Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by baron816 2 days ago
I don’t think this is where the robotics revolution is going to happen. The big one will be using AI to design and build highly specialized robots to automate mining and manufacturing.
3 comments

The AI will need generalized robots to build the highly specialized ones.
Why would building specialized robots require generalized robots?

Seems to me you'd do better if you built the robots with robots that were specialized in building robots.

If it can make any robot then it’s not very specialized.
Making robots is a very narrow, highly specialized subset of things that robots can do.

Also, no one said it could male any robot until you tried to broaden the scope just now because you didn't want to admit you're wrong. This is an example of "bad faith" in a discussion.

A robot can be made by an automated assembly line (similar to how cars are built today).
An automated car assembly line is highly specialized to the production of a specific car.

Reconfiguring the assembly line to produce a different car requires people or general purpose robots.

Why not both?
Big humanoid robots are expensive, the actuators still suck, and the control problems are hard. Their big advantage is that they can occupy human-shaped spaces, but struggle to do anything useful.

Not to say we won't get humanoid robots eventually, but I think there's probably some low hanging fruit for people to make some other kinds of solutions. Specialized robots for industrial environment, well-thought out appliances for the home.

It would be a bit surprising if the progression was Roomba -> humanoid robot.

We have Google, Figure, Tesla, Boston Dynamics, and literally dozens of Chinese companies building humanoid robots and making huge improvements in the tech. Not there yet by any means as a general-purpose home assistant, but I don't think it will be too surprising if at least one of them succeeds
It will take a while before humanoids become useful. You can speed it up with extreme amounts of investment but it still wouldn’t be soon.
I'd say 10 years before they're a luxury item, if you look at what has progressed in the past 10 years it's been massive
I hope humanoids will be ever present, it’s just that the scale of impact from specialized robots will be far greater. Humanoids will be our butlers, but the other robots will be creating a world of unimaginable abundance.
agriculture first (mining and manufacturing are already robotizing).