavior together.

[numpad0]

The current humanoid hype don't have much substances or key technologies in it, and incumbent industrial robotics companies like FANUC are already in the process of rolling the techniques created for humanoids into their robots. I personally think this is going to be just series of incremental gains for big welding bots, and nursery equipment becoming mildly robotic, like Aperture Science wall panels, than humanoids walking into retirement homes and doing dishes in the future.

[imtringued]

Those were never techniques created for humanoid robots. Google researched using transformers as vision language action models to drive robots back in 2023 on a mobile manipulator and probably did non VLA work even earlier.

This is something people refuse to understand. The shape of the robot changes absolutely nothing about robot intelligence unless it abandons the basic concept of joints and links. Continuum robots are very difficult to control but they are also incredibly niche.

[numpad0]

I really can't shrug off my suspicion since one of Chinese humanoid startups had added few female type body bumps on a robot and the online humanoid hype cluster("but does it do laundry or dishes" types) responded in panic with shared sentiments of defeat, that, those humanoid hype types might be just yearning for HBO Westworld bots, to state it with modesty, not even Data or Marvin who we can share drinks with. The absolute humanoid obsession doesn't make sense to me otherwise. The cookie cutter "humanoids are best poised for leveraging pre-existing human infra" response make close to zero sense otherwise.

[bitwize]

Sounds like "That's a bold strategy, Cotton, let's see if it pays off for 'em."

[Teynah]

I agree they may be strategically necessary. I’m just less convinced that “commercial humanoids by 2028” means anything close to replacing a meaningful amount of labor by then

[Schiendelman]

Certainly. I would imagine that by the end of 2028, there are less than 1000 humanoid robots replacing a human worker. By the end of 29, maybe 5000.

[stouset]

I honestly think the opposite.

Successful nations haven’t had enough young people to care for the elderly because they’ve all been employed as knowledge workers. Knowledge work is going away rapidly. The only work that will be left are things that require actual human bodies (for now).

In short, jobs like elder care are suddenly going to have an enormous number of new job seekers, since it requires human presence and isn’t taxing physical labor.

[Schiendelman]

Are you familiar with Jevon's paradox? I think knowledge work is exploding.

[stouset]

Food has gotten progressively cheaper. At the same time, both the compensation demand for farm labor have plummeted.

Demand for the output of knowledge work can increase while demand for those who produce it falls. “Knowledge work” is not a product with inherent demand, just like you and I don’t go to the store to buy farm labor.

[Schiendelman]

I'm not sure I agree with the premise of that analogy. Demand for farm labor has increased, but more of it is done by machines. The number of people employed in agriculture has increased if you include agriculture technology, over the same period. Not that I'm not saying the proportion of all humans working in agriculture has increased, I'm saying the raw number has, which is what matters to people along their lifetime.

Also, both the pay rates for agricultural labor and the pay for developing agricultural machinery are much higher than the pay for agricultural labor was in the past.

Knowledge work is an ever expanding umbrella, just as agricultural work is.