[gavinsyancey]

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. It's possible throwing more compute at the problem will work and they'll be useful in a few years. Or maybe we're actually experiencing a Markov-chain / ELIZA moment and are multiple decades away from anything actually useful.

[cogman10]

I'll do you one further.

Self driving cars is far from a solved problem. It's something we've been working on for the last 20 years at least. We are getting closer, some solutions are impressive (like waymo). But even those ultimately need operators in the area of the cars to solve the problem of the car getting stuck.

Self driving cars are an infinitely simpler problem to solve vs a general purpose humanoid robot. You have basically 2 outputs, acceleration and steering. You have rules simple enough that I was driving at 14. With enough input, you'd think self driving could be completed in a snap. But it's not there yet.

Humanoid robots which are useful will come after widespread deployment of L5 self driving cars. Since we don't have that, I have no faith that we are close to useful humanoids.

[ForOldHack]

However, self driving vacuums are a done deal.

"I have no faith that we are close to useful humanoids." I agree completely. We still have competitions about having robots walk up stairs and open doors, and balance while doing those things...

What would be the top uses of humanoid robots?

[cogman10]

> What would be the top uses of humanoid robots?

To replace humans for general tasks. McDonalds would like to use them to flip burgers, take orders, and deliver meals. Amazon would like to use them to pick items from their warehouses for delivery.

I'd argue, though, in both cases the "humanoid" part isn't what they really want or need. Even in the mcdonalds case, so long as the robot is "cute" enough to interact with customers, then it can be a box with an arm.

Of course, a major problem with using robots in the food industry is cleaning and hygiene. Robots tend to have lots of hard to clean cracks that will happily carry around germs. Even in medicine, we are finding that things like laparoscopic devices are beasts that are almost impossible to fully clean.