My contacts at various factories and my own eyes after touring said factories tell me that the assembly lines have been mostly run by programmed (no quotes required, just SPS) robots for the past 50 years or so.
Welcome back to the 1970s I guess?
The ones I see deployed in construction do stuff like drilling holes in hard to reach places, or laying bricks. None of them look like people, though. Much like the typical household dishwasher hasn't been named Alice or Doris for the past 50+ years, but rather Bosch or Samsung and doesn't use actual hands.
But yeah, humanoid robots do look cool and many movies and books told us to be fearful of them.
It would've been impressive 15 years ago. People seem to forget that first humanoid robot capable of competently walking was showcased by Honda 26 years ago.
over 20 years ago, the updated version was capable of running and climbing stairs.
So a purpose-built (look at the thing - running is all it can actually do) two legged fast running robot doesn't seem all that impressive today. Cool? Sure! Useful? Not so much. Impressive? Whatever... it's just showing off at this point, much like Boston Dynamic's Atlas series that went nowhere (in contrast to this machine: this one did half marathon distance:)
Nah. What's often overlooked when seeing these (mostly) propaganda events is the fact that the actual autonomy of these machines is still lacking.
We've had purpose-built machines that outperform every human at specific tasks for over a century now. Just because a subset that's popular these days (the "humanoid" and dog-like variants) invoke some psychological and cultural (we've been primed by media for over 150 years at this point) fears, doesn't make them more capable than they seem.
Sure, the thing can run real fast, but looking at it, that's pretty much all it actually can do. In contrast to a boring old industrial robot, though, being able to win a half-marathon or a 100m dash against any hypothetical human isn't all that useful, no?
Of course it's still lacking. In contrast, how long does it take for a human to go from birth to being able to break any world records? How many years of dedication just to hone themself for that particular thing? And is a human breaking a record any more "useful" than a machine breaking it?
Once you lay down the coolaid for a second you'd realize that the whole point of the human experience has little to do with its "usefulness". But you'd have to redo your civic education and maybe socialize first for that to finally hit.
Ah, someone who doesn't have a valid argument but feels compelled to argue anyway, and so resorts to personal attacks. I know, it sucks to be in such a position. But you'll feel better once you accept reality. Buck up.
Ah, someone who doesn't have a valid argument but feels compelled to retort anyway, and so resorts to vague-posting about some higher-level point they supposedly hold. Drink up.
Given its form factor there is already a ton of active research into developments that would be just about plug and play. Hands with coordination for example.
True. Physical capabilities can be added with ease. The actual problem isn't the actuators anymore, though. Very useful for a remote controlled puppet ala "Surrogates" (the film), still not quite there yet when it comes to performing even simple tasks autonomously.
Emptying a washing machine located in the cellar/basement, taking the clothes to a room on the ground floor, folding and sorting them before putting them in the closet still is quite the challenge.
Wirelessly hooking such robot up to a data centre running heavy machine learning models isn't a proper solution either, because in contrast to digital agents, latency matters quite a bit in physical interactions.
I don't see the difference. Is a humanoid robot not a machine? What surprises is that it took so long to achieve this. It took Honda 20 years to get to ASIMO in 2000. I'm not surprised by the fact that 26(!) years later, a humanoid robot finally exceeds human capabilities in basic tasks like running.
Such robot would easily smash the current marathon record as well and the only thing I'd be impressed by, would be the battery capacity tbh.
If you were ever trapped on the top floor of a burning building, should we just send a car up there?
Nobody is surprised by advancement like this, but there is still a lot of engineering that went into it, not talking about how it’s now almost consumer grade tech that you can buy.
> If you were ever trapped on the top floor of a burning building, should we just send a car up there?
Riddle me this then: what role does a robot that has been built to run real fast play in that scenario?
Sure, a good deal of engineering went into this, but the hard part - solving bipedal locomotion - had been done long before that. Apart from showing off it's not really advancing the field and so there's not too much left to be impressed by (honestly, the battery and actuator efficiency that allowed the thing to do a half marathon was MUCH more impressive, at least to me). It seems to me to be more analogous to car tuning.
The thing has no real arms, hands or carry capacity, so what would be the point?
Running up the stairs is the easy part after all. The difficult part in such scenario is lack of orientation due to smoke, obstacles like locked doors or fallen debris, unstable walls and ceilings, locating people and getting them out safely. All of those things require a good amount of autonomy, on-the-spot physical problem solving and judgement.
To this effect, the recent DARPA Triage Challenge, which has its final taking place in November this year, seems like a much more thorough and practical demonstration of current capabilities. Something to look forward to if you're interested in the current state-of-the-art w.r.t. real-world applications of robotics.
Everyone has the same basic objective and measurement norm, so we can see how performance improves year over year, and how different manufacturers handle a specific known goal, even if it's not super-representative of real world use cases.
Billion-dollar supercomputers don't spend most of their time running LINPACK, and some probably perform better on specific tasks, but it doesn't make the Top 500 list any less of a thing.
Developing coding skills is both easier and more difficult than ever at the same time.
50 years ago the main barrier was access to hardware - computers were big, expensive, and not easy to come by for average people.
30 years ago, the biggest hurdle was access to resources: you had to spend a fortune on books that quickly became obsolete or had to wait for your local library to get them for you.
Today, you basically have everything - up-to-date free reference material on pretty much everything in an instant, cheap and accessible hardware (no need for high-end stuff), great online tutorials and interactive courses, message boards, the works.
But then you also have a machine that completely removes the need to put in the effort required to actually learn and hone your skills. Human psychology always seeks shortcuts and more discipline than ever is needed to not give up and have the machine do the thinking for you instead.
Proficient developers are getting pressured into outsourcing their craft and skills to the machine, thus deskilling quickly. Juniors never get the chance to become proficient in the first place - either because they're not getting hired to begin with, or because they succumb to the siren song of the machine...
Everything old is new again. The reason natural language never caught on for programming, is that natural language is inherently unsuitable for the task of formulating precise and unambiguous instructions for a machine.
Numerous attempts have been made in past 70 years, but we landed on the compromise that is high level programming languages with their (mostly) well-defined syntax and semantic rules.
If you look outside of the world of programming you'll find that the same is true for every craft and profession that requires precision and unambiguity. Cooking, logistics, military, carpentry, mechanical engineering, law, medicine, etc. all have their own domain specific languages for describing tasks, procedures, and tools. Heck, even sufficiently large organisations have their own internal languages and terms for that reason.
> Preferably, don’t give the AI access to the codebase. [...] If the AI does have access to the codebase, this access is read-only.
also
> I don’t follow all these religiously.
So if you need an overview of a system, you can and should provide access to the entire codebase. Even the rule itself says "preferably", not "don't ever". If you have different needs, you can always just look at it as a useful guideline. It's just a blog post by some rando on the internet, not the epiphany of AI coding's Ten Commandments.
> Long distance/time dependencies could develop and be naturally maintained via complex decentralized indirect but intertwined economic arrangements.
But that would require causality-breaking FTL, no? Otherwise the speed of light itself would create enough of an obstacle to make any trade impractical. Property rights only work if they are enforceable, which is the case on Earth but not over interstellar distances.
If a system is distributed enough, with complex financial and legal dependencies, a great deal of indirection becomes stable, because to violate the indirection would put so many direct relationships in peril.
And when there is reliability, even over vast distances and time, that future-value can be traded as today-value. With risk assessments of course, but this is how a great deal of the economy works. More and more of the economy, as it becomes growth and innovation focused, operates on the currency of expectation.
> You might be able to have everybody go there frozen.
Common trope in sci-fi, pretty much impossible in practise. Humans aren't capable of surviving being frozen, we lack the genetic machinery for that. Could you breed/engineer hybernation-capable humans? Sure. Otherwise this approach would require to literally being able to kill and then resurrect people at will.
> Or have a robot ship that gives birth to the colonists from an artificial womb on arrival.
I like this idea. It kills two birds with one stone: for one, fertilized eggs and fetuses can be stored safely for a long time.
Secondly - and I think this is something that's underdiscussed - genetic modification will be necessary anyway. The target environment won't be a carbon copy of Earth. Different atmosphere, different gravity, different starlight, different pathogens, etc. If you insist on colonising planets and start terraforming via automated means ahead of time, the resulting ecosphere will still differ from Earth and adjustments will be necessary. A ship carrying unborn settlers would be informed of the specifics of the target world and the ship's biolabs could make genetic alterations accordingly.
As well, fertilized eggs and fetuses take up much less mass and do not require internal atmosphere too much. So you could have a smaller, simpler ship that takes less energy to get there
The ones I see deployed in construction do stuff like drilling holes in hard to reach places, or laying bricks. None of them look like people, though. Much like the typical household dishwasher hasn't been named Alice or Doris for the past 50+ years, but rather Bosch or Samsung and doesn't use actual hands.
But yeah, humanoid robots do look cool and many movies and books told us to be fearful of them.