[gavinsyancey]

Factory work that can be straightforwardly automated by robots generally already is, by special-purpose factory robots. The remaining tasks are generally:

* Tasks where poorly-paid humans are cheaper than expensive factory robots. Humanoid robots are more complex / fiddly so will be more expensive than existing factory robots. No help here.

* Tasks where human dexterity has an advantage over state-of-the-art robot actuators (e.g. sewing fabric panels into garments). Better robotics could help here, but the advancement needed is better actuators, not AI and a humanoid form-factor. And if you solve this you'd be better off putting your new end-effector on an existing 6dof platform.

* Supervising robotic equipment and handling exceptions. But then you get to "handling poorly-specified unfamiliar tasks in the physical world" which is not currently a solved problem and there's no guarantee just throwing more compute at it will be sufficient to solve this. So far all humanoid robot demos have either been either known tasks in a tightly-controlled environment, teleportation, or so poorly-functioning as to be obviously not fit for purpose.

[cogman10]

Totally agree.

I'd also point out that what makes this whole thing smell of being a grift is the fact that what's being chased is humanoid.

Humans are not the pinnacle of dexterity or stability. And freed from biological constraints, it makes no sense why we'd use the human form as a reference.

Making a humanoid robot is a hard thing to do, for sure, but it's also not particularly useful. The routines needed to balance a robot or correct for a slip are interesting to solve, but don't really make for a better robot which is more capable of doing the dishes or folding the laundry.

If I'm amazon, for example, then the most useful form factor for a general purpose robot is 2 arms on a 4 wheel omnidirectional rolling platform.

[taneq]

Our hands are actually amazing, to a degree that’s hard to comprehend unless you’ve tried to build something equivalent. Our finger tips can discern features down to around 10 microns, detect a wide range of vibrations and single shocks, manipulate objects two orders of magnitude smaller than them, grasp an incredible range of weird shapes and materials reliably, repeat pre-learned motions remarkably quickly, and with training carry kilograms, all while weighing about a kilogram and reliably operating maintenance free for tens of thousands of hours. Oh and they’re made of meat.

An artificial manipulator with even half of these features would be the holy grail of robotics. Doing them all at once is a miracle.

[cogman10]

Completely agree. My point is more that even though our hands are amazing and even if we decided we want all the features of hands, there's no reason why you'd design such a device with 5 fingers and an oddly placed opposable thumb. There's no reason you'd have more than 2 joints per finger.

That's what I'm calling a grift of the humanoid robots. They are focusing pretty heavily on making manipulators shaped like hands, which don't perform anywhere near hand capabilities. The form is mattering more than the functionality which introduces a lot of unnecessarily hard to solve functionality problems.

The actual hard part of doing something like folding cloths isn't even the manipulation (though it's part of it) you mostly just need a few pincers. The hard part is that fabric changes like crazy in a 3 dimensional way on every motion. Just identifying "this is a shirt" is a hard problem to solve. Further deciding how to fold said shirt is extra difficult. But even further, getting a robot to know "this is where this shirt should be put away" and "this is how I should handle new cloths" is crazy hard. That's the part that I've seen absolutely no evidence that any of these humanoid robots are making any sort of progress on. The most impressive ones are cheating with a guy in the room over doing the task. Not exactly something I'd want in my home. Perhaps in a nuclear reactor.

[taneq]

I get your point about strictly anthropomorphic robots. There's definite scope for improvement there - I think Boston Dynamics' recent videos on their design process for the hands for Atlas is fascinating, and the way the fingers (in fact most/all(?) of the robot's joints) can flex both ways is a definite improvement. I also think that pure legged locomotion is dumb in an urban environment, compared with wheeled legs like a lot of recent robots are using.

[ForOldHack]

I would say that turtles are the pinnacle of stability, and longevity, and so we have Roombas. But, Racoons are at the pinnacle of dexterity, and Octopodes are at the pinnacle of dimensional manipulation...

but personally, I would welcome our cyper-coon overlords.