Hacker News Reader

Comment by blopker | Hacker News Reader

I can't see human-like robots being the way forward. They will always be expensive, bulky, and creepy. No one will want one in their homes. You can't have them unattended in public (see what happened to all those kick scooters).

Maybe in factories? However, the main reason to have a humanoid robot is to have it fit in places designed for humans. Factories can be designed around robots, so the human-shaped advantage isn't there. The robots we currently see in factories are only arms with tools, I don't see that changing much.

View on HN

> They will always be expensive, bulky, and creepy.

This is an incredibly bold claim, and mostly just sounds like your personal opinion towards humanoid robots. Why do you expect economies of scale to not apply here?

> No one will want one in their homes.

I am literally prepared to pay a car's worth of money for a robot, humanoid or otherwise, that can meaningfully take care of the drudgery of household chores.

> humanoid or otherwise

I think that's the key. I like my Roomba, and I didn't have to take out a loan to get it. Humanoid robots will always be more expensive than a Roomba. Short of heavy subsidies, no amount of scale will change that.

Even a car-priced robot would be a paradigm shift. No subsidies needed.

Citation needed.

yeah but what if your roomba could flawlessly do your dishes and laundry and clean the windows and take out the trash? I'm with mrshadowgoose. I'd buy that for car $ (probably before I'd buy a car)

I can't see human-like robots being the way forward

It seems like a human-like form the best way forward for robots that will assist in the home -- pretty much everything in the home (including humans themselves) is designed around the human form factor.

Exactly, it really depends on the environment. Amazon warehouses and manufacturing facilities are already designed for robots whose form factor is far from human-like. But in the environments where humans operate, it's probably cheaper to design the robot around the human instead of having humans adapt to a robot-centric environment.

> They will always be expensive, bulky, and creepy.

People said similar things about those early NNs generating images, code, music.

Surely we will solve the fine motor skills soon. It just takes one incremental step at a time, there are no fundamental roadblocks on the way.

> No one will want one in their homes.

I would kill for a robot that keeps my house clean, makes my favorite food, fetches me things, etc.

While I could pay a human to do that, it just seems more convenient if that wasn't a real person. Because with a real person I can't e.g. walk naked around them and behave generally weird, because I need to respect their feelings, which I don't have to do with a robot.

> > They will always be expensive, bulky, and creepy.

> People said similar things about those early NNs generating images, code, music.

Yes and… they still are expensive, bulky, and creepy. The expense and bulk is externalised to the stock market (but maybe improving), the creepy is endemic and not getting any better.

https://www.midjourney.com/showcase is funded by customers, not investors. Anything in there that's creepy, but not obviously intentionally creepy, is more a reflection on the viewer than the image :P

Not sure walking naked in front of an internet-connected camera in humanoid form is much better...

I would pay extra for a robot that runs on a local hardware — there would be a market for that, for sure. People need privacy.

An expensive/bulky GPU doesn't have to be built in the robot body itself — it could be a box mounted somewhere in the house with the wireless connection to the robot body.

I am sure at some point there will be hardware that would protect model vendors from extracting/copying the model weights, like on-chip encryption when doing inference or something.

Or maybe there will be GPUs with homomorphic encryption¹, so everything will be end-to-end encrypted, and it will be safe to compute in the cloud without compromising user privacy.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption

The NVIDIA keynote today mentioned on-chip encryption for model data actually. Not sure how entirely that covers your proposed case, but it’s already something they’re working on at least.

People said the same thing about computers. Now a random 10 year in a third world country has all the computing power of the 1940 world combined in his pocket (I just made that stat up, but you get the point).

I think you’re underestimating by many orders of magnitude. 1960 might be a closer date.

This same argument could have been made in the 60's regarding computers. Don't just look at what is, also look at what could be.

There are some key differences here though. By definition, humanoid robots will never get smaller. They will get less expensive, but never less than something like a Roomba.

I do think smarter robots will take off, but I don't think this form factor will be as important as it seems right now. Maybe just for novelty or entertainment.

Wzyss ze

Keeping factories compatible with humans is probably something you'll want for a while. Another funny thing to think about is that this AI is based on mimicry of human behavior so it's almost fundamental to the process.

> No one will want one in their homes.

I will want one in my home when I'm old and weak to the point that the alternative is either institutionalization or letting strangers do its job.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com