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Comment by nomel | Hacker News Reader

> needed to match human performance.

This is not a remotely a real world requirement for them to be useful, and for them to sell like crazy.

Isn't it? The whole promise if humanoid robots is replacing humans in a human-centered environment. Instead of specialized hardware or modifying the existing process, just drop a robot in place of a human, bam, done. Otherwise, what's the point?

The point is that even if they do something 3x slower and maybe capable of 1/100 tasks they can still this do task 24/7, without holiday and never sick, they can also have more strength e.g in construction.

My smart vacuum is more dump than me when wiping floor and much slower than be but still greatly useful.

The problem - robots do break, they need constant maintenance, repair, and replacement (especially the smaller ones like the humanoids), and can go wrong in all sorts of situations. The costs for robot maintenance largely depend on the reliability of hardware and that should be included in the ROI calculation (which almost no one is doing right now)

that's the thing, what's the appeal of humanoid robots then? why not something more fit to the task? imagine if your roomba had legs because well that's what a human uses to move around when cleaning

Accessibility and a single chassis that does the vast majority of things. Even if they're never as fully dexterous as the average human (doubt it) they're still as dexterous as a somewhat handicapped human, which is already clearly enough to function decently in most of society and is far from useless.

If you want several bots all custom built to specific tasks, go for it. That will happen too. But a generalist has value of its own.

> imagine if your roomba had legs

That would probably be an improvement. Floors are designed for people, and may have several levels. An ideal vacuum would probably look something like a centipede.

Anyway, the appeal would be that it can perform several tasks. It doesn't need to perform all the tasks a human can to fulfill that.

They don't need to be anywhere near as efficient or effective as me, they just need to be able to do it unattended. Roomba is a great example - it's great to be able to have floors cleaned every day while I'm working, even if it takes 10x longer to do so. If a robot could do laundry while I work, put away the dishes from the dishwasher in the morning, and mow my lawn while I'm BBQ'ing, it's a life changer.

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