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Comment by gretch | Hacker News Reader

To me, humanoid robotics seems to be the 'flying cars' of our era.

They seem cool and futuristic at a glance, but upon close inspection, they are kinda not pragmatic at all, and there are simpler, cheaper solutions that will beat it in the market.

For example, we could build a humanoid butler robot to do chores around the house, or we could build a dishwashers + roombas + washing machine. These simple appliances do 90% of the work for 10% of the headache (including the consumer side headache of performing maintenance on a humanoid machine!).

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My dishwasher does not come close to doing 90% of clearing the table, washing the dishes, drying and putting them away.

My laundry machine is certainly better than by hand, but folding laundry and putting it away is significant.

You clearly need both? You'd never task a humanoid robot to wash clothes by hand. But you would task it to remember to check whether its time to do laundry, load the laundry, run it, move it to the dryer, fold the clean clothes and put it away.

It's not the case that existing robots (dishwasher, washing machine, etc) do 90% of the work when you consider the full task in its entirety. Humanoid robots would just replace the work that humans are doing assuming they have access to the specialized robots.

> You clearly need both?

I don't think you "need" either. It's just a conversation about what the market will reward.

> Humanoid robots would just replace the work that humans are doing assuming they have access to the specialized robots.

Or, there won't be any replacement and the majority of people in domestic households just keep doing that little remainder part because it's not really a big deal.

This all holds perfectly with the flying car analogy -> ground cars are pretty much fine. We could try way harder to make them flying-grade at a consumer level, or we can just keep driving road cars (or taking public transit) and be happy. That's the fundamental thing that 60s futurists missed when envisioning the future.

Man that’s such a downer.

I guess that's one way to look at it.

Are you down that there's no flying cars?

I'm pretty happy with it tbh.

edit: btw, I'd like to add that from a design perspective, humans kind of have a crappy form, which is perhaps one of the reason that rarely does one design something which ends up humanoid. E.g. something with wheels can usually move farther with less energy (or even something like tank treads if rough terrain)

no. but flying cars aren't a really good solution for a bunch of reasons.

a humanoid robot, i think, is a good solution for a bunch of problems.

the comparison is kind of useless and doesn't really help us.

a humanoid robot is a clunky solution to all problems. You'll always have more specialized equipment that just does the job better. The "all purpose very complex" mediocre solution is not something that will stick in my opinion.

The self driving cars of our era, even.

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