Comment by Terr_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Terr_ | Hacker News Reader

> No sense of touch. Human hands are packed absolutely full of sensors. [...] We store energy in our tendons and reuse it on the next step

Side-rant: As cool as some cyberpunk/sci-fi ideas are, I can't imagine a widespread elective mechanical limb replacement within the lifetime of anyone here. We dramatically under-estimate how amazing our normal limbs are. I mean, they're literally swarms of nanobots beyond human comprehension. To recycle an old comment against mechanical limbs:

________

[...] just remember that you're sacrificing raw force/speed for a system with a great deal of other trade-offs which would be difficult for modern science to replicate.

1. Supports a very large number of individual movements and articulations

2. Meets certain weight-restrictions (overall system must be near-buoyant in water)

3. Supports a wide variety of automatic self-repair techniques, many of which can occur without ceasing operation

4. Is entirely produced and usually maintained by unskilled (unconscious?) labor from common raw materials

5. Contains a comprehensive suite of sensors

6. Not too brittle, flexes to store and release mechanical energy from certain impacts

7. Selectively reinforces itself when strain is detected

8. Has areas for the storage of long-term energy reserves, which double as an impact cushion

9. Houses small fabricators to replenish some of its own operating fluids

10. Subsystems for thermal management (evaporative cooling, automatic micro-activation)

_______________

I predict the closest thing we might see instead will be just growing replacement biological limbs, followed by waldoes where you remotely control an arm without losing your own.

Per 5, it says here "Human hands are packed absolutely full of sensors. Getting anywhere near that kind of sensing out of robot hands and usable by a human puppeteer is not currently possible."

Then another quote, "No one has managed to get articulated fingers (i.e., fingers with joints in them) that are robust enough, have enough force, nor enough lifetime, for real industrial applications."

So (3) and (7) are relevant to lifetime, but another point, related to sensors, is that humans will stop hurting themselves if finger strain occurs, such as by changing their grip or crying off the task entirely. Hands are robust because they can operate at the edge of safe parameters by sensing strain and strategizing around risk. Humans know to come in out of the rain, so to speak.

I have come to realize that we barely understand complexity. I've read a lot on information theory, thermodynamics, many takes on entropy. Not to mention literature on software development, because a lot of this field is managing complexity.

We severely underestimate how complex natural systems are. Autonomous agents seem like something we should be able to build. The idea is as old as digital computers. Turing famously wrote about that.

But an autonomous complex system is complex to an astronomical degree. Self driving vehicles, let alone autonomous androids, are several orders of magnitude more complex that we can even model.

Seems related to:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variety_(cybernetics)

Yes! Thank you!

I have read Wiener and Ashby to reach this conclusion. I've used this argument before. A piece of software capable of creating any possible software would be infinitely complex. Also the reason I don't buy the "20 w general intelligence exists". The wattage for generally intelligent humans would be the entire energy input to the biosphere up to the evolution of humans.

Planetary biospheres show general intelligence, not individual chunks of head meat.

That knowledge held in evolution equates to "training" for an AGI, I guess. Mimicking 4 billion years of evolution shouldn't take that long ... but it does sound kind of expensive now you mention it.

[flagged]

Now I'm imagining a brain in a jar, but with every world-mimicking evolved aspect of the brain removed. Like, it has no implicit knowledge of sound waves or shapes or - well, maybe those low-level things are processed in the ears and retinas, but it has no next-stage anticipation of audio or visual data, either, and no body plan that relates to the body's nerves, and no relationship to digestion or hormones or gravity or jump scares or anything else that would prepare it for being monkey-shaped and living in the world. But, it has the key thing for intelligence, the secret sauce, whatever that is. So it can sit there and be intelligent.

Then you can connect it up to some input and output, and ... it exhibits intelligence somehow. Initially by screaming like a baby. Then it adapts to the knowledge implicit in its input and output systems ... and that's down to the designer. If it has suction cup end effectors and a CCD image sensor array doobrie ... I guess it's going to be clumsy and bewildered. But would it be noticeably intelligent? Could it even scream like a baby, actually? I suppose our brains are pre-evolved to learn to talk. Maybe this unfortunate person would only be able to emit a static hiss. I can't decide if I think it would ever get anywhere and develop appreciable smarts or not.

I feel like I can intuit these things pretty well but others can't. For example I see everyone talking about LLMs replacing developers and I'm over here thinking there is absolutely no way an LLM is replacing me any time soon. I'll be using it to do my job faster and better sure, but it won't replace me. It can barely do a good job while I hold it's hand every step of the way. It often goes crazy and does all kinds of dumb stuff.

Similarly reading this article I agree with the author and I feel like what they're saying seems obvious. Of course making robots that can match humans' abilities is an absolutely insurmountable task. Yes, insurmountable as in I don't think we will ever do it.

Automating specific tasks in a factory is one thing, making a robot that can just figure out how to do things and learn like a human does is many orders of magnitude beyond. Even LLMs aren't there, as we can see from how they fail at basic tasks like counting the Rs in Raspberry. It's not intelligence it's just the illusion of intelligence. Actual intelligence requires learning. Not training. Actual intelligence won't run a command, fail to read it's output, make up the output and continue as if everything is fine while in fact nothing is fine. But LLMs will because they're stupid stochastic parrots, basically fancy search engines. It's really strange to me how everyone else seems blind to this.

Maybe if we some day figure out real artificial intelligence we will have a chance to make humanoids that can match our own abilities.

Also to prevent breaking other things or hurting others. That’s also why robots will have tons of safety issues for a while

I'd add an 11th point to expand on #1: supports a very wide range of movement speeds, movement force/torque and movement precision.

Take the elbow joint and the muscles it's connected to. It supports very fine precision, slow speed operations as well as high speed but at the same time the same operation at high speeds - say, lifting yourself up on a horizontal bar, assuming adequate strength you can either do a slow or a fast lift, and both at enough precision and torque to prevent your body mass from impacting to the bar which is another feat in itself.

Now try to replicate that with a classic mechanical mechanism, you'll always lose either precision, speed or torque.

Yeah, it's cool and all, but I more that once was frustrated that it can't rotate freely, it has only one elbow joint, it can't extend.

You want telescopic rotary jazz hands?

Sure. I even had a simulated experience of having extendable arms in my dream. So, the control machinery is probably there for some reason.

One of the things that is true of humans is that we have an extremely mutable body plan and sensorium.

https://plasticity-lab.com/body-augmentation

https://www.carlosterminel.com/wearable-compass

https://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/mar97/858984531.Ns.r.h...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096098220...

Bolting on extra senses, tools, limbs is no big deal.

Humans are also some of the most physically adaptable animals on the planet, in terms of being able to remodel our bodies to serve new tasks. "specific adaptation to imposed demand" is one of the things that really sets us (and a few other animals) apart in a remarkable way. Few animals can practice and train their bodies like we can.

In addition, I understand research shows that people with amputations very quickly adapt both practically and psychologically, as a general principle (some unfortunate folks are stuck with phantom pain and other adaptive issues).

The old discussion about "adding 20 minutes to your commute is worse than losing a leg below the knee" takes into account the fact that most people underestimate how large a negative effect commuting has, but also overestimate how large a negative effect losing a portion of a limb has.

It's likely that humans beat basically every other animal at this - because humans are social tool users. Most animals learn their body plan once and almost never change it. Humans have to learn to use new tools or work with other humans all the time.

Which seems to reuse the same brain wiring as what's used for controlling the body. To a professional backhoe operator, the arm of the backhoe is, in a very real way, his arm.

Curiously enough, most current neural interfaces don't seem to expose much of this flexibility. It's likely that you'd have to wire into premotor cortex for that - but for now, we're mostly using the primary motor cortex instead, because it's much better understood. The signals found there are more human-comprehensible and more prior work was done on translating them into useful motions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com