Hacker News Reader

Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

Try threading a nut onto a bolt. Pay attention to how your fingers feel when the threads engage properly and you aren't cross-threading it.

Next, insert a Standard screwdriver into a screw head, set the screw in place, and screw it in. In order to make it work, you have to push and torque it at the same time, and not let the blade slip out of the hole or damage the screw head.

If you think this is easy, try to teach a kid to do it. Watch them struggle to control the nut and the screwdriver.

Our hands are really, really good at both major motor control and very fine motor control.

View on HN

For some nuts and bolts, I myself struggle with it, almost to the point of giving up.

But what the article misses: We can just rearrange our environment to make it easy to interact with by robots. There might be only standardized nuts and bolts, with IDs imprinted so the robots know exactly how to apply them. Dishes might come in certified robot-known dimensions, or with invisible marks on where to best grip them. Matchsticks might be replaced by standardized gas lighters. Maybe robot companies will even sell those themselves.

Yep, this is what I reckon will be tried too. But then making that robot environment safe for humans to be in will be quite a tough problem.

I imagine things will just be very unified and boring because the same shapes will be recognizable everywhere. But it would be the same things we already have. Just make the robot weak and light enough to not even be able to harm someone. Lighting the kitchen on fire is always a risk though, I guess.

Once the humans in question have paid off the 7 year loan to remodel their kitchen, the real question is what further value do they add to the proposition?

I wasnt thinking Kitchen so much as Data Centre, a lot of whom are already unfriendly to human life, adding 300kg robots, and parts designed for robot interaction are just going to make them even moreso.

Imagine an IKEA robot, they could redesign their kitchens to fit it, as well as all of their other products. I'd never step into my kitchen again so why would it need to be made for me anyways?

(They could give the robot instructions on how to set up their furniture as well, the business plan really writes itself)

It’s only a stopgap measure. And maybe that explains why autonomous robots in space struggle so much: we first need to adapt space to robot (joke)

Standards are good, but then how about you take up pottery and make a plate yourself and now your robot won’t handle them…

You can do pottery in VR if you want.

That's a great idea actually!

An example that came to my mind: squeezing fruit juice requires a lot of dexterity. But if we sold pre-chopped fruit bits in a standardized satchet, then robots could easily squeeze the delicious and healthy fruit juice from those! And health-conscious people drink fruit juice every day, so this could easily be made into a subscription-based service! A perfect business model right there. You could call it iJuice or juice.ai or even Juicero.

I spent last night bemoaning the sad internet culture of negativity and sarcasm and hatred... But this post made me laugh.

If HN sold the ability to buy more upvotes they would have all my money for this comment.

I can rent them to you. Contact us for pricing today!

(Do not ask about our burst pricing though, it usually screws up the deal)

Fully autonomous vehicles will never reach maximum reliability, speed, and efficiency either until we eliminate human drivers, pedestrians, stoplights, buildings, and pave the entire surface of the planet.

And for maximum safety, we'll need physical barriers that prevent the vehicles from leaving their designated path. The easiest way to do this, in my opinion, would be to put a special type of wheel on the vehicle. The wheels would have a flange on the perimeter, and the road surface could have a groove that the flange fits into, thus preventing the vehicle from veering off outside its prescribed lane. This would actually provide such tight control on the vehicles' lateral movement, that it would become possible to connect several vehicles front to back, in a sort of autonomous convoy, which is pretty cool IMO!

Yeah. Also, please refrain from reaching maximum speed and efficiency of the transportation system alone.

That's not an important goal. The important goal is to optimize the life of the people that use the lines, not artificial measures taken from just looking at the machines running in them.

Wait, what if we put them on tracks and they had predetermined stations they stopped at?

Dead end. You can't redesign and replace the entire world.

It's the same issue as self-driving cars: universal worker robots have to either learn to use the same things humans do, or never leave the labs.

We changed the world for combustion cars, why not for self-driving cars?

Typically the world changes when a new market is discovered, making the earth more traversable by car at the time opened up enough of a new market that it was done post haste for better or for worse. The only real way I see self-driving cars opening up markets at a scale that they would justify the amount of overhead is if they created self-driving only lanes with infrastructure closely around them to be quick and easily accessible from the passengers.

Which at that point is really just the Japanese train system and surrounding infrastructure, which many places (at least in the US) don't seem capable or willing to make happen.

Combustion cars were already usable even on the roads built for horse drawn carriages - they were, in fact, adapted to the existing world.

They even ran on things like firewood, coal, or, for the first ICEs, relatively common liquid fuels that could be sourced in large cities.

Cars rely on gas stations today - but gas stations only became a thing after cars already became a thing.

Nowadays, Tesla had to make Superchargers happen all by themselves before EVs could really happen - despite EVs already having the crushing advantage of being able to charge overnight in any garage that has power.

Can you see a robot company branching out to be a competitor to McDonalds to prove that their kitchen robot is viable if you design the entire kitchen for it? Well, it's not entirely impossible, but I think it unlikely.

Yes, I can see restaurants easily adopting an entire robot-friendly kitchen if it means robots can handle dish-handling and repetitive cooking tasks.

From that to every manufacturer adopting the standard on every product, independently of the client you just need some competition on their market. I dunno if there is any, but it's not a lot.

If all a robot does is take a package and throw it into the microwave why don't I just save a trip to the "restaurant" and eat at home?

I have no idea how you came from my comment to that idea. But nothing is stopping the chef from just throwing your food into the microwave today, so I don't see what change you are complaining about either.

There's a huge practicality issue for the chef. They don't have the food in microwavable format for many dishes.

But to me thats the end state of this conversation. Like lets take shipping as an example, we came up with pallets and containers not because they're useful for a person to move but because they're helpful for robots (and analogs) to move. People aren't born with palletjacks for hands. So to me it seems as you add more robotics into the kitchen you're going to slowly change your supplies to arrive in more robotic form.

While in Europe earlier I learned that BYD had to make hybrids for the European market since their charging infastructure isn't quite there.

Your comment is actually lagging behind reality. There is a manufacturer of kitchen robots that opened a fully functional demo fast food joint: https://misorobotics.com/CaliExpress/

How so? roads were already dimensioned for horses, motorways for tanks. Most major change had industry (shipping, logistics etc) or military backing.

We changed the main purpose of roads to be for cars

https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2022/11/08/happy-bi...

Yeah bit we didn't change the world, and we didn't add roads. We just refused the existing ones, building out as necessary.

Only if you think a road back then is the same as a road now.

We changed the layout, the material, added guardrails and guide posts etc.

That's exactly what we've been doing since the industrial revolution.

Step in a car factory, plenty of robots but none of them are humanoids. We redesigned the whole factory around specialized robots, rather than have humanoids on a Ford-like moving assembly line.

So you want to turn your home into the equivalent of a car factory, where everything is designed to be handled by robots? I don't think many people would want to live in such a home.

But the reengineering of assembly lines has targeted speed and cost of assembly, not so much automation. Robots do have a role in manufacturing, but I think it's a relatively small fraction of the whole. AFAIK, most part makers don't rely on automation, and even though final assembly has had greater success, it's still far from as adaptable as humans are.

GM's Saturn was relatively early in that space but it didn't scale up anywhere as well as they had hoped. Likewise, Tesla went there 30 years later, but IIRC, they too experienced myriad difficulties building reliable automated manufacturing processes.

If automation among makers were ready for prime time, the work would have migrated to countries with the cheapest power and fastest mobility while ignoring labor costs. AFAIK, that still hasn't happened.

Not the entire world but maybe enough of it.

I mean, think about the batshit idea of raiway transport in Europe. Like trains sound nice in principle, sure, it works on the scale of a mine or a shipyard to move things around, but using that to travel between all major cities (and even most villages) and countries all over? It would require laying thousands and thousands of kilometers of train tracks.

Or introducing electricity and phone lines, public lighting, and adopting various standards, metrification, putting road signage everywhere, etc. etc.

We've done a lot of large scale transformations. But to kickstart the process, robots need to be "good enough" without these infrastructure changes, and then people will see it and want the change. You can't start speculatively. It has to work first, and offer to work better if there is more infra standardization.

The 50’s called and wants all its mechanical lever-actuated extendo arm-clasps back!

Joking aside, the present always has a tangential future that never comes to be. Right now the current zeerust is “AI and robots doing everything”. Continuing to have humans do it is good enough.

> Maybe robot companies will even sell those themselves.

They will sell them so only their robots can use them.

This is exactly the kinda shit Nietzsche was referring to when he talked about humanity giving up our humanity to better serve machines instead of making machines that better serve humanity.

Aren't the nuts and bolts part of the machine?

Nietzsche and his whole philosophy are stupid, wrong, and ontologically evil. His whole philosophy is poorly reacting to the great ideas of Philipp Mainlanders “the philosophy of redemption”. Philip mainlander and Aruther Schopenhauer were correct in their philosophical pessimism and actual nihilism and nietzschian radical optimism is what motivates nearly all modern totalitarian, fascist, and authoritarian movements.

The only good thing nietzsche produced was the “Wall-E” movie from Pixar, which is a radically nietzschian film.

There's more to Nietzsche than "master and slave morality". I'm a big Nietzsche hater too but you're wrong to dismiss the rest of his work because of one part of it. He's incredibly influential in philosophy to this day, for good reason.

E.g. you can look into Deleuze's reading of his work, which focuses on the continuity from Spinoza and the analysis of ethics from a perspective of capabilities rather than obligations (as in the Kantian framing).

Or more directly, read about the idea of eternal recurrence, which I find to be an incredibly pro-, not anti-, human concept.

I dismissed him over his radical optimism. You claimed I dismissed him over master-slave morality. We are not the same. Also I’ve covet to cover read all of his work. Almost all of it is trash and ontologically bad.

You try to quote fashionable nonsense charlatan grifters like deleuze as though they are worth reading a single word of. Their works, the people who read them, and the entire field of critical theory are direct reasons for the rise of trump and right wing authoritarianism world wide.

Kill critical theory or its hateful children will kill us all

But instead you patronize me by acting like I don’t read. This mentality is why the world collectively hates leftists right now.

Haha you're going to be in strange company claiming to hate ""leftists"" and Nietzsche at the same time. Who, might I ask, do you consider "ontologically good"? Do you believe in a God that could provide such content, or is this just your own definition of what that entails? Ironically enough, between that and your seeming rejection of all prior moral philosophies, it sounds like you're operating quite in line with Nietzsche's actual recommendations -- which is far more than I could say about myself, given my rather more religious tendencies.

> But instead you patronize me by acting like I don’t read.

Rather quaint to be upset about this given the bucket of assumptions you yourself made in the comment above.

elaborate please?

I'd be willing to wear clothes that have ultraviolet stripes and QR codes on them if a laundry robot can fold them for me.

That will fail rather quickly if the robot is trying to repair something dirty.

I've thought about this with roads and automated driving--today automated driving seems somewhat insane because, even if the system can do the right thing on the overwhelming majority of roads, there is an enormously long tail of roadways that have surprises that these systems will not have encountered and automated systems can't easily handle. In the future, it may seem insane that we would allow roads to be built that aren't accommodating of automated driving systems (or maybe we will just develop AI that is not simply "pattern recognition" but which can actively solve somewhat "complex" problems?).

The article doesn't miss it -- this is exactly the point. We can and will rearrange our environment to support robots, but that means they will never learn dexterity.

That plan sounds viable until you consider how much noncompliant legacy hardware is out there that can't all be replaced but must be repaired, like cars, roofs, appliances, HVAC, electrical, plumbing, etc. If robots can't accommodate the huge fraction of old infrastructure already in place, they'll have limited value indeed -- basically just working on assembly lines in factories.

In New Zealand there are rules, and more extensive guidelines, on "disabled access". (Probably called something different now)

But it means that access to publicly accessible places is possible for a wide variety of disabilities

I wonder if that would help robotic access? For example you do not need to grip and turn a knob to open a door, they should all be levers.

> But what the article misses: We can just rearrange our environment...

The article does discuss this...

    change how things are done in order to automate them away from human labor

What boosters of humanoid robots specifically do not want to do

I have thought up a HOLY GRAIL test for physical AI. "Open a door given a keyring". It involves vision, dexterity, understanding of physical constraints etc. I find it insane that our hands do this so casually.

Can you explain in more detail (doors vary massively, as do keyrings)

While I have no opinion on the "holy grail" part, I think them varying massively is the point.

A lot of locks require a bit of finesse as well, like pulling the door towards you or pulling the key out just the right amount, which would be an interesting challenge. Especially if the technique isn't known ahead of time. Given enough time (and frustration), people can generally figure the "finesse" aspect out for a lock.

I've been outsmarted by a door more than once in my life.

We actually have notes taped on two of our doors, with instructions of how to get the locks to line up depending on the season. Another door requires a hard shove during the summer, and a slight pull back during the winter. Someday we'll replace that door with a metal door and get it framed nicely. But we've been saying that for 12 years!

> But we've been saying that for 12 years!

Welcome, fellow traveler!

So many repliers have seemed to miss the truly hard part i.e. "keyring" it has many keys and the robot needs to see, recognize and juggle the keyring to only push the correct key in the hole. A human can do this so easily with a single hand

https://generalrobots.substack.com/p/benjies-humanoid-olympi... "Use a key", about halfway down

Quite similar to the "coffee test" of Steve Wozniak.

I have to rattle the key around a bit in the lock to get the lock to turn. Good luck designing a robot to figure out it needs to rattle the key in a certain way. Or to realize that the door needs to be pulled or pushed a bit while turning the key, so the bolt doesn't jam in the door jamb.

One of my doors needs to be pulled upwards in order to open/close it. (Due to slowly pulling the doorframe out of alignment over time.)

Both those tasks require very fine force-feedback perception, instantly mapped to multiple possible scenarios that could be happening inside those metal parts. E.g. does it feel like I have crossed the threads, or is there a bit of rust? Let me twist just a bit more, but gently, to find out.

We said the same thing about language to be honest- the nuances of words and concepts are too hard for a word generator to correctly put together and now we have LLMs. We said the same thing about video generation where the nuances of light and shadow and micro expressions would be hard to replicate and LLMs are doing a pretty good job with that. We’re just waiting for physical LLMs, it will happen at some point.

As another poster pointed out, nobody has been able to remotely duplicate the sensors in our fingers.

I don’t think it needs to be all that complicated for the vast majority of things. It might not be able to twirl a pen around its fingers but it should be able to hold one and write something.

Yeah, tactile stuff could be described as a dark data stream that only animals have access to. I'm talking about nerve endings. You can't get that wealth of data from any mix of sensors. Lidar and accelerometers can't tell cold from hot, lumpy from smooth.

Meanwhile, I watched a cat today jump off a 4 meter high trellis and onto the top of a 2 meter high fence rail no wider than my hand, and I thought, how can we not marvel at something that's obviously so much more advanced at navigating its environment than we are?

> lidar and accelerometers can't tell cold from hot, lumpy from smooth.

Not those. There are other sensors. Tactile sensors exist. Lumpy and smooth can be distinguished. They are still rudimentary, but there is nothing fundamental blocking progress here. Roughness, squishiness, temperature, all well measurable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com