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Comment by melling | Hacker News Reader

We got our current revolution because gaming paid for the development of GPU’s.

Getting consumers to fund R&D has a big impact.

Still waiting for consumers to fund the robot revolution.

Robots are everywhere. We just don't call them robots. We call them dishwashers, CNC machines, STM machines, automatic welders, fabric cutting machines, etc, etc.

Sort of like we already have flying cars. They're called "helicopters".

> Sort of like we already have flying cars. They're called "helicopters".

you cannot drive helicopters on the road, they are flying but not cars

When people think flying cars, they don't think of something without wheels that can only land in certain spots that requires years of training to operate that is significantly expensive to be outside of the reach of 99%.

They think of the car that anyone of legal driving age with a reasonable amount of money that anyone with some income can purchase.

No, helicopters are not flying cars. And no, dishwashers aren't what people would think of when they think of robots. Something that has a microprocessor in it isn't automatically a robot.

When people think flying cars, they don't think something without wheels that can only land in certain spots that requires years of training to operate that is significantly expensive to be outside of the reach of 99%.

I think if one eliminates the training requirement, reduces the cost, and increase the safety, then we don't need them to be road vehicles. Achieve the above, and we'll have flying taxis!

If it weren't for many of the other problems of helicopters including convenience and noise.

How many helicopters will fit in an IKEA parking lot? And how many will be able to bring back whatever you buy there?

Extend that thought experiment a bit. You might be able to achieve the transportation of people in controlled circumstances, but not much else.

You do realize small ducted fans are an order of magnitude louder than a helicopter, right? All those slick marketing videos omit that part.

Yes helicopters aren't flying cars.

But if a machine automates 90% of a process, like a dishwasher, why shouldn't it be considered like a robot, say a 90% robot?

Practically it does have the same effect.

A dishwasher is to a robot what a calculator is to a computer.

Which means that a robot is something that has a property similar to the property of 'turing completeness' in computers.

By that token, how well can a Boston Dynamics dogbot clean your dishes?

Do you think of a washing machine or a dryer as a robot too?

I think of them as machines that automated a certain task. So a robot substitute.

> When people think flying cars, they don't think of something without wheels that can only land in certain spots that requires years of training to operate that is significantly expensive to be outside of the reach of 99%.

You write down two points:

1. regulation

2. cost

"Regulation" is not an engineering problem, but a hard and deeply political one.

For "cost": When a lot of regulation comes down, the possible market size increases by a lot and it begins to make economic sense to invest lots of engineering ressources into cutting costs down by a lot (I do believe this is possible). Then helicopters will even perhaps transform into something that is much more akin to flying cars.

We probably don’t call a dishwasher a robot because it’s not

That is the only consumer facing device you mentioned. I know we have industrial robots, so I’ll skip debating where we draw the line.

Once we get to the Apple II of home robots, consumer spending will fuel the rapid development, and “robots”, will become more intelligent and agile

Not the person you responded to, but I think I see where they are coming from and agree: we don't call them robots because we are used to them and have a specific name. I don't see how they aren't robots, unless we are defining robots as having a specific kind of manipulator.

Aren’t we discussing robots vs machines?

https://www.toyota.co.jp/en/kids/faq/i/01/01/

I think their point was that if the dishwasher was made so that mechanical hands picked up a dish, washed it, rinsed it, dried it, then set it aside before picking up the next dish and doing the same, we would call that a robot.

The definition of a robot tends to be fairly fuzzy. If you look up the Websters definition (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/robot), and ignore the first definition about being in human form, you get:

> a device that automatically performs complicated, often repetitive tasks (as in an industrial assembly line)

Which basically hinges on "complicated". I suspect most people wouldn't count a dishwasher, washing machine, etc.

No question. It was video gaming from the period roughly spanning 1990-2010 that funded gpu innovation. But programmable compute shaders caught on very rapidly in science. And Nvidia was quick to not just recognize the new market, but bet the company that supercomputing would one day be gpu cluster based.

Here's Jensen Huang talking to Stanford students about the birth of the Cg language (27:40" mark). The entire talk is gold. A text book case study of Moore's Law and the SV model of risk capital:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xn1EsFe7snQ

Ironically, IC Design itself is a strong candidate as an industrial process likely to be revolutionized by AI ;)

Chip Placement with Deep Reinforcement Learning

https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.10746

We got our current revolution for three major contributors:

* Big data. Lots of big data. Mostly unstructured and unqueryable driving demand for...

* Innovations in machine learning. "Deep learning" enabled by big data and algorithmic approaches that previously wouldn't have been possible without...

* Ubiquitous access to high-performance compute power, and in particular GPUs, which are optimized for the sort of math needed to train big neural networks powered by big data.

So GPU-powered compute is one of three mutually dependent things that got us here.

Most deep learning algorithms were discovered decades ago, so it's debatable that it was a driving factor behind the 2010s revolution. Backpropagation dates from 1986, convolutional neural nets from 1989 (neocognitrons), LSTMs from the late 90s...

I'm willing to spend 10k for a robot who can do my kitchen and clothes.

Let's see how long it will take

The Willow Garage PR2 robot could do that for $440,000.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_Operating_System#Willow_...

I would also pay in the 10k+ range for this, easily.

Yes, these kinds of robots are more useful than self-driving cars, because you have to sit in the car anyway and might as well drive.

> Still waiting for consumers to fund the robot revolution.

Aren't they already, via Tesla and Amazon?

There's a lot of effort/funding recently going into automating restaurants. Machines for cooking, cleaning, serving, delivery.

Once that gets deployed at some scale, consumers will pour a lot of funding into robots indirectly.

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