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Comment by sktrdie | Hacker News Reader

My biggest beef with this is: why humanly shaped? Our shape is the outcome of evolutionary survival in an environment that is very much different from... a household?

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Because robots shaped for their environment are old news, to the point that most of them aren't even called robots. If you want to wow people and have them feel a connection to your robot you have to make it at least resemble a mammal. Even better if it resembles a human.

There's also the other argument about humanoid robots doing better in environments adapted to humans. But that's so far that hasn't really panned out.

Not even a mammal. Even having the articulations in the wrong place (as the Boston dynamics dog) creates a lot of discomfort in the potential customers

Why humanly shaped, you ask?

Drop-in compatibility with all human-shaped legacy interfaces, for the most-rapid deprecation of homo sapiens as soon as the ASI can teleoperate humanoid proxies.

We instinctively prefer machines that are arranged like us.

This is the reason that every single car built have "two eyes" and "four legs". They could have one, or three or five. A car designed by insects would have six wheels, but then people would reject the model as ugly. All cars have an upfront and a posterior "face". And this face depicts either a mammal or a person. Never a bird or a snail.

Generally having fewer than four wheels reduces stability while not offering compensating substantial advantages (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-wheeler#Configurations). And more than four disjoint wheels means adding further axles and coping with the problem that on a bumpy road a wheel pair may entirely lose contact with the road.

As for headlights, a single central one would still be notably face-like given widely spaced turning indicators. And having two headlights gives redundancy: "one-eyed monsters" at night are preferable to cars lacking any lights.

> A car designed by insects would have six wheels, but then people would reject the model as ugly.

I doubt this. There are physics issues involved with 6 wheels.

First off, where are those extra wheels going? Dually pickup trucks exist, but that's just so they can carry heavy loads.

If you put them anywhere other than close to the existing tires, unless you attach some sort of steering mechanism, or perhaps use casters, turning becomes a huge problem as those tires would have to skid.

No, we use 4 tires because it's the most stable and efficient number of tires to use unless you need to carry a ton of extra weight.

Take Optimus, teleoperate it to be a Bartender, collect the training data for your actual robotender. Repeat for any reasonably specific task.

Because all of human society is built around the human shape. If you want robots in the home, office, field, and factory, they need to be humanoid to maximize their utility. Bipedal movement is also advantageous for mixed terrain and energy conservation.

But we then made houses

This is a good point - households, and their implements and staircases and so on, have evolved to fit our shapes

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