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Comment by tootie | Hacker News Reader

I have a few thoughts. Number one is that humanoid robots are probably a dead end. It's movie stuff. It makes me think of Henry Ford saying customers want "faster horses". It is the fault of evolution that we don't have wheels but we don't have to repeat that mistake.

Secondly I think robot butlers are a bridge too far. The article explains pretty well why the spatial reasoning is problematic but so would things like battery life. And there'd be zero margin for error. The first time a robot steps on someone's cat or, god forbid, baby there will be a massive backlash. They have to be perfect. We accept LLMs hallucinating once in a while but a physical robot in your home cannot ever be wrong.

I think if we want to pilot autonomous robots it will be factory floors and other rote tasks. Maybe installing solar fields or something. Let them achieve a perfect safety record in someplace with more risk tolerance then take the next step.

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> It is the fault of evolution that we don't have wheels but we don't have to repeat that mistake.

With wheels you can't climb up a steep mountain. Hands and feet allow to hold tight.

With wheels you can't hold as much. Feet can be used as a replacement for an arm for some functions when arms are broken.

If a wheel is partially broken it's close to impossible to use. If a foot is broken I can walk on heel or toes only and bypass some issue.

It's not the best solution for many things, but the flexibility is a big win.

That flexibility isn't needed with machines, though. I can have many machines, I can replace machines, ... so I can optimize for the use case.

And sometimes the use case might be to simulate a human to trick instincts, which recognize "humans" subconciously. Be it in health care or be it an army of machine soldiers walking towards an enemy.

Have you ever seen an ATV? You can absolutely drive up a mountain without roads on wheels. Or treads. Also nobody is buying a robot to walk up a mountain. They will spend all their time indoors or on paved roads.

The evolutionary mistake that allowed us to walk on our feet and use our hands enabled us to build tools, conquer our environment and tackle hard problems. A humanoid robot provides a good blueprint for creating a robot that can do anything.

A solar field robot can only do one thing. A humanoid robot with a software model that allows it to install solar fields and then switch to a new model is a much more compelling use case. Eventually you're going to run out of solar fields to install, then you need a solar field repair bot, a solar field cleaning bot, etc. General purpose robots that can switch models to perform different tasks is not a dead end, but definitely a very hard problem.

> I think if we want to pilot autonomous robots it will be factory floors and other rote tasks. Maybe installing solar fields or something. Let them achieve a perfect safety record in someplace with more risk tolerance then take the next step.

No, these autonomous robots will be used by the military as soldiers. There will be no attempt to achieve a "perfect safety record". These soldiers are already here, pay attention to what is happening in Ukraine.

The conversation is about humanoid robots, not wheeled/tracked objects with a gun or carrying cargo.

We have had remote controlled objects like this in various forms going back to WW2 and a few instances before. A wireless/fiber/starlink connection was added recently making them more robust. This is not a humanoid because they don't make sense from a power/weight carrying/so many other perspectives.

The only thing unique to the Ukrainian situation is the widescale usage.

I'm saying they will not be in homes until they have a perfect safety record. But no, it's not a constraint for other applications. And yes, military bots all roll or fly. No humanoids.

> Number one is that humanoid robots are probably a dead end.

Our shape is very flexible.

It's probably not the end-all most flexible format out there, but whatever format we end up with will probably be more similar to a human than to a 6df robotic arm mounted on a car. (It will probably have legs, for a start, not wheels.)

I'd wager we just end up with multiple models for different roles. If we get a multipurpose bot it will be a rolling trash can with multiple arms.

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