A very accessible article on the promise and limitations of humanoid robots with current AI technology. The conclusion:
The embodied AI that will transform the world in the near future is what’s already out there. In fact, it’s what’s been out there for years. Early self-driving cars date back to the 1980s, when Ernst Dickmanns put a vision-guided Mercedes van on the streets of Munich. Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University got a minivan to drive itself across the United States in 1995. Now, decades later, Waymo is operating its robotaxi service in a half-dozen American cities, and the company says its AI-powered cars actually make the roads safer for everyone.
Then there are the Roombas of the world, the robots that are designed to do one thing and keep getting better at it. You can include the vast array of increasingly intelligent manufacturing and warehouse robots in this camp too. By 2027, the year Elon Musk is on track to miss his deadline to start selling Optimus humanoids to the public, Amazon will reportedly replace more than 600,000 jobs with robots. These would probably be boring robots, but they’re safe and effective.
Science fiction promised us humanoids, however. Pick an era in human history, in fact, and someone was dreaming about an automaton that could move like us, talk like us, and do all our dirty work. Replicants, androids, the Mechanical Turk — all these humanoid fantasies imagined an intelligent synthetic self.
Reality gave us package-toting platforms on wheels roving around Amazon warehouses or the sensor-heavy self-driving cars clogging San Francisco streets. In time, even the skeptics think that humanoids will be possible. Probably not in five years, but maybe in 50, we’ll get artificially intelligent companions who can walk alongside us. They’ll take baby steps.
For me the most interesting test case for AI machinery is hair cutting. Mechanically this is far far far simpler than prepping dead chickens for sale, but, uhm, nobody does it.
Now, you CAN find zillions of AI manufactured videos showing it done, but not actual things.
Somehow, that does not add up for me.
Roombas are humanoid robots?
Warehouse robots are humanoids?
I was hoping to learn something about Humanoid Robots
The Captain
Please mark as off-topic or move to science fiction board.
Thank you.
just in case: /s
Nope. But the article is about humanoid robots and their prospects, and a key part of that analysis is contrasting the state of robots in a humanoid form versus the state of robotics for non-humanoid forms.
The use case for humanoid robots is in some way constrained by what non-humanoid robots can do. They are competing products, to some extent. Tasks that can be done cost-effectively by a non-humanoid robot are somewhat (or a lot) less likely to be available use cases for humanoid robots. As AI expands the boundaries of what non-humanoid robots can do as well, that has an impact on what market is there for the humanoid ones, if ever we get to that point.
Oh, I can’t wait for that. I’m so looking forward to a machine with a sharp pair of scissors waving around my head, because I really don’t use both eyes all the time anyway. One would be good enough.
Besides, there are lots of people in the Philippines who can be used as “remote operators” in case the video has a glitch between the camera and the multi-articulated arms.
Or maybe they’ll just use a Flowbee and we’ll all be required to have the same haircut?