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Comment by fusslo | Hacker News Reader

my office adjoins a factory where we produce what we engineer in the offices.

The factory has two or maybe three different types of robots delivering all sorts of things from packages to packaging to stainless steel bar.

the robots use the same walkways as the humans.

It seems more and more we are designing robots to occupy and utilize the same spaces as humans. And we're designing the robots to make the humans give way: they're slow, large, bulky, and just stop when confronted. I think it's because humans are a much better robot.

humans (generally, of course) are more agile, can route easily, and move our bodies in unexpected ways to accomplish the task (lift a box up from waist height over an obstacle for example)

though I do get a LITTLE annoyed every time I have to walk around the stupid floor mopping robot in my local stop & shop

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>> I do get a LITTLE annoyed every time I have to walk around the stupid floor mopping robot

I ran into one of these things late one night after checking into a hotel. Dead tired, I got off the elevator and was walking down the hall when this 3-foot high dalek started following me. "Can I get you some towels?" I retreated into my room. The next morning I almost tripped over it. It had spent the night outside my door... stalking me.

Perhaps it was simply a very big fan of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and thought that no-one should be without a towel.

There was something very Douglas Adams about that story.

Robot: can I get you some towels?

Man, confused just enters room and shuts door.

Eight hours later he emerges for breakfast.

Robot: well?

It must be a Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays.

It was probably waiting for a tip you cretin! :]

> the robots use the same walkways as the humans.

How much of this is that the robots are far newer than the buildings? How soon till new buildings are designed with designated robotic paths?

Plenty of buildings are designed with hidden back-of-the-building areas and access routes for maintenance humans. I assume pretty soon they'll have the same for robots too. Then we'll really hit the Star Trek "time to climb through a duct to save the day/stuck robot" type situations.

It will be much cheaper, and not that hard to make the robots super safe and considerate.

And then we send them to Jupiter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_Unintentional

We do that all the time, we just don't usually consider them to be robots. Car factories have all kinds of vehicles transporting car parts along tracks, ceiling mounted rails, etc. Nobody bats an eye about that. If you squint hard enough elevators are a kind of robot on a designated pathway.

But to be called a robot it has to have some human-like (or at least animal-like) quality. Which usually involves either imitating human arms (e.g. typical industrial robot arms), imitating human movement (e.g. Boston dynamics) or using infrastructure designed for humans. If you put a delivery robot on a purpose-built path it has none of those qualities and reverts back to being a normal machine.

> Plenty of buildings are designed with hidden back-of-the-building areas and access routes for maintenance humans. I assume pretty soon they'll have the same for robots too. Then we'll really hit the Star Trek "time to climb through a duct to save the day/stuck robot" type situations.

For some reason, it appears to be a major priority for people to drill tiny holes and channels all through their house so their cables can run through them, out of sight. This is a huge hassle as far as installation goes, but it makes up for it by also being a huge hassle as far as maintenance goes.

What's the problem supposed to be with running cables through clips on the wall? That you'll know they're there? That you can easily access them?

> For some reason, it appears to be a major priority for people to drill tiny holes and channels all through their house so their cables can run through them, out of sight. This is a huge hassle as far as installation goes, but it makes up for it by also being a huge hassle as far as maintenance goes.

Install flexible plastic tubes instead and you can just pull out cables when you need to replace them for whatever reason.

Appearances (which I suspect you know, but just value it less than most).

People want to see a finished wall, not cables, pipes, and ducts.

Here in the 3rd world we still often use people instead of robots mainly due to cost, but it's definitely changing. Why struggle with government rules, unions and individuals if a machine can do it?

Jobs are already really hard to come by on all the unskilled levels, it's a bit grim to be honest.

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