Surgical robots, and robot pianos both exist. Neither employ humanoid hands. This all just illustrates how humanoid robots are, in multiple dimensions, going down technology rat holes. In some cases better solutions already exist without looking humanoid. In other cases, the humanoid form factor fails to address problems like a high center of gravity in a device that needs to not fall on grandma while helping her around the house.
I continue to be amazed that the wrong form factor keeps being pursued. Though I suppose I shouldn't be too surprised given the parade of failed "AI devices."
I think one major draw to human-like for factors is the reuse of existing ecosystems and tools. If you have human-like grasping, you can reuse tools and utensils for human hands, otherwise, you need custom attachments. If you have human-like legs you can navigate stairs, wear pants for customization, and possibly operate a car or bike.
Its a bit like choosing JS / python -- of course performance is inferior to a compiled language with highly tailored code, but they are flexible and have an ecosystem that might do 99% of the lifting for you.
But in isolation, I agree with your idea that specialized robots with form fitted specifically to task will likely outperform a more generalized solution in a specific domain of behavior, the more generalized will likely outperform in flexibility and reusability (e.g. capable of reusing the human ecosystem).
I think it’s less about tools and more about the spaces that humans operate in.
You don’t need a human-like hand to hold a tool made for humans. As an extreme example, you can make a robot operate a power drill with strap to hold it and a servo with a small bit of wood to operate the trigger mechanism.
But for a robot operating in a space made for humans there certainly are some physical requirements which are based on the human form: maximum volume and clearances, stairs, fragile fixtures that can’t be operated with too much force, etc.
Ever walk through some over-crowded antique shop where you need to twist and lean your body to avoid knocking into thing?
This is exactly the example I used to show the ridiculousness of humanoid robots. You're not going to have a humanoid form climb into the driver seat of your car and act as your chauffeur. Your car will be the robot.
Just how ridiculous is a humanoid robot chauffeur? Should know how to drive a stick shift? Should it use its superior ability to swivel its head around to check for cars in the blind spot?
Someday business schools will have a chapter in their product management course that covers all the ways people slide ass backwards into thinking a humanoid robot makes sense. Humanoid robots will always be crushed between the rock of low value use cases below their price points the hard place of high value use cases that deserve tailored solutions.
There are a whole lot of tools intended for human use that I would use much more effectively if I could rotate my wrist repeatedly in the same direction.
Many overactuated, purpose built robots (like surgical robots and pianos) exist, and have existed since the Unimate, and work great in certain situations. The problem with all of them is they are very expensive, often extremely large, and single purpose or very narrow purpose (and even if they are narrowly multipurpose, require tons of setup to get to work for each job they are intended to do).
I personally am not bullish on 1:1 human hands either, but IMO the question shouldn't be $100k 2 ton Kuka arm vs biped with hands, it's overactuated robotics (build it from the floor with hard coded operations) vs underactuated (build it from the contact point of the work backwards with ML and sensors). We shall see which form factors prevail, but the type of robotics development posted here seems like the way forwards regardless, an ecosystem of small, power dense, reliable, accurate QDD actuators will lead to many general purpose robot applications. I recognize I am not using underactuated vs overactuated in their strict definition here but if you are familiar with robots I think you'll understand where I am coming from as far as a robot design ethos.
I will say though in designing robots of this type without necessarily being bound by trying to make a robot look like a human, I have often found myself accidentally recreating human arm DOF in a round trip way, it does just end up being well packaged beyond the "world designed for humans" talking point. Maybe hands will end up being a similar situation.
Similar to how we are seeing LLMs shoved into spaces where existing ML was already doing well and better suited.
Not to dismiss the value of LLMs in those cases as an interface/interpretation layer.
If grandma goes into the windowless surgery factory, I just want the best bots working on her. There is value in having Dr. Bot the replicant give me the face-to-face status updates. We are not breaking out those layers as much, anymore, as the focus becomes minimizing FOMO.
You are right. If the hand is doing a specific task, better morphologies are likely. But that's not always desirable. The canonical example is of course the household. I don't want X robots, I want 1. And I don't want to change anything. Robot hand!
Not to mention that the world is very widely designed to be manipulated by hands: doorknobs, handles, container sizes. A unique door opening appendage isn't going to do much good around your house.
A humanoid human will fall over too if pushed into a sufficiently awkward corner. It’s a fundamental problem with things that aren’t statically stable and need active stabilization.
I see it as trying to apply the bitter lesson to robotics. Specialized robots will always have their place, but humanoid ones can take advantage of all the design interfaces that already exist in the world for humans.
Similar to how claude code gained so much traction in terminal by just leveraging the command line interface that already exists for humans, no need to invent a domain specific MCP to just run shell commands.
I agree with you that it's far from the most efficient approach for specific tasks. But the analogy would be that you also generally don't want to use LLMs to do something you can "just" write a script for... that doesn't make LLMs useless though.
Mayors, prosecutors, merchants, and local press get co-opted by police. This leads to systemic failures that, unfortunately, make dealing with this in criminal law less workable. Sometimes you gotta do what works.
Seems like an easier problem to attack than, say, slavery, women's suffrage, the draft, etc. Once you look just a bit deeper, the US system hasn't been stagnant monotonically over the long-term. Not that originalists would ever admit it.
Sure, it's morphed from the original in various ways .. but perhaps not substantially enough to protect it from being gamed.
Transparency, limiting campaign funding, taking away corporate lobbyinging, universal suffrage (including everyone), indpendant commissions for electrol boundaries (stop parties directly dicking about with boundaries), ranked voting, more room for independant blocs, no "presidental" elections, cicada like co-prime terms for justices / other heads of non-p[olicy arms, ... many ways to improve the current system to increase broadly democratic representation.
The original point by the green account stands though, "problems with the US system have been known for a long time" .. perceived or otherwise, as evidenced by many others looking at the US system and picking and choosing what they use.
The notion of comparative advantage says you don't. It's not NIMBYism. And it's not a good faith argument when it comes from folks who have a bunker in New Zealand.
How about we try keeping big money out of politics and using ranked preference voting before we declare democracy obsolete? People have been studying that stuff.
FWIW most experts now favor approval voting [1] over ranked choice. Approval voting has similar advantages as ranked choice in allowing 3rd-party candidates and favoring moderate candidates. It avoids the chaotic behavior that RCV can exhibit [2] where shifts in the order of voters' down-ballot preferences can very significantly alter the outcome of the election [3]. And it's also much easier to explain to voters ("It's like voting today, except you vote for everybody you'd find acceptable and the best candidate wins. Sorta like when you're picking a restaurant to go out to with friends - you go to the place that is acceptable to the greatest number of people, not the one that a minority really want to go to"), doesn't require that you reprint ballots (you can re-use normal FPTP ballots, but you just count all votes instead of disqualifying ballots with multiple candidates marked), and is easily adapted to proportional representation and multi-member elections (you just take the top-N best candidates instead of the top-1).
there's no such thing as "acceptable" or not, there are just utilities and _relative_ satisfaction. you want to get the most satisfaction possible from the options you have.
What does what look like? Approval voting? The unacceptable (usually extreme) candidates fail to get votes and so get booted out of office, with their places taken by more moderate, common-sense candidates.
FPTP, particularly with partisan primaries, has the misfeature that you need to rally the base in order to win the crowded primary field. This leaves only extremist candidates heading toward the general election. In a country like the U.S. where voting is not compulsory, this turns off the moderate electorate, who are forced to choose between two extreme candidates that both seem batshit crazy, and encourages them to stay home.
I think they're talking about the flaws in presidential democracies. Not democracy itself. Parliamentary democracies are supposed to be a better design.
They all think it's big money on the other side. Everything they learn themselves isn't the result of a big money campaign, it's honest truthful information that they were smart enough to find on their own.
This is precisely why I don't care very much about accusations that there's big money in politics. Of course there is - there's huge numbers of people and institutions with money, using that money to advocate for the political change they want to see, and an important strategy for doing this involves promulgating information that they think is favorable to their cause. Everyone is doing this all the time.
Nonetheless, an individual citizen still has to support some political cause (even if you are completely politically disinterested, there are multiple factions claiming that your inaction is tantamount to support for their opponents). Whatever information about the world you think is true, or whatever political cause you think is in your interests, someone else can point to a monied interest who supports similar things. There's no way to use the absence of big money as a heuristic for what political causes are good or bad for you to support.
How about, before we try to keep "big money" out of politics and adopt ranked preference voting, we ban ill educated people and ban voting yourself other people's stuff. Voting is not a survival skill, it's a civic obligation.
What specific educational test would you like to see for someone to be legally eligible to vote in some jurisdiction? SAT score higher than a certain threshold (what specific threshold?). What if huge numbers of people cheat on the test in order to be able to legally vote? What if instead the educational criteria is a degree from some credited educational institution? Who decides what institutions will be authorized to grant people the right to vote or not? What if some authorities within those educational institutions believe in universal suffrage and so make sure to give suffrage-granting degrees to literally everyone who sets foot in their institution, regardless of their academic performance? (During the Vietnam War in the US many college professors gave passing grades to all males in their classes, in order to allow them to keep their student draft deferments, to try to prevent them from being drafted into the US military to fight in Vietnam).
There's a set of similar questions one could ask about exactly how you implement a ban on "voting yourself other people's stuff", in an adversarial political system where everyone has a different idea of what that means and is motivated to use whatever constitutional framework exists to ensure that their idea gets structurally advantaged.
I'm not saying you have to have a certain level of education to vote, I'm saying you have to have a certain level of functional ability to not be incarcerated for the rest of your life. Such as you have to be able to read and write and do math at some certain level.
Voting yourself other people's stuff would be that the safety net is bare minimum to keep people who are going through unexpected issues alive. But no one gets to live in the social safety net. No one who is receiving these kinds of benefits from the government should expect name brand anything, or to even be able to choose what food to eat, or to travel, or even pick who you socialize with. If you want to eat steak, you have to be a net producer. If you want name brand clothing, be a net producer. If you want to go to the beach, be a net producer.
Everyone who should pay some amount of tax, and anytime there is an increase in government spending, that amount that they are taxed should go up. If there is a decrease in government spending, it can go down. But everyone pays something. People need to have skin in the game. The US's current situation where nearly half the country are not net tax payers is not sustainable. Anything that can't go on forever, won't. So the country should ease into better situation, where the country is a nation of producers and not a nation of consumers, instead of hitting a brick wall where suddenly your ration of beans just stop.
> I'm saying you have to have a certain level of functional ability to not be incarcerated for the rest of your life. Such as you have to be able to read and write and do math at some certain level.
Having a failure of parental upbringing and education system causing someone to be incarcerated seems cruel. Should a child who ran away from home & school to avoid family abuse be incarcerated? There are so many current systems of society (education, police, disability, etc) that have failures at the margin that adding incarceration seems over the top.
Plenty of illiterate people manage to stay out of jail, you’re implying that you weren’t suggesting literacy tests for voting, so I’ll just admit to being at a loss as to your point. But if you care to take another whack at how you would suggest “we ban ill educated people”, I’m all ears.
I am not attempting to describe the world. I am trying to define the expectations we should have of the citizens of our polity. It has nothing to do with illiterate people manage not to commit crimes. I am saying that before we decide to get "big money" out of politics or we let people vote for the seven people who promise them the most shit, we should decided to put people who chose not to acquire basic skills that any human within standard deviation of average intelligence can acquire, when given 12 years of free education, into jail. It literally is not a literacy test for voting. It's an "are you a lazy piece of shit who is going to drag all of society down" policy.
What this tells me is that major social media sites, some of which claim to be developing frontier models, have no excuse for a bots waging influence campaigns on their sites.
We do advocate for stricter controls on data access on social platforms because of this. There is a bit of an unfortunate trade-off, but I think allowing mass-scraping or downloads of data from social sites can be misused in increasingly more ways.
Seriously. While it can't be more than speculative, it's a pretty solid speculation that a competent follow on to Model 3 would've put the rest of the automotive industry so far behind they would never catch up.
Instead, Elon wasted the opportunity on the Cybertruck ego trip to show that he's the genius that transformed cars. Once people catch on to the fact that launching 15 to 25 refueling rockets isn't a viable way to get beyond earth orbit, another project is going to turn out to be an Elon ego trip.
reply