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> While this is pretty cool I believe generalist robots will not have a fraction of the skills an average human has , at least not within a realistically foreseeable timeframe, let’s say within this century.

I'm pretty sure they will be flipping burgers by the 2040s, if not before, and doing everything else needed to efficiently make a (big) percentage of people jobless in first-world economies. Though, not in parts of the world where electricity regularly in the wire is still rare...because those problems don't solve themselves in a few short decades.

Now, we both are cynics and should go for a beer together. Who knows, maybe we will come up with a more catastrophic and highly probable scenario that combines your outlook with mine...

Oh yea, I would love to be wrong- and if I can’t change my mind about something then I am as good as dead.

I believe we will sooner solve the electricity problem with renewables though.

Agree that a vast majority of the jobs will be automated fairly soon - just not those pesky jobs that really need to be done and no one wants to do - like cooking, cleaning, childcare, taking care of sick people. Sure we will have some more nifty appliances that make it easier maybe, but I want (most of) that stuff fully automated, at least the cleaning part!

Anyway a beer sounds good right about now and we will just have to wait and see how it plays out I guess

The Flippy robot came out in 2018.

The problem is that even a specialist vacuuming robot needs to be more of a generalist than you realize.

For example, take the "nothing was allowed to be on the floor" restriction. To relax this restriction, the robot needs to know what it can and cannot do for something it sees in the floor. List everything that could be on the floor (I'll wait). The robot needs to recognize all of these things, and know the correct behavior for each.

You could still do this! You'd need to label a ton of items and hardcode a bunch of behaviors. After all this R&D your robot vacuum would need to cost $5k-$10k, and you'd wish you'd worked on a higher priced product like a robotic forklift instead. Still, it's feasible to build this.

However, manipulation is a few orders of magnitude more complex than navigation. You have to recognize many objects, their precise poses, and many aspects of the objects. Think about opening a can with a can opener. The robot needs to recognize a few parts on the can opener, and how it fits on the can. Then you've got to hardcode behaviors for attaching the opener and then turning the knob until done, and removing the lid. Doable, but very very hard.

This is feasible, and you can build a can opening robot, but after 9 months of R&D, that's all your specialized robot will be able to do, and oops, there's 40 more tasks it needs to accomplish to cook a dinner. The only way to build this product is to tackle all the tasks at once, and that's why this research is so important. Everything you want a robot to do needs O(dozens) of individual tasks, and when each task takes O(year) to build it's impossible to finish.

So most the specialist problems we've had that were not 'generalist hard' we've already mostly solved with machines that we don't consider complex robots.

It shape of the robot isn't the issue, the problem space of reality is. A roomba can suck stuff off a floor, it has a much harder time dealing with (or even identifying) a sock that needs moved out of the way first. To do that for all the different objects that could show up in front of you, you need a general purpose AI.

Good floor cleaning robots are effective. Your anecdote doesn't prove otherwise. It's like a 4-5+ billion dollar market.

If you look at demos from this article, ALOHA, Tesla's bot, Asimo, etc. you will see more and more skills being demonstrated.

The biggest thing missing from most systems is probably strong fluent motion with integrated sensing and actual hands. But the Tesla robot for example has made a lot of progress on those fronts and does have hands with touch sensors.

What are the skills that your average human has? And let's see if we have robots that can do that. Maybe not quite as well YET, but still the same skill.

- can walk around. Check

- play soccer. Check

- locate and pick up objects from a flat surface. Check.

- assemble objects together. Check.

- put dishes in a dishwasher.check

- play the piano.check

- climb stairs. Check.

- do a front flip. Check.

- open doors. Check.

- drive a car. Check.

- write a computer program. Check.

- draw or paint. Check.

- put clothes in dryer. Check.

- understand and produce natural language. Check.

We are really at the point of just making these things work better and be deployed. And there is rapid progress.

The large multimodal models provide a new level of generality that is accelerating this.

I believe that within say 2-5 years you will see an explosion of robots with more skills than any human could ever hope to achieve in their lifetime. Just like you can download LoRAs that make LLMs more capable in a certain programming language or art style, there will eventually be adapters to instantly provide any type of skill desired.

You will just say "I would like a martial arts lesson" and your android helper just looks off into the distance for a few seconds and then says "I.. I know Kung Fu!" Then launches into a demonstration worthy of The Matrix.