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Comment by johnsmith1840 | Hacker News Reader

I think yes but on different categories. First one I imagine is robotics control and support.

"This robot is having trouble folding a tshirt help it out for 1$"

Unless they go the waymo route of highly trusted people but I think mass deployed robots are a bit safer than a car for this.

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Giving out control of industrial machinery that interacts in the human environment without the physical interlocks (i.e. humanoid robots in a house) to random internet people seems like a problem.

I can imagine a carefully orchestrated plot to assassinate someone by having an embedded agent in the task delegation pool command the laundry bot to punch the target's head off their shoulders.

Giving out control of such things to LLMs is already complete madness, so once the first pleasure bot powered by Grok has dismembered a few thousand users, they'll get sophisticated safety mechanisms.

Though like as not you're still going to be right, after all, Stuxnet happened.

I’m really not happy that you’ve put the idea of Musk fuckbots into my head.

I'm envious of the time you spend where it wasn't already.

"Robot are the commands you have been given dangerous?"

"You cannot control legs for this task"

"You have 1 min for this task"

"You can only make suggestions for this task"

Anonymize identity best you can.

That's not that scary.

giving out unrestricted control that is. in the example of Waymo, a human can control some aspects of the car manually, but it can never override low level obstacle detection or say open the trunk/door when the car is moving.

I'd watch that movie

Why does a laundry folding bot have to have the physical strength to be able to kill somebody?

The principle of least privilege has been a hard learned lesson in cybersecurity. Why do we again need to first go through disasters to re-learn it in the physical world?

If a general-purpose humanoid robot has the strength to perform human actions at human speed, it will have that much torque in the motors. If it didn't, it can only move very slowly and/or jerkily. You need fast, high-torque feedback to stabilise the physical control system, especially if the robot is supposed to be able to lift and manipulate objects.

The idea here is Optimus-type robots that can do everything like a human and therefore don't need special infrastructure, as opposed to dedicated, immobile low-torque, low-velocity robots specifically for, say, laundry.

You can layer a safety system on top of the raw motor control but it's very complicated to define what is and isn't safe, especially when you consider what the robot is holding (and what it THINKS it is holding), where the robot is (or thinks it is) at the time, what is around it (what it thinks is about it) and so on.

Which isn't a robot-specific problem. Humans spend years learning how to subconsciously safely interact with their environment and even then fuck it up sometimes. What is robot-specific is being made of metal and having the "safe hand velocity within 10cm of a human head" function bypass be one bug or OTA update away.

Yeah so maybe a general purpose humanoid robot in your home with autonomous decision making power that can kill you is just not rhe best idea.

People only want to run Claude in Sandbod. Understandable. Seeing Optimus roam in their household would be rather surprising.

This is what I meant by full stack AI companies. I don't think you could get humans into the loop fast enough if they didn't have some idea of the type of task involved. I don't want people to be asked to fold a tshirt one moment and do a difficult traffic merge the next.

warioware shows it can be fun though but i'd indeed not like to see that applied to safety-critical tasks

There is training systems and validation of skills in mturk iirc: for tshirt folding, you'd be given fake setups to be able to get used to controlling the robot, if you can't do it, you won't ever get assignments to do it. For traffic overrides, you'd be tested on having correct knowledge, and once again given supervised tasks to show you can actually be trusted (and there would be safety systems, elevating tasks that can't be performed at your level to people who can, etc)

The worker needs to do a bunch to opt into any given work group, which makes the (lack of) payments extremely unreasonable on top of everything else

It doesn't really matter what you want though, only what CEOs want and that's low costs. I can see a combined shirt folding/traffic merging platform taking off.

CEOs are loser nobodies. Real influence is with owners, boards, investors.

Mostly they don't care as much as CEOs think they care

but call center are still mostly single client even though it would be cheaper for any worker to be able to answer to any call. So clearly the expertise and context trade off is too big to be worthwhile

You misinterpret "want" here. My intuition is that you create huge problems for people context switching like this repeatedly for quick tasks.

That's a remarkable idea. It could be heavily gamified, it could train models, and it might actually be mentally stimulating since you'd be facing different situations all the time.

Except, I'm a grown adult and I can't fold a t-shirt properly

It could require listing your credentials to get you the proper tasks: doctor, lawyer, or tshirt folder

There are already robotics models that can fold shirts and similar just fine. Progress in VLA models is good, I don't think this would form the foundation of a business. Humanoid robots are going to be another ChatGPT, it's going to seem to happen almost overnight because people aren't paying attention to the underlying research papers.

Any papers you'd recommend?

Most progress in data-driven robotics nowadays are done either in unicorn startups or corporate research labs - so you should follow the industry more than academia. The path to good robot performance isn't really in the models themselves - it's highly dependent on how much you can gather high-quality real-life data.

Specifically for laundry folding, Sunday Robotics is probably the state of the art, where they were able to obtain 99.1% success rate and call it "done": https://www.sunday.ai/blog/act-2-preview#solve-standard

If their hero image video and the side by side at (5x) with a human at quote "1x" are "solved" I'm not impressed. I'm faster and more accurate and I am the worst folder in my house (kids included). The human looks like they are doing it slow mo to show children how to.

Nah, there's an obvious reason figure made splashy announcement of people cleaning homes with recording devices strapped to their heads.

Chatgpt had the internet.

Robots do not. Translating video is promising but obviously not enough.

Robots will likely never "explode" like chatgpt. They're gonna be a slow long term project requiring massive capitol to get the data.

There are already a number of companies providing RLHF and SFT services for AI providers that does a lot of validation/prequalification of people that'd be well placed to take on tasks like that, but the big problem to solve would be latency if you don't have people contracted to carry out a task right now.

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