Kicking Robots, by James Vincent
Kicking Robots, by James Vincent
harpers.org
Kicking Robots, by James Vincent
A Harpers contributer does the legwork and gets a head start on deflating the next dumb hype cycle.
19 comments
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The part about robots doing backflips causes the robot to wear down faster has me thinking the whole "replace humans with humanoids" should be framed as comparative advantage rather than how many robots would be required to build itself. Given the number of humanoids required to replicate itself, you could take those same complex parts, rearrange them into non-humanoid configurations and have more output both in an interval of time and over the life time of those parts.
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IMO, this grift is enabled by the miniaturization of brushless motors. It's been a bit of an underreported revolution, but the improvements are super obvious for anyone who has handled power tools in over the last 10 years; it's also a big deal for combat robots. You just get so much more power per kilogram of motor. These guys are lazy, so they didn't think to consider the wear from that kind of loading in their designs.
So the grifters just CAD up a believable people-shaped chassis, plonk in these new ittybitty motors, warm-over 20 year old dynamic stability research, have a few guys dance around in knitted gimp suits for the camera, and voila, they can vacuum up money from scifi-pilled rubes for years before vanishing.
Edit: also I can promote my niche hobby horse here: I maintain that Tombstone from the Battlebots tv series is the ultimate answer to these things (as well as skeleton hordes and zombie mobs).
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Two things, first thinking the llm stuff will help in robotics doesnt seem to fly, as llms are based on the whole internet and all books, a massive amount of data, data which for menial tasks doesnt exist yet. (And is also harder to get, creating text is easy).
And the story about how humanoid bots are great for working in a warehouse seems also wrong to me, as one of the problems we all have had is that of you are carrying things, the big box you are carrying obscures part of your vision. Different designs would be better for that. (Even a humanoid robot who has eyes on the back of its hands for example). Such a lack of imagination.
E: mentioned the lack of data being an issue, but I realized it prob is even worse as we dont even have a proper language to describe a lot of movements and feelings, due to reading this https://archive.is/uxzgz
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Of all the environments that you might want to rearrange to facilitate non-humanoid labour, surely warehouses are the easiest. There’s even a whole load of pre-existing automated warehousing stuff out there already. Wheels, castors, conveyors, scissor lifts… most humans don’t have these things, and they’re ideal for moving box-like things around.
Industrialisation and previous waves of automation have lead to workplaces being rearranged to make things cheaper or faster to make, or both, but somehow the robot companies think this won’t happen again? The only thing that seems to be different this time around, is that llms have shown that the world’s c-suites are packed with deeply gullible people and we now have a load of new technology for manipulating and exploiting them.
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you want something to help you in warehouse work? we have a tool for that: it's called forklift
Hello I would like a mechanical slave
they have played us for absolute fools
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data which for menial tasks doesnt exist yet.
This reminds me over an old old furore here in Sweden. A female researcher at a largish university made a study of how cleaners ... cleaned. How bathrooms, kitchens etc were constructed and how workers had to move and lift to do their work.
This was almost universally derided - "who does science on cleaning???", but of course the intent was serious. Lots of people clean, if we design better workspaces, we reduce injuries and RSI etc, and maybe make it easier for less skilled people to clean. But becaseu both the author and the subjected were coded female, the reactionaries had conniptions.
Anyway that won't help humanoid robots. Just thought about it
Edit found an article in Swedish about it, year was 1985. Nowadays bathroom fixtures are constructed after her recommendations
https://arbetet.se/2009/02/26/gudrun-linns-forskningpverkar-hela-byggsverige/
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Sounds a bit like a Swedish heiress to Lillian Gilbreth. My wife has had some mobility issues and has lamented that the work that went into designing more ergonomic and accessible kitchens in the 40s and 50s was largely abandoned and ignored in more recent homes.
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19 comments
This is a good insight into the corporate culture angle, but I'm a bit disappointed the author didn't go into the more obvious technical problems, mainly: power. This article from IEEE goes into much more depth in that regard, in case anyone missed it in the stubsack a while ago.
I didn't know about the Tesla humanoid robot demo (Hilarious) though, so at least that's another tack for the pegboard.