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Comment by ben_w | Hacker News Reader

> The entirety of human civilization is human shaped.

That's the marketing pitch.

A plumbing robot doesn't need to be humanoid, an octopus shape may well be better for all the awkward corners. A robot police officer could be the municipality itself for sensory nodes (essentially the sales pitch of Flock etc.), plus some drones or robot dogs to perform arrests*.

The robot vacuum cleaners and lawnmowers we already have are nothing like a human. A robot taxi driver can be just the car. Robot dogs are already used for maintenance and security sweeps.

If you've got wheelchair access, you've got wheeled robot access. If you've got guide dog access, you've got access for Boston Dynamics' Spot.

* this may be a bad idea with current robotics, but I aver it's not improved by making those robotics humanoid.

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You are not understanding what humanoid robots are about. Those are specialist robots you are describing. The promise is of course one robot that can do the plumbing, clean your house, do the dishes, build a house, and basically every physical job a human can do. It's extreme lly likely that at least a somewhat humanoid shape is required for that.

Humans are really bad at everything we do compared to the specialized creatures in nature, it’s just that we can do many things that sets us apart. A humanoid robot is incredibly dumb for that reason. At least add a set of arms and legs and 360 vision. And obviously dislocated joints than can move freely and hands should have two thumbs and more fingers.

It’s not hard to come up with a bunch of improvements for humans, it’s just that making robots in our image is a lot more trivial because you only have to solve for those same averages attributes that we have.

Adding arms and 360 vision is not free. Look at octopi with their insane nervous system required to support their tentacle. The one who wins is not the one that makes the best robot ever. The one who wins is the one who builds a robot that can do the most, while being the cheapest.

> Adding arms and 360 vision is not free.

Vision is hard regardless of the angle, but scaling it from a normal camera to 360° doesn't add much cost or difficulty once you've done the hard part of turning pixels into a suitable latent space.

> Look at octopi with their insane nervous system required to support their tentacle.

500 million neurons across the whole animal, brain included. We'll only know the synapse count when someone does a full connectome scan of one, but based on the vague estimates I see with a quick search, their whole mind is less complex than a SotA LLM today.

> The one who wins is the one who builds a robot that can do the most, while being the cheapest.

This is a reason for specialists, not generalists.

A literal Swiss army knife is a perfectly reasonable thing to own, but you don't want to hire a builder who only has that and nothing else, not even if it's the silly model: https://www.vintageknives.nl/p/wenger-giant-swiss-army-knife...

The best container ship is a terrible pleasure yacht, and vice versa. You use container ships pretty much constantly, even though you (almost certainly) don't own one, by the power of indirection. You can rent a pleasure yacht as desired without owning own.

In both cases, the cheap option is to use the right tool for the right job, rather than to take a holiday on the Hanoi Express and get your next international shipment delivered by this: https://www.boattrader.com/boat/1996-hatteras-82-convertible...

I will ignore the insane comparison between neurons and LLMs. But

> This is a reason for specialists, not generalists.

Precisely not. The amount of work a human can do is basically unenumerable. Requiring a specialist for each task will quickly run up costs to be completely unreasonable.

> I will ignore the insane comparison between neurons and LLMs. But

Please don't.

I mean, you yourself specifically said to "Look at octopi with their insane nervous system", and that's exactly what I'm doing and my conclusion is "doesn't look that bad compared to what else we do now".

Also note that I expressly noted that synapses, not neurons, are the important factor in parameter count.

> The amount of work a human can do is basically unenumerable.

https://www.bls.gov/ooh/a-z-index.htm

> Requiring a specialist for each task will quickly run up costs to be completely unreasonable.

The existence of specialists in professional settings proves this claim false.

As does the existence of special-purpose robots, all the way down to injection moulds designed for one specific part, which overall make the end product cheaper, a process which probably started with whoever invented whichever came first of the wind or water powered grain mill.

Much of the economic gain of the industrial revolution was replacing the very expensive salaries of general-purpose humans with machines that, despite being extremely single-purpose and having high purchase and maintenance costs, were still cheaper than the wages of the huge number of humans needed for equal output.

Since the industrial revolution we have been the species that makes tools even though it sometimes also uses slavery, not the species that relies on slaves and has tools for decorative reasons.

My octopus will outperform your humanoid by doing the dishes, fixing the plumbing, and preparing a Caesar salad, all at the same time!

Yeah. Can't wait to see three or four armed robots. Or five or six!

How do you train a robot to use three hands effectively when we only have two? Then again, why is the robot limited to being one robot? If two humanoid robots are in the same area, they don't have to be distinctly controlled. If they're both controlled by the same AI, a third arm on one body is the same as that arm being attached to another body.

Ah, but my "five guys" will outperform your one octopus!

Things you need to take into account that you've almost certainly glossed over:

Safety. Human-robot interactions are generally dangerous and avoided, unless the robot is specifically designed to interact with people. In those cases you often sacrifice speed, strength, and flexibility for safety and softness. Having someone come in with a specialized plumbing robot makes sense, you owning one probably doesn't, and you owning a generalize android capable of plumbing makes less sense still.

Cost. The more compact, complex, and interactive your robot is the more it costs. Make a strong, compact, complex robot safe for interactions with people in the wild is non-trivial and adds costs. The software required to do all of this is hypothetical, but obviously also costly.

Need. I understand the dream of a robot to do whatever you want is very much part of our culture, but when you consider the downsides do you really need it? I don't need a plumber living in my house any more than I need a carpenter or a landscaper to live on premises. At most these are services I would need occasionally or on a schedule. I also doubt my need for them will overlap much, unless we're talking about building a new dwelling.

So why do I need a generalist in my life that's going to cost more than you can imagine, when the means to hire existing human generalists is cheap, quick, and frankly less likely to accidentally punch a hole in you.

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