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Comment by michaelt | Hacker News Reader

The reason people keep working on human-like hands for robots is: The world is absolutely full of things adapted to be operated with human hands.

Handling heavy boxes? Baking a cake? Operating a circular saw? Assembling a PC? Performing surgery? Loading a ream of paper into a printer? Playing a violin? Opening a door? You can do it all with two five-fingered hands.

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I think it's important to note that many individual humans are adapted to only a few of these tasks. A construction worker's hands and a magician have very different muscles, skin thickness, grip strength, dexterity, etc. even though they can both wash a dish and open a door.

They have the same muscles, what do you mean? They are both humans. A construction worker is likely to have stronger hands, but by no means does that preclude them from performing a magic trick nor is the magician precluded from doing carpentry. It's likely they've done more than a few construction-based tasks in their life. It's even possible that one do both, it's merely choice and time that determine these things.

I mean that if you measured various qualities (like grip strength, skin thickness (callouses), flexibility, eyc) that there isn't a standard human. Individual robots likely would be adapted for certain tasks too.

>Handling heavy boxes?

Are handled by non-humanoid Robots already.

>Baking a cake?

How do you think modern industrial baking works? All done by non-humanoid Roboters.

>Operating a circular saw?

Seriously? A circular saw is the perfect scenario where a humanoid is useless.

>Performing surgery?

Why are surgery Roboters not humanoid? Obviously it is easier to give robots custom tools than make human tools conform to robots.

>Loading a ream of paper into a printer?

Do you know how a modern printing press looks like?

>Playing a violin?

Google "mp3".

>Opening a door?

ARE YOU SERIOUS? Do you think automatic doors don't exist?

It is far, far easier, cheaper, fast to make robots do a specific task than to make them do all tasks. Humans are terrible at most tasks, making robots to conform to humans is absurd.

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