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Comment by fooker | Hacker News Reader

The bottleneck is not really the intelligence here.

We can build robots that do the things you want. Arrange a visit to Amazon's robot warehouse tour.

We can't ship them because they break all the time with current technology. It would be a tough sell to have to being in a 100kg robot for servicing every few weeks.

This was cars in the first several decades of automobiles. The tide shifted as soon as you could just drive the car to a neighborhood dealership for servicing. It's fun to imagine the logistics of that for robots but the material science and engineering has to advance a bit.

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Just have two robots, and teach them to service each other. Problem solved!

Only sort of kidding, tbh having bots service themselves (and being intentionally made in a way that they can service each other) just makes a lot of sense.

An automated service station could be quite compact; it wouldn't need plumbing, lighting, human-comfortable climate control. Parts can be modular, and when a station gets low on spare parts, a self-driving truck could come by to pick up damaged parts and drop off replacements.

We're not there yet, but I think we're a lot closer than most people realize.

This is kinda terrifying from an AI apocalypse angle, though.

It almost feels like "A robot shall not autonomously build or repair another robot" should have been another of Asimov's laws.

Really? All you need to do to stop this is to stop governments from hiring robot "labor". Surely a democracy can make that decision, even when it means paying a little bit more, no?

Just need a third one for when the second one breaks while servicing the broken first robot.

I don't think we can build a robot that takes a pile of crumpled up clothes from the dryer and folds them (reliably without destroying any of them).

I think the parent's point - and what I more or less agree with - is that the problem is the hardware.

Human arms and hands are incredibly intricate. Reproducing their facility with hardware requires a large number of actuators and finicky fine parts. This isn't a software problem. Industry solves it with maintenance schedules.

There's probably nothing in your house that has as many moving parts as a robot needs. Your car maybe, and pretty much all it does is rotate wheels.

That's part of it but OP presented it as a solved problem but the hardware is expensive/unreliable.

That's not the case. I've seen folding robots. They require standardized input, only fold one type of clothing and don't do it reliably.

Yes we can do this, and if you look for it you'll find plenty of videos of this happening.

But you can't buy it because it'll break in about seven days.

What breaks?

I am trying to understand in your view what are the parts that actually breaks and what kind of improvement we would need.

Robot vacuums are massively simpler and they fucking break all the time. Wheel motors or their position sensors, belts, plastic gears, contacts that corrode, a circuit board someone decided to not comformally coat and a cat puked on it...

My roomba (Rosie) is going strong 8 years in. It’s just the bump into everything vacuum only kind but it gets the job done for my 900 sqft apartment

Not an expert on this.

Passing on what I have heard from robotics researchers at lunch conversations.

My impression is that any moving part that is not an electric motor or an hinge breaks.

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