Remotely controlled humanoid robots are pretty cool though, aren’t they? Like, potentially hugely valuable?
There are also potential ethical issues around teleoperation as a form of labor arbitrage. Should employers be able to outsource low-skill physical labor to actual humans abroad to circumvent wage and immigration laws? Is the benefit worth the economic dislocation to society? If you say yes, ask yourself why even bother reshoring manufacturing at higher cost and with trade barriers.
Teleoperation is argued to be an interim solution that trains autonomous systems the way driving trains FSD but as of right now, given what we know about just how much data is needed for current imitation learning approaches to work for fine manipulation tasks, it doesn’t seem scaleable. Maybe there will be a modeling breakthrough.
My bet is on cheaper non-humanoid form factors and data collection that doesn’t require a robot being operated for every data collector in the field.
Having a robot bake A cake and then wash the dishes. Not sensical to build a custom bot.
Laundry and washing dishes is not just “putting things in a spot”. Perhaps you don’t fold your clothes or separate your clothes or scrub dishes but many people do. Even loading the dish washer is fairly annoying when it’s a large crowd. Cooking is of course a huge one.
The question is really just how much would you pay for a 24/7 live in maid that can cook, clean, repair, etc. with a real human you’re paying them for availability. With a remote operated robot you’re paying for just the labor hours and none of the downtime.
It seems kind of fucked up but I do think the economics could work. People do have servants today. I tend to imagine such a service would be cheaper than a servant even at $20k up front cost. I do agree the bipedal legs seem unlikely be cost effective.
If it's a robot that needs to be able to work in any room, including navigating stairs, I'd think being bipedal is the simplest way to achieve it. Maybe make it tripedal to make walking/balancing easier.
Vs a real life human stranger in your house that could steal stuff and let accomplices into the house.
I already have a dish washing robot. And one that washes and dries my clothes. Can you imagine if you had a humanoid robot that was in your laundry room scrubbing your clothes manually in a tub and then taking them out and hanging them up on clothes lines? That is what you get with humanoid robots.
Would you rather have a tiny vacuum that parks itself in the corner and disappears, or some 6 foot tall thing with arms and legs pushing your Hoover around all day?
Clearing the table, scraping dirty plates, putting condiments back in the fridge, packing away uneaten food as left overs, rinsing the dishes, loading the dishwasher efficiently, then unloading the dishes and putting them all away in the arbitrary places the go, are all tasks to that cant be done by any robot that isn’t humanoid in nature in some way.
The amount of pen caps, dropped food, discarded clothes, school bags, shoes, partially assembled legos, couch cushions, books, and other random bulky items that end up on the floor of a house with young kids makes the idea of robotic floor cleaning being a solved problem laughable.
My assumption is that an Optimus home assistant will be an order of magnitude cheaper than manual labour, which means it will be accessible to people who can’t currently afford a cleaner/maid but whose lives would be improved by having help with the daily workload of life.
This brings up two thoughts, I wonder if the advent of robots will lead to more gender equality as women currently bear the a significantly higher percentage of the domestic work load.
Also, autonomous robots are going to make even harder to convince my kids to clean up after themselves :)
I don't understand what about that task needs it to be humanoid?
It obviously needs various abilities that humans have - being able to move around, being able to control multiple "limbs" to manipulate the clothes, etc. But why couldn't it look like R2-D2 rather than C-3PO? Why couldn't it be a flying drone that has 4 clothes-folding arms? Or... whatever non-humanoid design could be conceived that works best?
The only "need" for it being humanoid would be if the kids (or adults, or animals) found it more acceptable to be around.
The limitations of R2 are pretty obvious if you try to imagine it. there’s probably some optimizations that could be made but it’s a sensible start imo
But even your reasons for preferring a humanoid are all reasons why humans are better than current-technology non-humanoid robots, not unarguable facts that humans are the ultimate design. As a couple of examples:
> "You probably need legs to traverse areas."
Even if legs are definitely needed, the animal kingdom shows that human legs are far from the only choice. Why only two? Why not legs that are 90% of the height of the robot rather than human proportions? Why not legs with the equivalent of 20 knees rather than 1 knee, or legs that feature wheels that are sometimes used, or...
> "You can’t realistically fly while safely doing mundane tasks."
Not if you were to take any existing consumer drone and add robot arms to it, sure, but there's no scientific reason it can't be made with future improvements to technology. We already have drones that can automatically avoid bumping into things, and that can counter the effects of wind to stay in the same position, and we have drones that would be safe to walk into (ones with covered blades, where the only injury risk is it flying into you hard enough). There's no reason that a future version couldn't be just as stable hovering in the air while doing something as being on the ground - it just needs to extend its stabilisation algos so that it's not just countering the wind, but also pushing in whatever directions required to counteract forces caused by whatever its doing. And it also doesn't even have to be flying while doing the task, it can fly to the clothes, then unwind its leg (or legs) and stand there while doing its work, or...
Humanoid is obviously appealing for the simple fact that, if it's developed to the point that it has the same (or better) physical abilities as a human (including balance etc) then we know it can fit into anything humans do because we already do it, and because we've built a world around us for human-shaped people. But thinking there couldn't be alternative form factors that are just as good if not better is just lacking imagination on the subject of what technology will be able to do in the coming years - especially when not talking about a general purpose "can do anything a human can do" robot but about specific tasks (such as the clothes sorting & folding that we're discussing).
Obviously you can design better forms for specific tasks, but people don’t want some zany futuristic world populated by dozens of task specific robots.
But even for general purpose robots, my points above stand that future tech will mean plenty of non-humanoid shaped robots could be just as effective as general purpose robots as humanoid ones.
The ease of swapping different expertise in to the same body as needed could also potentially be useful.
> If you say yes, ask yourself why even bother reshoring manufacturing at higher cost and with trade barriers.
Mostly the reasoning to onshore things is to ensure independence on manufacturing critical resources despite the competitive disadvantage; not a jobs program.
So you'll have upper-middle class people own a robot and whenever they want a task done they order it from basically a call-centre somewhere in the world... reminds me of the etymology of "robot" - from the Slavic for "slave"...
You're right there are ethical issues, but hardly new ones for this context. In response to your question,
> Should employers be able to outsource low-skill physical labor to actual humans abroad to circumvent wage and immigration laws?
This is a very pertinent question ethically, but this already undergirds our current globalized society, where the the clothes most of us are wearing, the coffee we've been drinking, much of the food we've been eating today, and so on, are produced exactly by such labor. This is the way the world works, for the time being. And it's unfair. But these robotic possibilities don't add to the unfairness in my view, although they definitely would give it a new twist. Given current trends I wouldn't bet against increased twistedness..
The tasks Tesla suggested included babysitting, and now that we know that the robots are built for remote control first, I would feel pretty uncomfortable with letting my child alone in the same house with a robot like that. Vacuum cleaners are bad enough.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/ecovacs-robot-vacuums-hacked...
>remote control first
If you mean it's the typical operating mode for the final product, I doubt we can conclude that just from an early public tech demo.
Factory robotics is mostly just conveyor belts and pusher whatevers. Not even something resembling a droid of any kind.
Honda is now valued higher than Tesla, right? Oh wait... no they are not.
It was never remote controllable by unskilled operators.
It doesn't take a whole lot of imagination to come up with scenarios where even a remote controlled bot would be incredibly useful to society. If Honda never productized it or developed Asimo into something practical, then we can only speculate the reasons why. But that's on Honda for failing to follow through, ultimately.