iRobot Founder: Don't Believe the AI and Robotics Hype | Hacker News Reader

iRobot Founder: Don't Believe the AI and Robotics Hype

crazystupidtech.com

259 pointsherbertl192 comments

One quote that really stood out to me:

> Rodney: The robots—they’re not embodied. I always say about a physical robot, the physical appearance makes a promise about what it can do. The Roomba was this little disc on the floor. It didn’t promise much—you saw it and thought, that’s not going to clean the windows. But you can imagine it cleaning the floor. But the human form sort of promises it can do anything a human can. And that’s why it’s so attractive to people—it’s selling a promise that is amazing.

> ... I always say about [a language model], the [linguistic] appearance makes a promise about what it can do. [Clippy] was this little [cartoon paper clip]. It didn’t promise much—you saw it and thought, that’s not going to [write the next great novel]. But you can imagine it [offering limited help]. But [human language] sort of promises it can [write] anything a human can. And that’s why it’s so attractive to people—it’s selling a promise that is amazing.

The difference between the promise and reality of LLMs and the difference between the promise and reality of humanoid robots are a different order of magnitude.

In which direction?

When a language model fumbles, its mistakes are still wrapped in convincing writing, so the error is only apparent if the user already knows what the answer should be.

When a humanoid robot fumbles, its mistakes are obvious because the physical world offers immediate feedback.

It's the difference between lying on your résumé that you're a world-class gymnast, and having to actually perform.

How much of this is due to nearly all humans already having advanced knowledge of what they would expect out of a humanoid robot in the home?

With the gymnast example, as a non-gymnast, I don’t know the difference between a high and low scoring routine on the floor or beam. If a humanoid robot did a routine and didn’t fall, I would assume all is well. I don’t know the technical details of what is required for a gymnastics competition.

This seems like the same idea as an LLM writing a paper that looks correct to someone who doesn’t already know the answer.

In a home context, this could look like the robot not practicing proper food safety or storage around someone who doesn’t know the details about that kind of thing, which is a good number of people. What it’s doing might look correct enough, and it produces food you can eat… all is well, until you get sick and don’t know why.

Which gymnast competition? The well known ones are more beauty contests with/on gymnastics equipment. However there are also competitions where they measure objective things. I know what I like to see in a beauty contest, but that is also subjective. I too don't know what a technical competition is measuring, but I know they have objective things they look for.

I don’t know what you’re referring to when talking about gymnastics as a beauty contest.

I’m not an expert, but I know there are specific moves with various degrees of difficulty. I believe there is a max score based on that difficulty level, and any imperfection will lower that score, such as a foot pointed or flexed the wrong way at the wrong time, taking an extra step on a landing, etc.

I know all these rules exist, but I’m not an expert where I can say someone had their foot flexed when it should have been pointed. These details would go over my head, where a humanoid robot might get a pass from me, while an actual gymnast or judge would be able to see faults.

Makes you wonder on the outcome, as the current direction is to build humanoid robots communicating via LLM.

So the robot might be equally convincing that it is capable to clean your windows as it is capable to repair your car brakes.

You saw it clean your windows and are satisfied, and both its form and words are promising that it can repair your brakes equally well...

This is an interesting premise.

I’m kinda torn between “genAI powered robots will have a ground truth reality as a reference, so they will ultimately be more grounded and effective that LLMs” and “LLMs are like drunk uncle Steve with his PHD swimming in vodka, and using genAI in robots will end up as well as having drunk uncle Steve drive home”.

Guardrails on tasks it will attempt are inevitable, but I can also see that becoming a paywalled enshitification farm.

Yeah, imagine "that guy from the pub" who is unemployed for years because he claims to be "overqualified for everything", and then add that he knows exactly how to convince you that he is capable of EVERYTHING you throw at him...

Agree. Not sure what is worse though. Leaning towards the LLM...

LLMs are much closer in practice, they're already useful for a pretty wide range of tasks. Humanoid robots are still comically clumsy and limited, barely able to complete scripted tech demos.

The difference is very easy to define and notorious difficult to solve: it is physics. And man is physics a hard problem to "solve".

Welcome to the world of hard tech not easy machine learning models. Capital is in short supply, it doesn't go nearly as far and you don't get wild multiples in return if you even get any.

I cannot quite tell what point this is trying to make. LLMs are just the next Clippy? As far as I can remember no one actually liked Clippy, so my read is you are not a fan of LLMs, but I could see it going either way.

I took it to mean that the way LLM's use natural language causes the typical observer to feel as if they can perform far more than what they actually can. Akin to the analogy of humanoid robots.

It plays off of the "if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and walks like a duck" idiom, which of course isn't foolproof and gives avenue to the kind of spectacular advertising that is fueling this hype.

I agree. A personal anecdote.

My mom was lamenting car insurance quotes, so I told her to ask AI. She did, then had it do a Monte Carlo simulation for all the insurances she the AI felt she was qualified for.

It happily replied that it did 1 million monte carlo simulations and here was the result.

To this day I don't think she fundamentally groks that LLMs cannot calculate.

For me, it was a friend that was wildly impressed by ChatGPT (before it could search the web) had "analyzed recent market news and stock price graphs" to give him stock recommendations.

>To this day I don't think she fundamentally groks that LLMs cannot calculate

Can't most LLMs trivially use Python and other languages and libs and calculate?

I used Gemini to take "0.3 grams of KNO3 will raise the nitrate level of 10 gallons of water 4.84 ppm" and generate tables of how many grams of dry fertilizer for 1ppm, 5ppm, 10ppm for my planted aquariums of 144 and 3000 liters. It calculated them perfectly.

https://rotalabutterfly.com/rex-grigg/dosing.htm

LLMs cannot themselves calculate, but they are given tools which can.

They're getting quite good at that now.

ChatGPT can easily do Monte Carlo simulation in its "thinking" step, and has done many times for me. e.g. I asked it to compare savings interest between regular banks and median returns from premium bonds. It's not difficult at all for it to do, you can see the code it's generated to do it + the output, easy to inspect

I understood it as mocking the iRobot's founder quote, that what he says is a false promise, could just as well be applied to LLMs, where it has been a true promise (but he says the opposite mockingly).

I would say the same delusion even applies to the field of machine learning in general.

The "API" of trainable algorithms is essentially "arbitrary bunch of data in -> thing I want out" and the magic algorithm in the middle will figure out the rest.

Because "thing I want" is given as a list of examples, you're not even required to come up with a clear definition of what it exactly is that you want. In fact, it's a major "selling point" of the field that you don't have to.

But all of that creates the illusion that machine learning / "AI" would be able to generate a robust algorithm for any correspondence, as long as you can package up a trainset with enough examples and shore up enough "compute" to do the number crunching. Predict intelligence from passport photos? Or chances of campaign success from political speeches? No problem! Economic outlook from tea leaves? Sure thing!

The setup will not even tell you if your idea just needs more tweaks or fundamentally can't work. In both cases, all you get is a less-than-ideal number in your chosen evaluation metric.

The process is definitely vulnerable to magical thinking.

I think it is possible to avoid, though, by asking if humans can be generally good at the task in question, if working through the implied interface restrictions, and then evaluating whether the required skills can be reflected in an available training data set.

If either of those cannot be definitively answered, it’s probably not going to work.

An interesting example here is the failure of self driving vehicles based on image sensors.

My take is that most of the problems are because a significant fraction of the actual required training data is poorly represented in data that can be collected from driving experiences alone.

As in: If you want a car to be able to drive safely around humans, you need to understand a lot about what humans do and think about. - then apply that same requirement to everything else that occasionally appears in the operational environment.

To understand some traffic management strategies expressed in infrastructure, you’ll need to understand, to some degree, the goals of the traffic management strategy, aka “what were they thinking when they made this intersection?”.

It’s not all stuff you can magically gather from dashcams.

Yeah, my understanding was also that the (remaining) hard part of self-driving cars is guessing the intentions of other traffic participants. There are a lot of assumptions human drivers can make about pedestrians, e.g. whether a pedestrian has seen the car or not, whether they will wait for it, have no intention of crossing at all - or will just run across the street.

A model might potentially be able to understand those situations, but it would need a lot of highly task specific training data and it would never be clear if the training really covered all possible situations.

The other problem I see is that a lot of situations in traffic are really two-way communication, even if it is nonverbal and sometimes so implicit we don't realize it. But usually pedestrians will also try to infer what the driver is thinking whether he saw them, etc. In those situations, a self-driving car is simply a fundamentally different kind of traffic participant and pedestrians will interact with it differently than they would with a normal car. That problem is independent of machine learning and seems much harder to solve to me.

That's not the "API" that's powered the AI boom though. What you're talking about is supervised learning. Generative AI is mostly unsupervised. It's "bunch of data -> similar data conditioned on some input". This goalless nature is one of its strengths.

The sort of questions you're talking about are primarily popular in academia. Run some MLRs against some random dataset you found, publish a paper, maybe do a press release and sell a story to some gullible journalist. It doesn't have huge value. But generative AI isn't like that.

Hasnt written a great novel, wont ever write a great novel, will definitely write regurgitated slop that midwit tech slaves steeped in the works of Malcolm Gladwell and Co. will read four words of and proclaim "Dostoevsky!"

I think that the main reason that LLM writing fails so badly in a field one might assume it would excel in is the lack of being able to model a theory of mind for the reader.

While I have seen LLMs produce some ham-fisted attempts at manipulating the state of mind of the reader, I think that the human process is so obfuscated that it only shows up in occasional echoes and shadows in the training set.

It might be possible to develop a training set that reflected perception and internal mental state vs input using (magic brain scan technology) that could change this, but right now the emotional state of the reader is just missing from the training data.

Indeed. GP isn't making the point they think they're making.

"It's writes like us, it must think like us, and will be able to think anything we can think!"

"It's embodied like us, it must be be like us, and will be able to do anything we can do!"

Flawed thinking layered upon flawed perceptions, but get enough decision makers to buy into it and heaven and earth are moved to further it.

This take is so tiring, here's one of the most surprising things we've ever invented, and people are going "IT CAN'T WRITE DOSTOEVSKY". It's fine if y'all are so jaded, but can you at least keep it to yourselves?

LOL it's awesome, amazing tool, and I never saw it coming glad to have it, I'm responding to GP, what it does is nothing like good writing at all, and the only people who think otherwise are without exception people that have little to no exposure or training in any human arts.

That's not what the GP said, the comment is about how the format (language output) is promising something the technology does not actually deliver.

Why are you allowing yourself to not keep it to yourself, while demanding so of others?

Mine was a request, the GP's was general complaining.

When humans do writing, the quality improves by refining multiple drafts, making sketches and notes of the characters and situations and so on, before synthesizing the final text. A lot of preparation and thought goes into it.

If you just ask an LLM to write something off the cuff, it'll be bad. But doing a lot of prep with a human author guiding it? Not Dostoyevsky level, but not pure slop.

Creative writing sites without anti ai rules are getting swamped. Disheartening looking for people to read and provide feedback when hundreds of users churn out 40k word stories on a daily basis.

We might have to start meeting in person again.

All these companies are pursuing humanoids precisely because we've built the world around that "form factor" (and we evolved ourselves to fit to the world). It's a general purpose design. It's the same reason why OpenAI pursued LLMs, as they are general purpose.

Yes, like LLMs, they will over-promise in the beginning. But it still make sense to pursue that form factor from an investment perspective if we think it's feasible.

Well initially we tried to build planes with flapping wings because obviously the only things flying had flapping wings

In the air we were starting from scratch.

Back on the ground, I guess it's possible that some general purpose non-humanoid robot will be able to use our tools and built environment better than people, but I have a hard time imagining what that would be.

Does it NEED to? perhaps I need a special robot to clean my stairs, if there is any clutter on it, it just dumps it at the top/bottom. Then a different robot puts the clutter away. My robot vacuum/mop does a great job with floors already, so I don't need the clutter robot to handle floor cleaning. I likewise need a robot to fold my laundry, but maybe it turns the folded laundry over to the clutter robot to put away or something?

The point is I don't need a general purpose robot of any form. I have various specific tasks I need done, I don't care how many robots are involved. I do care that the total is affordable. I do care that the total doesn't take up "too much" space. I do care that the job is done well. I don't want to think about any of it unless I want to think about it (sometimes it is fun to watch my robot vacuum work. Sometimes I want a specific mess cleaned up first and then go away before guests arrive). Maybe a general purpose robot is the best answer, maybe not - since I'm not [currently] designing such robots I expect those who are experts to figure out the best form - which is probably a compromise.

So you can buy one robot that does everything and stays busy all day, or a bunch of robots that each do one thing and otherwise stay in closets.

If you have a factory, idle equipment costs you money. Right now our factories have only specialized robots, but they still have lots of people because it's too expensive to do the remaining tasks with specialized robots. We need general-purpose workers for the tasks we're not doing 24 hours every day.

This makes general-purpose robots look like the cheapest option for many tasks, but that could be offset if they cost a lot more. But the more of anything we build, the cheaper the thing ends up being. A very large number of identical robots will probably end up costing less than smaller numbers of lots of special purpose robots.

> If you have a factory, idle equipment costs you money

True, but that isn't the whole story. Where I live most factories have their own snow removal equipment even though it is only used a few days per year and sits idle the rest of the time. While it costs money to have it sit idle, it costs even more to have the whole factory idle until the snow melts. (or the people you hire get around to your factory).

> Right now our factories have only specialized robots, but they still have lots of people because it's too expensive to do the remaining tasks with specialized robots.

And when they decide people are too expensive they replace them not with general purpose robots but more special purpose robots.

> A very large number of identical robots will probably end up costing less than smaller numbers of lots of special purpose robots.

Maybe. It isn't clear. A general purpose robot could be more expensive - I only need one while I "need" one vacuum robot per floor meaning that special purpose robot scales better. And that vacuum robot is also a lot simpler meaning it will be cheaper to own 2 than to have 1 general purpose robot.

The question then is the general purpose robot cheaper because you only have 1 instead of an army of special purpose robots. We do not know (today).

So the point is just to allow them to use existing tools ? Essentially self imposing our own limits on them, I don't really see how that makes sense.

Just look at the animal kingdom, there are a bunch of stuff that would be extremely useful, tails, extra limbs, extra joints, no separated head, longer limbs &c.

The animal kingdom also lacked built infrastructure and tools. If the environment had been full of hand tools for a hundred million years, how many animals would have evolved to use them?

Some of your listed features could still work though. A humanoid robot doesn't have to have exactly the same form as humans, as long as it's close enough to use our stuff, ride around in our vehicles, etc. The alternative is to build all new infrastructure and tools that don't work for humans; I'm not sure why we would want that.

I think Asimov wrote something along those lines in one of his robots cycle novels (which leads us back nicely to "iRobot", er, "I, Robot"): why build a vacuum robot, a window-cleaner robot, a robot lawnmower, a robot car etc. etc. when you can build a humanoid robot which can operate all the devices designed for humans? Ok, currently it's "if you could build" rather than "when you can build", but looking at it from the science fiction writer's perspective, it makes sense...

I think we've settled on the idea that the bipedal human form is most efficient when it's a bit naive. The vacuum robot is more optimal because it's small form allows it to reach all parts of the floor and under small spaces we usually can't get easily. We build tools to do jobs more effectively. Not just to mimic how we've done them before.

The human form evolved to run long distances in wide open fields, climb trees for nutrient and protection, and create and wield tools. We have built the world to accommodate for that around us. It is not a general purpose form factor.

An urbanized, general purpose robot may take an entirely different form factor than bipedal homosapien, ie. tachikomas from Ghost in the Shell: SAC.

Will a tachikoma fit through a door? If not, that's a bad "general purpose" platform.

A true "general purpose" robot should be able to walk into a space built by humans for humans and perform useful work there. That's the reason why humanoid frames are desirable.

A tachikoma is not the general purpose vehicle. It is an example of what a general purpose robot body could look like. It's job, in an anime, is a super intelligent armored tank.

Humans evolved to be bipedal to see over the bushes and tall grass in the savannah. Maybe the optimal form for a robot is an elephant with prehensile trunk, or giraffe, or a frog.

To some extent I'm willing to remodel if needed so the robot can fit. When I build/remodel my own house I only use extra wide doors so that a wheelchair can fit - I've never had someone in a wheelchair visit, but that is still something I make a requirement: does this help your robot work?

Maybe you are. But is the entire world willing to remodel? For the first generation of general purpose robots, which will, without a doubt, suck?

Chicken and egg problem there. Nobody will adapt the environment for your robots unless your robots have proven to work really well. So your robots have to first work really well in unadapted environments.

That depends on how much is needed. I've lived in houses with doors I need to turn sideways to get through (and I'm a wide guy - I expect fat people couldn't fit in any direction. I've lived in houses where all doors are bit enough for a wheelchair. Most houses have a range of sizes - what is your requirements. Some things are "easy" to do, and some are a major tear down. Without knowing the exact size requirements of a real robot we can't have this discussion. Though If you are in the business I expect you to look at houses and try to come up with something reasonable unless there is a good reason you can't.

There are always first adopters who will if it isn't too expensive. Rich people often live in a house with big enough doors (well most doors big enough - enough for this discussion to say they do), and likely have a need (and the money) for something even if it isn't very good. If your robot starts to prove useful people will ask for it - we build thousands of new houses/apartments every year just in the US, if builders see a demand they will make changes to their new models - it doesn't cost that much more so they don't even need a real demand, just a marketing feature that you could even if nobody does will work (for a few years: you better prove it useful to those who buy new houses fast or the fad will pass!)

It isn't easy because as you say, chicken and egg. If these prove useful people will make changes of the next few decades so they can have one. (though of course your competition will be looking to see if they can make something that doesn't need a remodel to use)

I think a tachikoma will have a hard time climbing up the stairway in an apartment building.

When they aren't doing high speed chases through the streets of Japan they are jumping out of helicopters, climbing walls, and chasing suspects up stairs.

And whether or not it actually is feasible, many are betting millions that it is, and marketing it as possible to keep the innovation machine running until we achieve it

I don't know why people keep saying "the world" when they talk about extremely small subsets of human civilization. Most roads weren't designed for humans. Flat surfaces in buildings were not designed for humans. Packages were designed to be handled by suction cups. Containers were designed to be intermodal transport, not to be carried by humans.

Space is practically inaccessible to most people.

It's crazy how many people purposefully become ignorant of the things they see every day with their own eyes.

Roads weren't designed for humans, but vehicles generally were. I don't think we need our robots to be able to drive 70mph on highways when we've already built millions of vehicles.

We've had buildings with flat surfaces for centuries, so I'm not sure of your point there. And Sears was shipping things in cardboard boxes long before warehouses had robots with suction cups.

~"Brooks believes the sheer size of Nigeria is going to make it an economic and technological epicenter". I laughed when i read this. The sheer ignorance and false assumption that large population = epic economic powerhouse is ridiculous. I critize CCP a lot for various reasons but their effective and efficient governance over the last 40 years can not be easily replicated. Good governance is an incredibly rare asset. India has big pupulation but has no good governance. The chance of Nigeria having as good goverance as China is very close to zero.

> India has big population but has no good governance.

As an Indian, I would dispute that. When I look back at what we were as a country, when we became independent, to what we are today, our achievements are really astounding.

India's economic development is centred on a narrow cone of progress around IT services/outsourcing/migration and the spending power that creates a set for consumers and government projects.

It's not comparable to the broad based productivity gains which happened in China or the UK across every industry as they developed, from agriculture to manufacturing to services. Instead it's much more like the Norwegian or Saudi hydrocarbon economies but with human capital exports.

> India's economic development is centred on a narrow cone of progress around IT services/outsourcing/migration and the spending power that creates a set for consumers and government projects.

That's simply not true.

India is making steel, pharmaceuticals, textiles, cars, movies, you name it.

North Korea also produces all of those things. Merely producing something doesn’t mean much.

I can buy the argument for Saudi, but the Norwegian economy is surprisingly diversified, oil makes up only around 4% of it. (Although it's proportionally a much larger share of exports and government revenue.)

Thought it'd be interesting to compare some indexes.. Thailand seems to be doing better than India on some measures, with China quite a bit further ahead.

    India
    * Productive Capacities Index (PCI, 2022): 45.3 (108th out of 194)
    * Economic Complexity Index (ECI, 2023): 0.60 (41st out of 132)
    * Global Economic Diversification Index (EDI, latest): 111.51
    * Human Development Index (HDI, 2023): 0.685 (130th out of 193)

    Thailand
    * Productive Capacities Index (PCI, 2022): 51.6 (66th out of 194)
    * Economic Complexity Index (ECI, 2023): 0.96 (29th out of 132)
    * Global Economic Diversification Index (EDI, latest): 108.99 (~27th out of 115)
    * Human Development Index (HDI, 2023): 0.798 (77th out of 193)

    China
    * Productive Capacities Index (PCI, 2022): 60.7 (26th out of 194)
    * Economic Complexity Index (ECI, 2023): 1.14 (22nd out of 132)
    * Global Economic Diversification Index (EDI, latest): 146.20 (top 3)
    * Human Development Index (HDI, 2023): 0.797 (78th out of 193)

That is such a naive view. IT/outsourcing makes up less than 8% of the GDP. Compared to that, industrial sector make up almost 30% and agriculture 20%. Just because IT services catch the news cycle does not mean that is the only thing India does.

Industry makes up 46% of Saudi Arabian GDP. Such figures can be a misleading way to characterise an economy.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Saudi_Arabia

What you have achieved is astounding. However I agree that you don't have good governance, it isn't the worst by any means, but it is still pretty bad in ways. It has been getting better, and that is something I hope you keep working on - the world needs more good governance.

BTW, while I would call the US or EU better, both have very significant governance issues that they need to work on. This shouldn't be seen as a game of who is better it should be seen as a game of how can I improve, looking at others only to see what areas they are better you can copy, and what areas they are worse you can avoid.

Since I live in the US that is where I focus most of my efforts, and I'm constantly stopped by people who have their heart in the right place but are doing something that because of complex factors they refuse to acknowledge is worse than what we have now. I'm also constantly being informed of something I didn't think of and having to readjust what I advocate for. If you are not in the same situation you are making things worse!

The parent has no clue what they are talking about, so I wouldn't take it to heart. Its pretty hard to deny that India is a global powerhouse.

No offense but in what non commodity industries is India a powerhouse? Here in the US I never see things made in India, and was just yesterday wondering how India compares to China. I could do some research, but I'm wondering why you think of India as a powerhouse?

Being an economic powerhouse doesn't mean being visible on shop shelves.

In Europe you very rarely see consumer goods labelled "Made in USA" (although we will frequently see products that are "Made in India"), yet the US is still an economic powerhouse because its strengths are in services, tech, finance, aerospace, and defence rather than mass-market manufacturing.

India is similar with most of its global impact through IT, software, generic pharmaceuticals, and space tech. Its the 4th largest economy in the world, and among the fastest growing - potentially surpassing Germany for 3rd place by 2030.

India is also the 2nd largest exporter of food in the world, and among the largest textile exporters (clothing, etc) - but for some reason you wanted to exclude commodities.

A country of 1.4 billion maybe potentially surpassing a country of 80 million strongly implies it's not quite a powerhouse yet.

I'm hopeful for India's future and they're on the right track, but currently, they're punching well below their weight. Germany is punching well above theirs. But investment from companies like Apple shows that India has what it needs to become the next China (or at the very least, next Vietnam). Nigeria seems to lack similar investment.

India is not a country that needs to “punch above its weight”. It is already a heavyweight. With one of the highest absolute GDPs in the world (third by PPP, fourth by nominal terms), it is a global leader across multiple sectors: IT, industry, pharmaceuticals, agriculture, and renewable energy. Its domestic market of more than 1.4 billion people gives it unmatched scale, representing nearly a quarter of the world’s population. India’s policy choices and growth trajectory directly influence global markets. That scale, diversity, and systemic impact are what make it a true economic powerhouse. Saying otherwise is naive, and seems a common rhetoric from a certain demographic...

"Leader" means other countries are following India's example and looking up to it. I'm not so sure that's happening.

There are many countries that view India as a leader for various reasons - economically, culturally, technologically and/or geopolitically. You really should go and read about India if you are truly this uninformed.

Which countries? I can't find any info and would appreciate some guidance.

Do you really not know how to use a search engine? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_relations_of_India

That doesn't at all say what you think. Every country has foreign relations. That doesn't mean it leads.

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

Is it safe to say North Korea is a world leader? If your method is anything to go by, yes. Does North Korea dominate India in its world leadership? Quite likely!

Impressive. Very nice.

Let's see India's GDP per capita.

GDP per capita doesn’t make a powerhouse, otherwise Monaco would be the most powerful country in the world, the US would be lucky to be in the top 10, and China would be considered somewhat average. Next?

Well, pharmaceutical manufacturing for one:

> India is the world's largest provider of generic medicines by volume, with a 20% share of total global pharmaceutical exports. It is also the largest vaccine supplier in the world by volume, accounting for more than 60% of all vaccines manufactured in the world.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmaceutical_industry_in_I...

This I am less certain on, but I believe there is a fairly robust space program (not many countries have that). I’m sure there is more.

> As an Indian, I would dispute that.

Don't. It's good for us that they overestimate China and underestimate us. For the next couple decades, we need breathing room to develop; why would you destroy that space by drawing attention to yourself?

I've spent a lot of time in various parts of India backpacking around in the past. No luxury bubble somewhere on beach of Goa, rather travelling around cramped public transport, sleeping in cheap or free places, interacting only with commoners.

Everybody and everything is growing, even North Korea in some aspects is. Thats called a progress and nobody interacting with rest of the world can escape that.

What is unfortunately true about India, and many other similar places is the potential of the country and the people and reality where they got and how far they can reach, given their own limitations.

From what I've seen, the gap (potential vs reality) is huge compared to western standards, and I don't see an easy way to push through that ceiling. Society isn't fair, its everybody for themselves. Castes are very much a thing still, absolutely horrible and deplorable thing (while this will be read mostly by brahmins or rich merchant castes who rarely see an issue there, so I don't expect much sympathy here). Corruption is abysmal. Women and minority rights are questionable at best.

No doubt great and important things will improve in upcoming decades. But in 21st century India will not resemble ie western Europe in any meaningful way, I just don't see a way. Real India is not some Bangalore or Pune bubble, its very opposite of it.

Yes, I agree. Which is why you should convince your politicians to forget about puny worthless India and focus all their antagonism towards the great mighty China only. Thank you.

Nobody in Europe considers India an antagonist, unless they will align hard themselves with russia, which would be a tremendously stupid move from any logical angle.

And China... its doing its own superpower things. I get why US is scared of prospect of having an actually worthy peer for a change with very different values, but thats not a main concern for Europe. putin and his FUBAR russia is and will be, all focus and energy goes there as it should. Unless US is going to properly help with that instead of licking various orifices of your own sworn enemy while it spits on you, we leave China to you guys (which just wants to sell their cheap EVs and other stuff here, hardly an evil plan we should lose sleep about right now).

"India used to be developing at a rapid pace, but then this person on Hacker News gave it all away."

It's worth noting that China is investing heavily in Nigeria and it is also its biggest lender, it might turn out Nigeria's gov is not that far from CCP.

China's third world investment adventures are questionable at best. And it would take extraordinary evidence for me to believe in Nigeria's government being competent.

Agreed. Uganda has also received significant investment from China, but the lifespan of the infrastructure apparently leaves some to be desired. The new road to the airport in Kampala is a major improvement, but after a year or two of use is already cracking in some places so may not last as long as one would expect.

That invokes the ship of theseus. China could terraform Nigeria. Megabridges, super housing projects, surveillance, etc.

(Wait this is still the rodney brooks discussion!?)

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/54/GDP_per_...

Normalize that to global and it won’t look quite so stark. Not saying India’s development is unimpressive but let’s put things in a real context

As an Indian I have to agree with this assessment. But India has gone through the socialist phase, it still maintains a liberal democracy and is now rapidly building out its industry. Socialism is completely dead in the cities, my opinion is it will eventually fall once the rural areas also develop.

I grew up in the USA and the changes in India even in the last 10 years has been completely astounding. For example I’m from Hyderabad and some of things changes I see: A national freeway that didn’t exist 10 years ago, a metro that covers most of the core of the city, skyscrapers, trains that now ship containers instead of boxcars, massive power plants that have recently been built.

Is India perfect? No. It still has a hierarchical society, sectarianism is still pretty acute, like everywhere else in the world India’s fertility rate has dropped off a cliff, and traffic in Hyderabad proper is a nightmare.

But culturally the submissive Indian mindset of my youth is largely gone. The millennial India is entrepreneurial and everyone is looking to get ahead. The next 20 years of India will be amazing at which point a lot of the issues of low fertility rates will start affecting India as well. Lastly, I think India really only has capacity to send a sizable amount of its citizens overseas only for the next 5 years or so at which point migration out of India will largely subside.

> like everywhere else in the world India’s fertility rate has dropped off a cliff

It's amazing when people flag this as a bad thing when it's undoubtedly a key component of getting places to prosperity in the first place. Got to get people away from being starvation-limited.

> I think India really only has capacity to send a sizable amount of its citizens overseas only for the next 5 years or so at which point migration out of India will largely subside.

That's how you can tell a country is ""winning"" in the international rankings, when more people want to move in than move out.

No society today got to prosperity on the back of falling birth rates. And nor did any of the western countries that went through population booms have food-production created famines.

> it's undoubtedly a key component of getting places to prosperity in the first place

The baby boom and a couple previous generations in the US is also associated with getting to high prosperity and high fertility. This part of your thesis is debunked and thus your whole argument falls apart.

> It's amazing when people flag this as a bad thing when it's undoubtedly a key component of getting places to prosperity in the first place. Got to get people away from being starvation-limited.

Exponentially falling fertility rates can create dynamics which can be destructive in its own right. As with other complex phenomena it would be for example foolish to rapidly cool the earth's climate. Stability is the key, here. Right now India is just below replacement which short to mid-term looks very promising but will it stabilize? Looking at worldwide trends I very much doubt that. A growing economy needs some demographical stability so coming from a long-term view fertility dropping off a cliff, now, could be bad news later (in one, two generations).

Turning some knobs one way or the other does not produce linear results, quite the opposite, there are thresholds, there is criticality. To draw on another more time compressed analogy here: I guess some operators thought back then: What could go possibly wrong by running a nuclear reactor (RBMK) at safer lower powers?

To be fair China has a top down control that India and the like don't

I agree about Nigeria but not about India. My understanding is that they have some very able people in government.

There are large countries in Africa that are undergoing fast development though, Kenya for example.

There are 80 some countries in Africa (it has changed since I was in school as borders change). Some of them are doing really good, but most are doing bad. Many of them have seemed to be on the right track for a while and then fallen off again. I wish Kenya the best, but history on that continent hasn't been kind to anyone in my the last few hundred years (but go back farther...)

Yes. Although Kenya is apparently well-functioning enough that some Swedes are happy to do business there and actually operate factories there etc.

You always are taking risks. Sweden could have a revolution tommorow and turn corrupt - seems unlikely but it could happen.

Certainly, and I don't think I'd move to Kenya to start a factory, but obviously some people think the people there are sensible enough that it looks okay.

Why is it very close to zero? Nigerians in the United States are the most educated immigrant group in the country.

This reads as rather naive. You think India’s governance is “no good”? It is literally the most culturally complex place on earth, so you might need to recalibrate your metrics and criteria.

Additionally, if you believe Nigeria has a near zero chance at good governance, then I suspect you have not read very much history or anthropology. Every instance of civilizational development looks pretty much impossible, and yet “good governance” emerges over and over again. The story of humanity is one of surprising social innovation, and I would never count Nigeria out.

Well since you, of all people, find it hilarious, and honored us with your iron clad, deeply reasoned opinion, it must be immutable truism

Time is not a linear function; creation and decay are not a normalized process. A large number of people can change inductive truism.

This is roughly the same content Brooks posted himself a few years ago, and was covered on HN last week.[1]

There are already many companies selling automated carts that run around warehouses. Search for "automated guided cart".

I thought the humanoid thing was silly until I saw the pricing. Here's the Unitree G1, starting out at US$22,000, less than a Toyota Corolla. I though these things were going to cost like Boston Dynamics products. No, the hardware is already much cheaper.

This is still a low-volume product and prices are headed downward. Humanoid robots are going to be cheaper than cars. Having more degrees of freedom than you really need for any single job will be outweighed by the cost advantages of mass production and the advantages of interchangeability.

The manipulation problem remains tough, but with moderately priced and standardized hardware available, more people can work on it.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45392922

> Here's the Unitree G1, starting out at US$22,000, less than a Toyota Corolla.

The sticker price might look cheap, but what I've heard from people actually looking to buy (even in large quantities) is that by the time you assemble the hardware and the tooling and the dev kit, the cost is $80-100k per robot.

> This is roughly the same content Brooks posted himself a few years ago, and was covered on HN last week.

That Brooks' post is his latest one, from a few days ago.

> The sticker price might look cheap, but what I've heard from people actually looking to buy (even in large quantities) is that by the time you assemble the hardware and the tooling and the dev kit, the cost is $80-100k per robot.

I know. You don't get the GPU for AI in the base model, for example. Do you get the articulated hands?

A robot package with all those custom parts, motors, and motor controllers, along with cameras and a short range LIDAR. for only $22K is pretty good.[1] As this technology starts to work, it's apparently not going to be insanely expensive.

[1] https://robostore.com/products/unitree-g1-robotic-humanoid

Pretty good?

It can lift 3 kg / arm. That's like barely enough for a super-sized coffee! What human role are you replacing with this? Some desk job? Why bother with the robot.

Seems like the kind of problems that would be amortized by scale. Anyone running a fleet won’t need to assemble one set of tooling per robot.

Unitree wants to charge buyers $80-100k per-unit (at scale) in order to actually make money on their humanoids. So we're not in the era of $20k humanoids, despite appearances.

What scale? If Toyota sold 1 car per year they would need to charge hundreds of millions to pay for the engineering. Just making an engine to meet modern emissions will cost more than a billion, but since that engine will be made for a decade we can amortize it and say the cost of the engine is 100 million per car. However because they make many more than that their costs go down. Because they make many cars they have developed assembly lines - to build the whole factory is likely another billion dollars (I don't have real numbers), but if you are only building one car a skilled machinist could do that in a year for much less cost than a factory.

Thus my question - what scale are they targeting. At some level of sales their expected costs are right. However if demand is a lot more than they expect it could probably scale down to $10k, maybe less, while if it is less costs go up...

The point is that the list price of $22k is basically fake if a full system costs $80-100k. It's like saying that a car costs $22k, but you can't buy it without also getting a $60k lifetime support contract.

There is "fake" as in, we offer the thing at $22k but this is a made-up price and we'd be losing tens of thousands per unit if we couldn't upsell the necessary tooling. Then there's "not fake" as in, the hardware is profitable (or at least break-even) at a list price of $22k, and the tooling is expensive because it makes sense to charge a lot to developers. These things put you at different places when scale starts to increase.

It's extremely common for dev tooling to be extremely expensive, even for widgets that sell for a few bucks at the retail level.

Why does the full system cost 80-100k though? Can I buy 1 full system at 100k, and then 10,000 at the list price? What is the difference. If I sign a contract to buy 1 million next year (thus giving you time to build an better assembly line) can you get the per unit price down?

It's worse than that for light trucks:

- Ford F-150 base price: $39,645.

- Ford F-150 Raptor R: $115,015.

nobody has solved manipulation at any price point, you can't scale your way out of that

> more people can work on it.

His point was that mass production will make it more likely that someone will solve it

Just be careful. Mass production depends on masses buying it. If they can't get the price low enough mass production may not be worth it. It is entirely possible that enough people would buy this at $1k, as to make mass production worth it, but if you target $10k not enough people would buy as to make mass production worth it. This though assumes that you could do enough mass production to get down to $1k, which might not be possible.

It also tells a story about any US robotics company like Tesla now claims to be. How can you possibly hope to compete against manufacturing costs that low.

I really liked this guy. Maybe it's Boston but here's a guy with two wildly successful startups in robotics and he's having trouble raising money because his idea isn't sexy enough!

I thought investors were smart and knew how to calculate odds. There is never any absolutely sure thing. But if a guy has been wildly successful twice aren't the odds pretty good he can do it a third time?

Having been through the VC system, I don't believe his face value statement, and I 100% believe you're right.

They want to invest, but not at his terms that he's demanding.

The thought experiment is - he wants to raise 1m @ 2m val. 50%. There's not a VC/angel/seed who wouldn't take that deal given who he is. So he's pricing himself at a level he "is willing to do this startup thing again" and it's simply too expensive.

You assume VCs are rational. They try to be. But they’re not.

A guess: Smart VCs know that they are not smart enough to evaluate a business from a plan or a founder' background and instead wait for the revenue growing explosively.

A smart VC knows they have 0% chance of getting into that round (even the top VC maybe 1/3 chance) much less leading it by then, and only chance is getting into it when it’s still contrarian.

I know a very low profile entrepreneur who has essentially built the exact same business (with slight variations) 3 times over the past 20+ years, selling the first two, so yes I believe there is some corelation between his 2 previous successes and being able to do it again. Even if it's imaginary the funding markets swear by previous success being a strong marker for future success.

Years ago my friend had the best app for a particular game in the App Stores. But competition was rising. So he just rebranded his app with a few changes and then got 3 of the top 5 spots! Same underlying app

And this is why we can't have nice things.

Sounds rather like we are having a lot of (almost same) nice things

iRobot got crushed by Chinese competitors. Rethink failed early, they had a poor quality product and Universal made a much better cobot. And this new venture is pointless, there are 10 other companies in the Boston area alone doing warehouse automation...

The comment about humanoid forms raising expectations comes from Rethink's hype and failure. Rethink tried to solve manipulation and failed.

The Rethink hype video, with their cute little face on a screen.[1]

What the Rethink robot could actually do: take PC boards off a conveyor and put them in a fixture.[2] That's a routine robotic load/unload task. Like this one with Fanuc robots.[3]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4mULTknb2I

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnzmxJS4Rp4

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Za5z1lb0hdU

The industry term, I believe, is "skill issue".

The conclusion to draw from "tried and failed" certainly isn't "it's impossible and everyone should give up on the notion".

I'm a huge fan of the ease of cleaning & repairing iRobots, especially the earlier models. I don't know if the competitors match that but I have preferred their simplicity & quality.

China competitors are always going to be tough to beat in terms of margins.

Details of this situation aside, the take "doing x is pointless because lots of other people are doing it" is a bit rough.

Upvote for you sir. I was writing the same response as you posted the exact response. The only thing I did not mention that I will add here. iRobot was kind of a turd. They basically kept the same turd of a robot for a decade plus. Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang…

I mean, VCs want stories (or at least hype) - not accolades, i.e., Altman, Neumann. Heck, accolades might hurt you. They want the unfound gem/they're so smart/cerebral...

Define success. Without a doubt iRobot was a category leader for a long time. They created the market but were they ever profitable? At this point it feels like a company on life support that is getting their butts kicked by the Chinese who offer double the product for half the cost. Without a doubt though he created the category. Was the second company ever a success, all I could find is it being trade for parts over and over.

This third company looks interesting but it’s also a flooded market at this point.

So for me the guy never had a real success and is currently building in a market that has been for years flooded with products like his.

"Were they ever profitable" is an easy enough thing to look up, why not just do that instead of use it as a rhetorical device?

https://macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/IRBT/irobot/gross-prof...

From that, they had 13 straight years of profitable net income starting in 2009. Rough recently because they got eaten up by cheaper upstarts; happens to almost everyone eventually. But clearing several hundred million cumulative in net income over a decade+ (peaking 2018-2020, so they were consistently growing from 2009 to 2020 even) is far from "were they ever profitable" territory. They don't have pre-2009 there, but from some other googling it looks like they were profitable by when he left in 2008 after their 2005 IPO. So he was there from inception to IPO and millions-a-year-profitability, and then you're discounting that because 12 years after he left some companies in China had better copies. Building something for 15 years to IPO isn't some VC pump and dump scam, it's harder.

If that's not success you have a ridiculous bar. "So for me the guy never had a real success" - get out of here, do your googling before making claims like that.

Not every business loses 95% of their market cap in 3 years. Many companies bleed out slowly as they struggle to retain their market share in the face of new competition. This is normal. It's not normal for a business to just collapse out of nowhere.

Did shareholders and investors collectively make money from the whole ordeal? Looking briefly at the numbers, it looks like they didn't. During the profitable years IRobot made $639 million (sum total) but they lost -$737 in the collapse that followed. No dividends were paid either during the good years. Shareholders were left holding the bag.

Building a business from nothing to IPO is a real accomplishment and I won't diminish that. However, if a business collapses and incinerates more money than it has ever made during the sum of all profitable years calling it a "real success" is a bit of a stretch.

Thanks for elucidating what I failed to do. That was my only point. Someone said he created a number of wild successful companies. iRobot in my eyes was a segment creator which is awesome but it was/is never a wild success. He was also one of 3 founders and is not credited for the first iteration of the roomba.

Sorry I hit a nerve, it’s easier to share an opinion without telling people to get out of here though shame on you. The adjusted ebitda numbers I was looking at either had it below or near zero hence I did not really consider them a financial success. He was one of 3 founders and another individual invented the first iteration of the roomba. I am not saying he is a failure but the person I was replying to stated he was “wildly successful” with three companies. I saw iRobot as a category creator but never capturing the market and no idea how you could say the other two are wildly successful can you share how? Otherwise get out of here.

Rodney Brooks is widely recognized and celebrated roboticist, ran CSAIL for a while. iRobot as a company created a new market and managed to put a functional household robot out there, whether Chinese alternatives ate the share of it is largely irrelevant to his argument on humanoids, which I find to be completely reasonable.

There is a wide gap between academic and entrepreneur/business operator though. He was one of three co founders of iRobot the company l, is not even credited at the inventor of it, and iRobot has largely been a one hit wonder. They created a category but the underlying product largely was unimproved until China started dominating.

His other business was a failure and his third current is in a crowded marketplace. Humanoids are the minority in warehouse automation.

Who is even talking about his argument on humanoids? What does that have to do with my comment. My response was on a comment praising his triple success in business and I am questioning that definition of success.

You say one hit wonder, but iRobot's PackBot and other gov-focused efforts were/are very profitable, though the company had to spin off the defense arm.

What are the other efforts? Packbot was sold off for $45mm for the time a company with a market cap of $1.6bn. Again the PackBot could be great but would you call a product that had low $ contracts to the government that eventually was sold for peanuts a wildly successful company? I don’t consider iRobot to be a wildly successful company.

Endeavor Robotics was recently sold for $382MM. So clearly it was actually valuable.

Are you aware that from an investor perspective, creating a household brand and high IRR though IPO is considered a wild success? All companies eventually decline. By your metrics GE wasn't a wildly successful company either. Or AOL. Or Yahoo. Or Myspace. Every one of those companies eventually declined and your return would be poor if you held on to your investment over their entire arc.

Are you aware you are picking the wrong numbers. $382 is post iRobot when endeavor sold to Flir. Why would you even use that number. PackBot sold for $45mm. That’s a decade worth of work and investment for $45mm. I think you might be narrating a bit too much and putting words into my mouth. I don’t know the IRR for iRobot as I was never part of the funding rounds while private or an insider while public. That said it was a stagnant public company that had a jump around Covid time which has come crashing back down. Maybe those folks like yourself, based on the way you speak, invested early in the 90s in iRobot and were part of that IPO.

I am not attacking the man only a perspective that I am not sure investors would see him as a wildly successful entrepreneur.

> the guy never had a real success

iRobot has sold over fifty million Roombas to date. Packbots are also highly profitable and have saved many lives.

That’s why I asked how do you measure success, they created the market but never were able to operationalize it or improve it from the initial iterations.

A decade of profitability as a public company seems pretty successful to me. Brooks was long gone by the time iRobot started its decline.

And brooks was one of three founders and not credited for the first iteration of Roomba. During his time the company barely broke even on and adjusted ebitda basis. His other company was a failure and this third is in a crowded marketplace.

Again as I keep saying. My reply was to someone who said he had three wildly successful companies. Yes iRobot created a segment but I still struggle to classify it as a wild success.

AGI doesn’t need to be “solved” for humanoid robots to be valuable at scale. The role of teleoperation is often underestimated; in the near term, many humanoids will likely be operated remotely by people halfway across the world, performing deliveries and other tasks cheaply.

Is that supposed to be something we want?

Maybe not you, but the millions of people at risk of being run over by a forklift or buried in a ditch probably find the idea appealing.

We already pushed them into shittier and shittier jobs, what will it be next ? There is 0 overlap between people pushing for these bots and people who care about workers rights

Honestly, it sounds like it would be really funny to me.

Like playing Call of Duty where you can respawn and the others dont?

Of course not, I just think the idea of little humanoid robots being controlled remotely, running around doing deliveries and such would be amusing.

The potential applications of this tech in war is concerning of course, but we don't have to allow that. And the more I've thought about it over time, I find the prospect of combat robots much less terrifying than the FPV drones we've been seeing used in Ukraine, or being obliterated by an unseen, unheard drone flying kilometers up in the sky before you even know what's happening.

How does that increase efficiency (beyond not having to pay normal wages)

There are plenty of jobs where 24/7 operation would be beneficial. Like a road paving crew, or a nighttime security guard. You can pay daytime wages for someone in another timezone.

Valid actually, that would be pretty cool.

> It’s simple intelligence, which is what we can do today and make reliable. It’s not sexy. It’s technology in the service of making things easier for workers and more efficient.

Perfection.

>At MIT, I taught big classes with lots of students, so maybe that helped. I came here in an Uber this morning and asked the guy what street we were on. He had no clue. He said, “I just follow it.” (‘It’ being the GPS—Ed.) And that’s the issue—there’s human intervention, but people can’t figure out how to help when things go wrong.

I live on a culdesac, and theres no instructions I could give uber drivers to help them find my house, when uber added a random roadblock on our street.

I tried guiding them by voice, but none of them read street signs. Its crazy. They just rock up to the dot and complain. Issue being, the dot was the closest accessible street, so one street in either direction.

One guy made the same wrong turn twice before cancelling.

I hate taxis, but at least taxi drivers can be expected to have some basic local knowledge.

You need to work out what the nearest routable adress is. This works wonderfully with taxis here.

FWIW cul de sacs are an evil invention, and what you describe is a common routing problem. The rescue services here solved it by mandating addresses with geolocation and the nearest streets for every house around here. That failed me because everyone uses that official data that is convenient for fire truck rescue.

The issue was resolved by complaining to the Uber Maps team for 9 months until they removed their fake road block.

The work around in the interim was a combination of:

1. Writing a long description of how to access our property. 2. Trying to limit the distance an uber driver had to travel. <1km made it more likely for them to review the map and comment before driving. Dont ask me why. 3. Oscillating the drop off marker on the map to make it more likely that the driver was sent to our street at all, where we could wave at them to get them to drive beyond the psychological roadblock. 4. Attrition lead some drivers to remember my name, and just come straight to the property ignoring the map.

Any other mapping service delivered people to our property fine. Its just that Uber randomly blocked the end of our street. Meaning our street had no entrance.

Problem was that, uber has an exclusive relationship for delivery with one of our local supermarkets, and my wife doesnt drive and was stuck at home with an angry baby for the duration.

Due to this issue we did push the maximum amount of our orders through other delivery apps, probably taking significant income away from uber. But they have deliberately structured their support channels to be impossible to deal with.

As a Openstreetmap contributor I know it is a rather common mistake, it is very seldom support actually can edit the map like you can on http://osm.org sadly these mistakes are not always trivial. I have similar support tickets oldest one is from 2007.

They're just a tired company not trying to innovate at all. My eufy is better at a fraction of the cost. How many versions of a robot vacuum can you make...

Going back to the tired quote about AI doing the dishes and laundry, fundamentally what IS so hard about making a robot that does that?

Is it the range of motion of my arm and hands? Is it computer vision not knowing the clearances of objects ? Even if the thing couldn't drive itself to the kitchen or laundry room, I would be fine wheeling it there and standing it in front of dirty clothes or dishes opening the appliance doors. But yet we don't have this.

Each individual problem is solved: we have water proof electronics, we have precise multi axis stepper motors, we have computer vision that can map 3D spaces. We could even sell custom dishwasher inserts that are designed to make it easier for the robot. Why the hell do I still have to do the dishes?

Reliable, general-purpose gripping is still an unsolved problem. Especially in the consumer space. Your body has the near-miraculous ability of repairing itself continuously. Most gripper technologies require regular maintenance or they start to fail: suction cups wear out, sandbags start to lose elasticity, rubber gripping points get worn smooth. In an industrial setting, this is something that's manageable with maintenance schedules and the like, but will consumers be happy to replace suction cups every month so their robot doesn't start dropping dishes on the floor?

The dexterity, ultra precise motor control, and senses of the human hands are the bottleneck. That’s my guess at least.

Seems like a fundamentally hard engineering problem. Evolution is mighty impressive!

Things like simple robot arms could do wonders in crucial sectors like construction and agriculture where most the world does not have the industrial solutions of the US. Depopulation and aging is causing massive abandonment of agriculture in europe for example. Indeed we don't need a humanoid to lay bricks, but a not-too-expensive device could help with the housing crisis.

> You can do so much more computation, sensing, some actuation, but people underestimate the long tail of the natural environment.

Indeed, there are so many different application requirements that a single generic platform will never be possible. And humans are inefficient, so why do humanoids? We need a modular robotics platform backed by a big player/operating system

Having interviewed at a few industrial robotics startups, I am concerned a bit for the short-term future of industrial robotics. Lots of companies by founders who have no real robotics experience, who seem to have lots of funding with no real customer base.

Not to long ago I interviewed with an embodied AI company who's founders were from the Google DNS team and had no real robotics experience. They were obsessed with graph theory which, while cool, is solved problem in the context of robotics and their startup. Another pitched itself as advanced AI but was just a camera and YOLO object detection. I worry there is going to be a harsh market readjustment.

> We have affordances on the cart that lower the cognitive load. [...] In comparison, the state of the art is that people have scan guns, and on their wrists are tiny screens with character-based software—it’s ’80s or ’90s technology emulated on an Android device. They have to read that to know what bin number, what thing to do.

Which means the literate person will get fired and replaced with an illiterate, because all the robot needs is a compliant gripping tool.

Why would that be better?

"It’s much easier to fund the promise than a real business, because real businesses have limitations on how fast they can grow. Whereas if you don’t know, you can live (and fund) the dream."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo

Says the guy whose robot vacuums only now don't drag dog shit across your house in a robotic square dance purely because they now have a camera that uses AI to detect such things.

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

"Rodney: That's why I'm skeptical of the Tesla taxi system. At the last earnings call, Elon said they're going to have safety drivers in the Teslas and they're hiring remote drivers. It's sort of a charade.

Rodney: I model myself as a realist. I've lived through so many hype cycles in AI. They weren't as big in public as this one, but they were brutal amongst AI practitioners. The arguments were strong and deeply held-screaming matches would happen. I've seen that happen again and again. Neural is ascendant at the moment, but neural was ascendant four or five times before and then got crushed. Something else took over, came back.

You can see that in agentic AI. [OpenAI promotion of "agentic AI" is currently on HN front page, directly adjacent to this submission.^1] Now suddenly everyone's got agent-based AI. They didn't have it six months ago. I suspect it's a little more marketing than reality. But when was the first paper on agentic AI published? It was in 1959 by Oliver Selfridge. There's been agent-based systems-SOAR, there's been lots. They come and go, all these ideas, and they get improved every time they come back. I'm not saying it's stupid, I'm just saying as someone who's been involved, it is not just the shiny new thing. This thing that looks shiny now may not be so shiny in a few years."

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45416080

I really enjoyed this interview.

I didn't know that much about Dr. Brooks. Seems like a really practical, capable chap.

He also looks a lot like Asimov (at least, in that photo).

How many years were they on the market before they added a dust buster to the dock? 3-4?

Aren't iRobots really not that clever and maybe can be improved with LLMs?

I have a Roomba 980 that I scored off a rich neighbor for $50. It cleans well, makes nice parallel lines on the floor and reliably does not get stuck. I can be out of the house, push the button for it to clean, and will always come back to a clean floor and a charging Roomba. Can't imagine wanting much more.

I've retired mine in favor of a Switchbot. Battery was tired and the cost of a new one is 1/3 the price of a new one so I got this K10.

At first I've liked it but the bruise rotor is already making rattling noises. It advertised itself as Matter compatible but I had to buy a hub thing to integrate it in HomeKit.

Worst thing it relies on Chinese servers for its metrics. I got China blocked on my router due to reasons so I can't check the status of the parts without leaving my wifi. I already bought a box of 1 year replacement parts for this but I'm getting rid of it as soon as I can.

The 980 was top of the line, and it was also quite expensive when it was new. No wonder it still works quite well (and being so old, it still supports stuff like maps and voice control).

I think they're just as smart as they need to be, and no smarter :)

What mechanism are you envisioning here?

iRobots were intended to clean up slop, not create more of it.

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