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Comment by Solvency | Hacker News Reader

I'll never understand this fascination with humanoid robots. It smacks of our innate narcissism, which lead to hilariously ironic and pervasive belief systems like "God made MAN in HIS image!" (surely not the other way around!)

Meanwhile the whole world already operates on incredibly precise high-tolerance robots doing low skill and repetitive tasks as well as extremely "high skill" tasks like painting/manufacturing cars or milling metal.

And we have wheeled robots like Autostore.com for other automation tasks.

A humanoid robot exists only to tickle our perverse self-centric obsessions, and namely: news sites, news consumers, and executives.

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A human robot is a robot you can put everywhere were a human can be.

this means it's seen as the holy Grail for a / the generic helper.

You build it once and replace any human manual laber task.

Basically you show the robot what it does by just doing it a few times and than the robot takes over.

Specialized 'robots' are closer to an assembly line someone needs to plan and design who knows how to do so and knows how to think like this.

Easy for an engineer hard for a normal human.

And when you look at.the progress it's not far fetched that this idea is close to become reality in the next 10-20 years.

I guess it depends on where you draw the line on what is a humanoid.

The world we've built for ourselves is for humans. If you need a robot to flip a hotel room for the next guest it may not need real legs but its probably gonna be column shaped with some arms. That's humanoid to me.

Not trying to single out a hotel maid as low skilled, just trying to use an example of a common task in a very human environment

I saw a 'robot' for a kitchen which was basically two robot arms on a rail installed on the ceiling.

It would also be super ugly (potentially) to have those specialized robots.

Why build a system today which uses HTTP as its transport protocol for communication? It's not the most efficient or robust, right? It's because there's a robust ecosystem and toolchain around HTTP as a transport protocol.

Making humanoid robots, while vain on the surface, does kind of make sense. If it's humanoid, it can be a drop-in replacement for a lot of human tasks using systems designed for human hands and feet. It's just a matter of training for the tasks.

You wouldn't task an ED-209 with cleaning an office building. You'd end up with dirty stairwells.

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