Comment by mediaman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mediaman | Hacker News Reader

The author is primarily focused on the cost of hardware, while ignoring most of the challenges of software (folding clothes, the dishwasher, whatever) by saying software companies will figure it out with AI.

A low speed, low accuracy robot was tried with Rethink Robotics, founded by the Roomba guy (Rodney Brooks), who tried to compete with Universal Robots and got their clock cleaned. Nobody in industry wanted a slow, inaccurate robot, even at a good price.

What's holding us back in robotics is not the cost of hardware. There are plenty of use cases of $40k robots that are still not pursued because engineering special end effectors and integration is too difficult, not because of the cost of the robot. Reducing the cost of the robot to $10k makes no difference in those applications because it's not the gating factor.

The idea that companies will just figure out folding clothes and other complicated tasks because the cost of hardware falls is, I believe, fanciful, but I hope I'm wrong. Maybe "AI" will hand-wave solve it.

The history of robotics is littered with the corpses of companies whose plan was to waive their hands until an app ecosystem appeared.

I instinctively want to agree with you, but isn't it possible that throwing orders-of-magnitude more engineers at these kinds of problems will eventually get them solved, but right now nobody is doing that because the hardware is too expensive (and the market thus perceived to be too small)?

I think robotics is a field where there are magnitudes of more engineers than required. Look at the college enrolment in robotics vs the actual jobs that are there in market. I would say less than 10-20%(just anecdotal data, correct me if wrong) of the students who study robotics work in proper robotics jobs.

I would imagine that the bottleneck for breakthroughs is more the number of robotics Ph.D.s and robotics engineers with 5+ years of experience. A bunch of bachelor's grads aren't going to help advance the field if they don't even get a first job in the field.

As noted, there are a lot of robot engineers out-there. Maybe tossing them all together would help but massive engineering projects tend work when the outline of what to do is known and the many teams can fill-in the details. It doesn't seem like we're there now. Notably, every single entrant in Darpa's two legged robot failed to complete the course.

Also, if someone was throwing that many resources at a given problem and it was to sell pretty cheap robots, how would they get their money back? Lots of expensive tools sport expensive software.

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