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Comment by totalZero | Hacker News Reader

1. You are imagining current technologies at scale, but future technologies are likely to get cheaper and better. Robotics is still a newborn field. Cars have also gotten cheaper and better; the Model T started out around 20k in today's dollars for a 20hp car that went 45mph.

2. You're comparing an in-home robot to a contract cleaner. Robots would be cheaper for the customer on a contract basis, just as a live-in maid costs more than a contract cleaning service.

I do agree that the Jetsons-esque conception of a humanoid service robot is not how things will likely shake out as domestic robotics matures; IMO the humanoid is a simplistic image that demonstrates a lack of imagination.

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1. That car massively outperformed its competition, the horse. It didn’t buck you off or startle, didn’t get sick and die, didn’t shit all over the roads. It was able to go faster, longer, and more comfortably than a horse. That sounds like the opposite of current robots, which tend to underperform their current competition, as the OP was trying to explain.

2. He also compared them to just people doing their housework. He also pointed out that this would be a toy for the wealthy, and we have to consider what they want. A friend of mine is half Filipino and very wealthy, and her relatives all have live-in maids. The maids cook, clean, do laundry, basic maintenance, and can even drive kids to school. They’re not particularly expensive either (compared to a robot) and you’d need quite a few different robots to accomplish all of those tasks.

Yes, robotics will improve, but I’m not seeing the horizon past which a single affordable robot can do everything from laundry to dusting for cobwebs. It goes back to the original point of the OP, which is that for people who could afford a robot, these are already solved problems and human labor is relatively cheap compared to half a million dollars of machine.

While I certainly tend more on your side of this discussion, I wonder to what degree your first point demonstrates a modern bias rather than an objective comparison.

Cars could only travel on roads, you couldn't go wherever you liked as on a horse. Narrow passages you could previously have ridden down were now inaccessible.

You need to put fuel in your car, which was probably even harder then than finding an electric car charger at the start of their existence. Providing food and drink for a horse was comparatively trivial.

Horses could easily be tied up outside of whatever store or destination you were visiting. What were the social costs of parking a great big machine outside of your local? To say nothing of parking as a town- or city-wide logistical problem.

Horses can in theory, go anywhere, but in practice it’s not advisable, at least at more than a trot. If you’re going at a canter, or god help you a gallop and the horse’s foot finds an unseen and unexpected hole, stone, etc... you’re going to be in serious trouble and so is the horse. Generally you only ride horses at high speeds on well worn and known trails, or roads. So yeah, a horse is better off-road than a Model T, but I’d rather walk unless I know the trail. Trotting for long periods is an athletic thing if you’re riding English, and torment on the groin otherwise. All in all, riding a horse for long periods is not easy unless you’re very used to it, and physically fit. Remember that at the time most horses weren’t being ridden, they were pulling carts or carriages, and they’re not exactly off-roaders either.

Fuel was definitely an issue, but you could just carry tins of fuel and the car wouldn’t mind carrying them. Carrying food and water for a horse is no joke, and horses also need to rest. You also don’t have to take the saddle and bridle off a car, wash the car and brush it down. Horses really are a lot of work, especially if you’re working them hard. Remember that work also comes at the end of a long day in the saddle, which is hard work for you, especially if you’re beating a trail at a trot.

Parking... I have no idea about the logistics of parking at that time, so I can’t say.

A horse produces ~20 pounds of manure and a liter of piss per day. It was not possible to keep the streets clean. Removing that waste was itself a huge logistical problem.

> At the turn of the 20th century, the most malodorous environmental challenge facing the world’s big cities was not slums, sewage or soot; it was horse dung. In London in 1900, an estimated 300,000 horses pulled cabs and omnibuses, as well as carts, drays and haywains, leaving a swamp of manure in their wake. The citizens of New York, which was home to 100,000 horses, suffered the same blight; they had to navigate rivers of muck when it rained, and fly-infested dungheaps when the sun shone. At the first international urban-planning conference, held in New York in 1898, manure was at the top of the agenda. No remedies could be found, and the disappointed delegates returned home a week early. (https://www.economist.com/special-report/2016/11/26/the-futu...)

See also The Horse & the Urban Environment: https://enviroliteracy.org/environment-society/transportatio...

To be sure, I'm not saying cars weren't an improvement over horses (history proves they obviously were), I'm just saying that after a century of car culture we're probably somewhat inured to and/or have engineered around the negatives of car ownership, so they've become invisible to us. Now it just seems like a near-perfect drop-in replacement, which I guarantee it wasn't at the time.

That said, I'm unconvinced that smell and mess are as compelling a selling-point as all that. Societally they're very important, but not obviously more than non-fuel-burning vehicles today. In practice, when it comes to making a purchase, there are often much more pressing concerns than an environmental issue over which you individually have little influence.

1) False

> That car massively outperformed its competition

Nope. Initially cars couldn't even match horses in speed. Although speed did rapidly become the reason to get a car, but initially this wasn't the case.

> It didn’t buck you off or startle, didn’t get sick and die, didn’t shit all over the roads

Yes it did. Early cars ... there were no more than a few dozen in a city, yet it was a daily occurrence that one blew up. Early gasoline engines ...

Second: the brakes.

Third: incomplete burning of fuel. It was constantly leaking oil/gas everywhere.

And all that is assuming you got them started. Even movies from 1920/1930 are full of scenes were cars don't start. That was after decades of fixing issues. Imagine what the first ones were like.

> It was able to go faster, longer, and more comfortably than a horse

Nope, nope, and nope.

Carriage suspensions were far superior to car suspensions for several decades. Cars were big bikes with an engine. More comfortable than a horse on bad dirt roads ? I doubt it very much.

Here's a story on the first long distance car driver (a woman !). Read it, because you'll realize just how bad it must have been:

https://media.daimler.com/marsMediaSite/en/instance/ko/Augus...

That was a rigid tricicle. No tires. Oh, and if you don't know how to make brakes out of old shoes, no brakes, or at least not for long.

We’re talking about the Model T, not “early cars” in general as you’re trying to shift this to. Model T’s were not routinely blowing up, and were quite successful. Let’s leave the goalposts alone.

You're the one who drew the comparison between the Model T and horses, ignoring decades of automobiles in between. That struck me as you moving the goalposts.

Not to mention that even the Model T came out with handcrank-start, which involved manually retarding the spark timing so you don't spark before TDC and break your hand when the crank kicks back. Ford didnt offer electric start until after the first decade of production. And that's in an era where well over a hundred different automobile manufacturers were already in existence, the automobile had already circumnavigated the globe, and gasoline powered taxis were already hauling fares in Paris, London, and NYC.

Have you already forgotten your own post that started this?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18297710

I didn’t set the comparison, and decades of cars before the Model T (released in 1908, only about a decade after the first practical automobile available in the US was released by Benz for a fortune) wwre hardlu displacing the horse. The mass transition from horses to automobiles began in earnest with the Model T, and the post you were replying to was pointing out the need to define your competition. The major competition for the Model T was a horse. Cars before it were finicky, incredibly expensive, unreliable, and out of the hands of the average person. The Model T changed all of that. Given that we were talking about how current humanoid robots could only be the toy of very wealthy people, it seems a fair comparison. The problem for you is that it supports the opposite point to the one you tried to make.

My point was that robots will improve with time, just as cars have. I still stand by that.

You took my point to mean that robots must today be immediately better than maids, just as the Model T was immediately better than horses. I think this is flawed because robots today are not at the same stage of development vs maids as the Model T was vs horses.

Your comparison of the Model T to horses is flawed. It wasn't the first automobile, but rather the first automobile produced on a moving assembly line. In other words, Ford had found a method to make cars, previously expensive and unreliable, into a viable mass market product. It was an improvement on prior automotive manufacturing technology.

What you're missing is that the Model T wasn't competing with horses, considering that production automobiles had been around for decades. It was competing with more expensive, heavier, less user friendly automobiles. The Buick Model 10 cost more, weighed more, and was mechanically inferior with its exposed clutch and user-oiled valve train. It, too, never got sick and puked on the side of the road. The market wasn't "Horse vs Model T", just like it's not "broom vs Roomba" today.

I don't get why it matters that your friend is Filipino or that her relatives have maids. We all know that some people have live-in maids. The question is, at what price point can comparably utile cleaning robots come to market? There will come a time when it costs less to have a robot (and hire an uber to drive the kids) than to have a person doing the same job.

When the technology brings that price point to a competitive level, the business opportunity will be obvious and there will be more investment. And that investment will bring the price down even further due to broader scale and more research money. Just as has happened with cars.

I think anyone who says robot design and manufacture are not going to encounter the quantum leaps that have graced every other technology known to man, is suffering from a lack of imagination and an inability to examine history. Imagine a group of cavemen arguing that stone tools are cheaper and better and more accessible than bronze because metals are too complicated to dig up and refine, fire is hard to deal with, and as a result the accessible bronze tools of the era are defective and poorly forged. They have a point but they are wrong in the long term. Technology advances and becomes cheaper as people find clever new ways to tackle old problems.

Meanwhile, there are always a bunch of uncreative naysayers standing on the sidelines. Obviously, people who say "this idea will never, ever be viable" are not going to be the ones who innovate and make money. For every Thomas Edison, there are a thousand less productive engineers who get frustrated and say "let's just stick to candles and gas lamps."

> human labor is relatively cheap compared to half a million dollars of machine.

Ask a laid off factory worker what he thinks about this.

Sure. Forever is a long time. But don't confuse hardware with microprocessors. There aren't many fields, maybe not any, whee you see exponential growth in capability and exponential improvement in price sustained over decades.

Cars may be a good model here. But I would argue that current generation robots aren't Model T's. 1960'-era industrial robots were the Model T. Current generation KUKA's are 1950's Cadillacs. Cars of today aren't exponentially better than a 1955 Caddy. The period of rapid growth in robotics (on the hardware side) started a while ago, and it's probably approximately linear.

Robonaut is the Lunar Rover. It's awesome, but it isn't at all clear whether any of that tech addresses a commercial market.

> Cars of today aren't exponentially better than a 1955 Caddy.

You're talking about cars that cost around $70k in today's dollars with 6.0L V8 carburetted pushrod engines that go 0-60 in 15 seconds, no standard AC, 4 speed transmissions....they looked cool, but you can buy a $30k Infiniti nowadays that is lighter, has just 60% the engine displacement, has fuel injection and variable valve timing/lift, goes 0-60 in 5 seconds, has 4 wheel disc brakes, a 7 speed transmission...the list goes on. Oh, and standard A/C.

I'd say that getting 3x the acceleration at half the price, with multiple times more reliability (try driving a 1955 Cadillac 300k miles without rebuilding the engine or heads), traction control, airbags, intelligent cruise control, and all the modern comforts is indicative of rapid growth. And it keeps going! Now we are seeing electric production cars and autonomous street legal vehicles.

Exponential? Maybe not. But aside from computers, it's hard to think of technological developments as exponential. They tend to be intermittent, with advances coming in fits and starts.

And both will get you to work at exactly the same speed. They even get approximately the same gas mileage.

All of the other stuff - better acceleration, air bags, automatic transmissions, A/C - those are refinements on a capability that fundamentally didn't change. They both drive on roads at around 60 mph at approximately 25 mpg.

A '55 Caddy Eldorado will get 10.5mpg highway according to these folks: http://www.automobile-catalog.com/car/1955/326075/cadillac_e...

They're cool cars but today's $70k luxury cars are faster, stronger, more reliable, and functionally better. The old Caddies do look damn good, but I'll take a DOHC versus an OHV any day.

My point is that the technology has clearly progressed. To your point, maybe not exponentially, true. But there has definitely been a whole heap of engineering work over 60+ years that has resulted in unequivocally better, more reliable, markedly different vehicles.

There aren't many fields, maybe not any, whee you see exponential growth in capability and exponential improvement in price sustained over decades.

Obviously, the field where exponential growth is/was sustained over a significant period is chips/microprocessors. Miniaturization is well-know as the key to this.

Information processing so-far is all that has benefited here. But existence of biological organisms, constructed from cells existing on a tiny scale, shows that miniaturization could be applied to other functionalities. There's no reason to think we're near that now but the situation does invite us to imagine it in theory.

I recall seeing something about agriculture productivity improving at 1% per year over many many decades - maybe that wasn't compounding though.

The first search result I found had this: "we track four key global crops—maize, rice, wheat, and soybean—that currently produce nearly two-thirds of global agricultural calories. We find that yields in these top four crops are increasing at 1.6%, 1.0%, 0.9%, and 1.3% per year, non-compounding rates"*

Another example is fuel efficiency of cars? Although that has hard limits.

Sure, nothing like electronics, but over decades slow compounding of small amounts does matter to us all.

* https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

A lot of Robonaut's actuator technology ended up in Baxter. Now Rethink's dead, but it did start the whole cobots sector. In many respects the cobots from UR are closer to the model T then 60s era robotics. 60s era robotics is more like the tracked steam shovel.

>A lot of Robonaut's actuator technology ended up in Baxter.

Well, not exactly. Both Robonaut and Baxter used series-elastic actuators. But Robonaut didn't invent them. This is kind of like saying that a lot of the tech from the lunar rover ended up in Tesla's. Sure, they both used electric motors and batteries. But Tesla's existence is in no way dependent on the lunar rover.

Sure, my statement was based on rumors that I heard about Rethink taking a look at Robonaut with the covers off and the actuators looking eerily similar. But yes, Series elastic actuators weren't invented at NASA.

Cars have also gotten cheaper and better;

Not by much. Sure a modern car is faster, more efficient and more reliable than a Model T, but at the end of the day it still does exactly the same thing in exactly the same way. Also $20k is roughly what you pay for a new entry level Ford today so it's not like prices have come down dramatically.

A today's car that could be compared to the Model T can be bought for less than $1000 in China. There is no demand for these in the USA but it exists.

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