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Comment by reilly3000 | Hacker News Reader

This won’t be vaporware forever. Seeing the latest from Boston Dynamics makes that abundantly clear. The utility for general purpose robots is immense in difficult environments like the surface of Mars, where O2 wouldn’t be needed. I anticipate a small number of companies making the hardware, and a large, diverse workforce training, supervising, and maintaining android fleets for a variety of tasks. The legal system will have a lot of work to do, along with the general economy. It’s still far out, but not that far.

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A future of actual autonomous robots, a la I, Robot, is probably further away that self-driving cars.

…probably?

Both are technologies we've expected to have for quite a while, yet here were are, still waiting for anything that's not just a tech demo.

General purpose field robots like this are further away than level 5 driving, by a long margin

I think they could see use in cities for delivery or patrol type jobs.

The stakes are so much lower for a 50kg robot moving at walking pace compared to a car.

Consider a pizza delivery operation. You could imagine having dozens of robots delivering pizzas, and even if you had to have one or two humans driving around town getting robots out of stuck edge cases when they happened, it could still be a net gain.

Consider that Boston Dynamics Spot robot dog is already operating on industrial sites today. Having it stand upright is not too different from a deployability point of view (see the Atlas robot).

Do you know how little pizza delivery guys get paid? Not a chance they get replaced by a million dollar robot this century.

And lest we forget: “HitchBOT, the hitchhiking robot, gets beheaded in Philadelphia”

https://www.cnn.com/2015/08/03/us/hitchbot-robot-beheaded-ph...

I assume if Tesla actually does intend to build them, they will be targeting a price point in the tens of thousands instead of $1M range. That is, priced comparable to a car.

If a robot cost say, $50k, they could seriously be cost effective compared to humans if they don’t have a ton of maintenance costs.

> Consider that Boston Dynamics Spot robot dog is already operating on industrial sites today.

In fact, SpaceX has one in Boxa Chica.

https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-robot-dog-wreckage-ex...

I see bipedal robots as sort of a PC of robotics. They don’t need to have great AI, personalities, or any sci-fi jazz, just basic collision avoidance and programmability. Lots of spaces and tools are shaped for humans; this means a specialized robot is no linger needed for every task. It doesn’t mean, as Elon suggests, they will be shopping at the grocery store per se but it could mean they could load a laundry bin and carry it downstairs. With adequate programming, it could learn how to fold specific garments and identify flaws. Like video and spacial APIs, not goal seeking.

Yep. I bet there are plenty of programmers out there who would rather spend their evenings programming a robot to do their laundry than do it themselves. :)

what we also see from boston dynamics is that this kind of tech takes decades to develop. It is an immensely difficult problem that Elon seems to think is easy and doable in a year.

Would you say this will come out before or after level 5 autonomous vehicles?

Industrial use will certainly happen. Personal use not so much though. By the time robots are feasible you'd be crazy to have one in your home. Like all new tech these days robots will be leveraged against you at every opportunity. They'll be constantly recording audio and video and reporting the events and contents of your household to companies and to the state.

Maybe the legal changes will happen eventually to prevent that, but I expect Americans will have general purpose robots long before our laws do anything meaningful about surveillance capitalism and the erosion of our Fourth Amendment rights

I'm still befuddled what the industrial applications are.

At some point a car factory had people moving stuff around and screwing things in and out. Now we have arm robots and conveyor belts and other machines which do not resemble humans at all but are obviously way better. We still have humans involved but I think the best way to minimize how often they are on the floor is with better specialized tools.

I feel this is the equivalent of building a robot to be your rickshaw driver instead of just realizing you can build a self driving vehicle with nothing that resembles a human invovled.

I don't think all robots need to be 1:1 replicas of humans but you might be underselling versatility. One robot for every specific task might be a good idea in some places where as in others it might be better to have robots capable of performing several types of tasks giving you the freedom to assign them to different roles as needed. It cuts down on the number of robots (and back up robots) you need to keep available.

A more human form would allow for that versatility and allow for easier interaction with the world and the items within it which we've built with accommodation of our own bodies in mind.

I am generally a fan of the 'do one thing and do it well' type of philosophy though and ideally we'll have a mix of specialized machines and general purpose ones.

> We still have humans involved but I think the best way to minimize how often they are on the floor is with better specialized tools.

Tesla tried this and it was a disaster. They had to rip a bunch of their robots out and replace them with humans.

There's still a ton of really fiddly tasks that specialized robots find really hard to do.

I'm sure there are but why would another robot be better?

If the problem is something like the dexterity of a stationary arm machine isn't good enough - I'm having trouble believing the dexterity of a moving humanoid machine would be different at all.

Converting supermarkets to dark stores. Supermarket by day, robot driven fulfillment centre by night. Using humaoids to pushing and fetching items from a human-centric store.

I've been wrong many times before but still have trouble believing this would be more efficient than just having two separate buildings. Even in places where land is very expensive.

How many dark stores would you have to run in a city like Boston to get the same efficiency you could get from a signle warehouse with a similar system to this?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssZ_8cqfBlE

And if you insist on doing that multi-use concept - it still seems like a robot on wheels and with much different than human arms would be more efficient.

Interesting. Maybe Tesla Bot will be on the first test mission to mars.

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