We know so little. We perceive and conceive things only to the extent that our minds and senses allow us to. Maybe there’s much more to reality than we can comprehend, and our current human capabilities simply aren’t advanced enough to perceive it yet. A few hundred years ago, we didn’t even know that microbes existed or that the light spectrum extended beyond what our eyes could see. And that’s what makes the future so exciting!
I still remember sitting on my mother’s lap and using a Nokia flip phone in the late 2000s. She was teaching me how to use it, and the camera was so cool. When you flipped it open, there was this huge camera right in the middle on the other side of the screen. It looked so futuristic back then. And those oval-shaped phones with rounded edges too. So nostalgic.
The purpose of building humanoid robots is actually very simple: we want machines to feel lively and familiar.
We are not the best creatures at performing every possible job, yet we are so interested in building humanoid robots. Instead, we could build specialized robots for each job and create ways for them to integrate seamlessly into an ecosystem that includes humans and other robots.
A cooking robot, for example, doesn't necessarily need to look humanoid. It could be a completely autonomous kitchen with no hands at all, while another robot could have some kind of interface or mechanism that allows it to integrate with and interact with the kitchen.
I appreciate that the site also shows examples of this approach. But even then, we keep building humanoid robots because, deep down, they feel more alive. Seeing something that looks like a person working gives us a strange sense of joy and satisfaction.
Funny how much of robotics is driven not just by what is practical, but by what feels alive to us.
You didn't counter with a non-humanoid design, your counter example is "many specialized robots" instead of one. What many want is a generalized robot that can do tasks the manufacturer never thought of, in an environment that already exists rather than adapting the kitchen to support the robot. The success of LLMs in generalized work over individual apps (the software equivalent of your counter example) has made people impatient for general robots.
Who are those "many" and how many of them actually exist?
> The success of LLMs in generalized work over individual apps (the software equivalent of your counter example) has made people impatient for general robots.
LLM seems to be the most hated technology for the last 30 years. Heavily forced from top, pushed on people whether they like it or not.
And also the one that is supposed to make us all unemployed, obsolete and unable to buy basic necessities. If one believes what AI labs claim.
The practical isn't being given due consideration here. We spend the enormous majority of our time in the built environment. Every single aspect of our homes and cities (from the size of doorways to the level of countertops) are designed around median human size and form. It's ludicrous to suggest these will change to accommodate the need of personal service robots - which already face a host of barriers to adoption, from privacy to cost to reliability etc. If there ever are to be general purpose domestic robots, they will absolutely be 'humaniform' to use Azimov's terminology. Sure a large hotel or hospital or facility can adapt itself to the shape and needs of more specialised machines, but we're not doing that in our homes. Nor are we likely to return to a jetson's vision of dozens of separate functionally distinct machines in the home. We've been doing precisely the opposite for decades - moving more distinct functions to combined devices as housing gets smaller and more expensive.
I think it's more than that for two reasons: 1) Humanoid robots are general-purpose, which is great in domains where it's not economical to design specialized robots and 2) they are also drop-in replacements for humans. If you have a kitchen already, you can just drop in a humanoid robot without having to redesign your whole kitchen, which makes adoption much easier.
We have cooking robots thought. They're the production lines of deep frozen meals and the microwave ovens.
We have automated large chunks of the economy already. I don't thing building humanoid robots is gonna drive a major further increase in automation.
For one, I don't think we have the technology for it. Servo motors is not it. The human hand has 20+ degrees of freedom. We're not gonna build a great robotic hand with step motors.
What sort of robot would you need to load and unload a dishwasher, collecting and storing the crockery etc.? What sort of robot would you need to load and unload the laundry, fold and store the clothes?
The biggest reason for humanoid robots is that they will need to function in environments designed for humans and used by humans, sometimes even alongside the robots.
This is very different to something like a factory or even a warehouse, that can be designed to be used almost exclusively by the robots.
>What sort of robot would you need to load and unload a dishwasher, collecting and storing the crockery etc.? What sort of robot would you need to load and unload the laundry, fold and store the clothes?
Correct, when you think about it, all the "world is designed for humans" statements inherently assume that humans are still needed for the specific task to be automated.
For example, we bolt robot arms on tables, so that the work space is at a comfortable height for humans, but if the robot arm had the exact same intuition and intelligence as a human, you could just install it onto the floor. Suddenly the entire rationale, the table, which is the representative stand-in for "the world was designed for humans" is gone.
It's not that we necessarily need a specialized machine, it's that a generalized machine doesn't have to be humanoid.
Completely agree with you mate. But the biggest issue if we say we wont use AI, we are going to be left behind, the speed at which things are moving is just so unimaginable and i really feel like my mind is just crashing out every time i am being reminded of this
This is awesome. I always think about this. As humans, we are very limited in what we can perceive and experience. A higher form of entity could have a completely different way of viewing nature and the world.
Just a thought experiment for you guys: imagine a bacteria that survives inside humans. It doesn't even know what a human is. For the bacteria, its entire world is simply the environment in which it lives. It doesn't know that we are living beings actively trying to maintain ourselves and survive.
Now, suppose a harmful bacteria enters our body, makes us sick, and we take medicine that kills all of them. From the bacteria's perspective, it could look like a natural disaster or some unexplained event in which they all suddenly get wiped out. They have no idea that a living being called a human actively tried to eliminate them using something called medicine, which was engineered specifically to kill them.
Similarly, what if our world, or nature itself, is part of some higher-level entity that we simply exist within? What if the reason for our deaths, natural calamities, and other events is something completely beyond our perception? Whatever we do, we may never be able to understand what is actually happening at that level, just as bacteria may never be able to understand that humans exist.
One thing that could potentially support this idea is self-regulation. We see self-regulating systems throughout nature, and these patterns seem to repeat at different scales. We ourselves are self-regulating organisms, and nature also has countless cycles and mechanisms that regulate themselves.
Maybe these patterns continue at scales we cannot perceive. We can observe certain things at the scale of humans, but we still don't fully understand what happens at the nano scale or on the scale of the universe. Perhaps there are higher levels of organization and self-regulation that we simply don't have the ability to perceive yet.
Woah your reply feels very much like Deja Vu to me - my OP on X from months ago
Gitanjali GulveSehgal
@gigi_sehgal
Jun 22
Replying to @fermatslibrary
Contrarian Takes:
1. We live in a “box” governed by the compute we are capable of. Perhaps the rockets are out there in a form we cannot observe. ( borrowing from Quantum Ruliad ). E.g
What do bacteria think of us? Do we “exist” for them? Are we infrastructure or entities to them? Do they think we do not exist?
We cannot see Neutrinos streaming thru our bodies but atleast we managed to figure out that they existed.
Who knows what else exists that our senses and technology cannot perceive or reverse engineer existence of?
2. Perhaps they have remote observation capability,
3. Perhaps its a simulation we are in a space alien overlord’s lab
4. Perhaps the Men in Black wiped our memory each time we see them
5. What were those drones flying over DC?
6. Perhaps they are already here
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