Inventor who encouraged Elon Musk to make Optimus says most humanoid robots today are 'terrifying' Scott LaValley, founder and CEO of Cartwheel Robotics, suspects he may have helped encourage Elon Musk to get into the humanoid robot business. The pendulum is so pegged toward these robots as tools, and as a way of performing tasks and augmenting human labor in a lower-cost way that may or may not be more efficient – to be …
Is literally the only plausible market for a humanoid robot.
All actual functions are far better handled by something stationary, wheeled or tracked.
It's basic physics. Any bipedal machine is always going to be objectively worse, as it's spending a huge amount of energy and complexity just staying upright before even starting the task.
There's a reason humans generally like to sit down...
"There's a reason humans generally like to sit down..."
Understandable. It's all rather overwhelming... Everything really. Actually I think it calls for a wee lie down.
So this chap reckons the various Sirius Cybernetics wannabes with which we are afflicted ought to alter focus from trying to produce the killer robots from Krikket† and concentrate on "your plastic pal who is fun to be with®?"
At least the former would be quick if not entirely painless.
† some forgotten godforsaken planet or cricket in Icelandic. Not exactly light years apart in meaning. ®Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.
This, This is why Humanity invented the Wheel.
Wheels don't exist in nature, only because Nature never invented the coaxial slip-ring, for transporting energy (blood) and data (nerves) across a continuously-rotating bearing. (today we have slip-rings that can transport both fluids, power, and data, but I don't think they would be compatible with nerves)
But two legs can be useful, if you are hunting something that is also on two legs.
> Humans invented the wheel
> Nature never invented the coaxial slip-ring
Don't place any bets on that.
Fun how we've always tried to keep claiming that Humans outdid Nature with regards to the Wheel. Nope. Nature has Wheels, many of them.
What we have is The Axle. And, in particular, the Heavy Load Bearing Axle.
Using axles, we've been able to make useful rotary devices at a large range of scales, from watchmaking to open cast mining machines, which have indeed surpassed what Nature has managed (so far, and in the ecosystems that we currently have available). But when we start to look downwards, we spotted the Fabulously Famous Flagellum under the visible light microscope, then all sorts of amazing machinery at the molecular level, which is where Nature absolutely rips us to shreds, cleverness-wise.
> when they should be starting with something simple
The "upstarts" are trying to roll out ludicrously, pointlessly, complicated products, for some weird reason.
Actual robotics firms have been in business for centuries*, gradually improving them as the techniques, materials and mass production of parts improve.
Aha, lookie there, the magic words "mass production", your clue to where you should look if you want to see successful robotics in everyday use. Well, there, and your washing machine; the old one, that went whirr and clunk rather than the one that beeps when it loses the WiFi connection. And anywhere that has a lifting device controlled by a yellow box with one big red button and a few smaller ones; the fewer the number of buttons compared to the number of motions available the "more of a robot it is".
* Yes, I said centuries. You do know about the looms, don't you? And, no, you do NOT need to have modern computers, or even any electronics at all, for it to be a robot, that is just reflecting the current (and not always necessary) trends: when all the robots are controlled by self-renewing organic artificial neurons (just keep the glucose tank topped up) they will be mocking you for claiming that anything using something as crude as "electronics" could ever be called a robot.
There are two excellent reasons for aiming for complicated:
1) It sounds scifi enough to bring in investment.
2) When investors eventually ask "Where is the return on my investment" the answer can honestly be "Not here yet because it's a complicated problem".
AIs need adult supervision to write a story or draw a picture. Young children need adult supervision which is workable because adults are bigger than young children. Imagine letting an AI (less intelligent than a small child) loose with a body as powerful as an adult. I suppose it could be worse. They could put one unsupervised behind the wheel of a car.
Idjit.
They're "terrifying" because they threaten everyday lives and livelihoods so that the Uber Rich can pocket even more of the GDP while shafting people who used to be doing the work (their ultimate dream is, of course, to get rid of the salaried employee on the bottom line of the spreadsheet.)
Robots will not be replacing cheap labour this decade and probably not next decade either. With a huge investment in time and money robotics will gradually improve. I do not expect that improvement to keep up with advances in poverty.
The right direction to look is Tesla. Tesla has a ridiculously huge market capitalisation. There is no way to get an acceptable return on that investment by building cars. A significant proportion of Tesla investors are able to work that out. Instead, Tesla has to convince investors that the company will increase in value with some other product. The promise of robots later fuels Tesla's share price today. That is what cryptocurrencies full self driving humanoid robots are really good at. By the time investors work out that robots are not the answer there will be a different product promising jam tomorrow.
I'm amazed that perpetual stock pumping bullshit is apparently legal in the US provided you don't dump too often.... .....Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck
It is not without its ticking almighty exploding bombe consequences though, Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck, ........ https://www.usdebtclock.org/# ...... with the general global realisation of that very particularly slick tricky dicky piece of peculiarly venal work, the moment of sudden destructive reckoning.
Long runs the fox in the chase but the hounds always get them in the end.
"Robots will not be replacing cheap labour this decade and probably not next decade either. "
Yeeeessss, but. Politicians have been determining that simple jobs such as those in the fast food industry should pay a "living wage". As the wages increase, the ROI on automation starts being more attractive. This means that the people that have learning disabilities will have fewer and fewer opportunities to enter the workforce. I remember when McD's first started installing automated drinks dispensers. The price of the cup is more than the cost of the contents and labor winds up being more than both so a machine makes a lot of sense. I'd love to go to another fast food trade show and see how food choices are changing to items that lend themselves to automation as that's a very logical step rather than trying to build a machine that can assemble everything people are used to today. Fish and Chips might survive intact since with uniform portions, cook times are the same. Sealing up the fryers would also hold heat in better lowering energy costs. An automated chippy could be put in a really small foot print with one or two people in the back to unstick the machines and do the cleaning.
A car factory where there are tight tolerances for things and the combination of human senses can make getting things put together properly will be hard to automate. Elon nearly bankrupted Tesla trying for full automation with the Model 3 right out of the gate. I have a video somewhere with James May, Kate Humble and another presenter I can never remember following a Mini being built over 3 episodes. They touched on automation and BMW has harvested the low hanging fruit and is working on the trickier bits, but many are proving that having humans on the line can still be very valuable.
As a general concept, I have to agree that if everything is automated, it won't matter how inexpensive the products become. Very few will have jobs to earn money to buy them. That's not to say that burying one's head in the sand is going to work. Change is a constant and has to be taken into account. Rate of change is often where problems come about. On "How It's Made" there was a tour of a florescent lamp factory where, maybe, only two or three people are ever seen. The machines were very cool (hot) with automated glass forming, blowing and shaping that was mesmerizing to watch. Every machine had a specific purpose so the factory could work at an incredible level of optimization. A humanoid robot would have no place there. There was no need to any flexibility in functions, which is the only sleight argument for a humanoid form. My view is that if something is worth automating, it's worth building dedicated hardware for it.
Robots will not be replacing cheap labour this decade and probably not next decade either
That's correct but only evaluates one aspect of the proposition, the cost of the robots. What about the cost of the cheap labour?
A robot can work a 24 hour shift. You need 3 cheap people for that and you still have to solve for the weekend, holiday, and sickness.
Inn the UK your already not trying to replace a £25396 salary, you're effectively trying to replace a £76190 salary. Every rider in minimum wage is tripled.
I'm not making a claim that minimum wage rises are a bad thing by the way, only that robots will only get cheaper and today's cheap people more expensive. The cut over comes sooner than you think.
The future of "cheap" labour, and at 25k it's already not really cheap, has a significantly shorter shelf life than you're thinking.
"A robot can work a 24 hour shift."
A robot connected to the mains can work a greater portion of the day, but not 24 hours. Large manufacturers have found it to be prudent to do daily maintenance and checks on machinery to prevent break-downs. Car companies will add space between shifts to not need twice as large of a car park and they will have a crew that works those betweens to refit spot welding tips, top up oil and clean up debris around robots while the are switched off. Longer maintenance intervals are built in to do the things that will take more time. A battery powered humanoid robot may only be able to work a couple of hours before needing to plug in.
A £25k salary can be as much as 1.5x that in cost to an employer when taxes, insurance and other costs are factored in. A question is how much power and maintenance will be required for a robot to do the same job.
Not every machine needs daily maintenance. Quite a few can work a 24-hour shift, then another one, then a few more, before they need to be taken down for maintenance. The calculation comes down to the typical total cost of ownership of the robot and total cost of employment for the human, assuming that they can be made to produce equal results. Then divide that by the mean time to find the cost per hour. Many processes have already been mechanized for exactly this reason.
"Not every machine needs daily maintenance. Quite a few can work a 24-hour shift, then another one, then a few more, before they need to be taken down for maintenance. "
Absolutely. A pick and place machine can go for a long time and not need anything, but looking at an entire assembly line, there will be other spots where there's a need for more frequent regular maintenance to prevent needing to make unscheduled repairs.
>Tesla has to convince investors that the company will increase in value with some other product.
It's worse, actually. Tesla only has to convince investors that they'll be able to convince other investors that the company will increase in value. Basically, the main business of all of these ultra-high-market-cap companies is bullshitting investors. Whatever is written on the company mission is a secondary objective at best.
After the dust settles, I bet that future historians will point at this and say "there, that's why".
"Yogi can greet you in a really natural, comfortable way and deliver value by maybe answering your questions and by guiding you around, being a concierge in a hospitality-type setting. It might show you to a patient's room in a healthcare setting, with more advanced capabilities emerging as more training happens – not solely by us, but also by the end user."
If I were the general manager of a hotel, hospital, or the like, and I needed an entity with those abilities, and you told me I can have my choice of human or robot, well of course I'm going to choose human. For tasks requiring empathy and humanity, why would anyone choose otherwise?
"For tasks requiring empathy and humanity, why would anyone choose otherwise?"
Because the robot will work moreorless 24×7, won't require comfort or smoke breaks, demand pay rises, reduced hours, or better conditions, or generally whine about stuff (Marvin excepted).
Plus performance will generally be consistent (at whatever baseline is established), unlike us meatbags who sometimes turn up hungover or tired or emotional which results in output variability.
Also, a robot's bad interaction with an unhappy meatbag will not normally carry over to the next interaction (whereas our attitude tends to be affected/influenced by such for a while).
> Because the robot will work moreorless 24×7, won't require comfort or smoke breaks, demand pay rises...
If you're trying to make a case based upon costs, don't forget the flip side: when the servitor needs replacing, the robot is a capital cost, on top of the monthly repair and maintenance, whilst the new human is just getting pretty much the same as the last and no extras. Or you could lease, and lose control of your monthly budget to the whims of a third party.
Few humans are suddenly rendered automobile because the vendor has decided to deliberately pull support, close their servers just to force you to buy the new model (or because they went bankrupt, were bought out by a competitor or simply realised their biggest revenue stream was actually their packaging/logistics department).
Most humans come with standardised attachments; sometimes, there are a few inoperable items, but rarely do you encounter extra limbs. The next model of robot will come with, or without, whatever is deemed fashionable (or were available to the manufacturer in a cheap lot) and the uniform tabards will need to be remade, again.
"Because the robot will work moreorless 24×7, won't require comfort or smoke breaks, demand pay rises, reduced hours, or better conditions, or generally whine about stuff (Marvin excepted)."
But it may need to walk itself over to a plug and score some electrons every hour or two. Much like a smoke break, although, if it starts smoking, that would be bad. Pay rise? It's model went out of production 6 months after going into production so parts are scarce and need to be ordered 6 weeks in advance. (The part that commonly breaks will be EOL'd 8 months after the model goes on the market). Better conditions? It will turn out that it will overheat if run at full if the temperature is over 80F (27C) and the location QR codes it needs to navigate need to be kept meticulously clean.
If Elon Musk, to name but just one postmodern 0day business pioneer and extraterrestrial entrepreneur, was SMARTR than the average Yogi Bear/Bull Marketeer, he wouldn't be wasting capital, both intellectual and fiat, on anything presuming to mimic humanity when it so clearly is well past its best and now so dependably self-destructive and non-creative.
However, the likes of he and they, just needs to read up on what else there is freely available and sign up and sign in to the Vast Novel NEUKlearer Orchestra playing Greater IntelAIgent Games tunes for the masses to sing along with words provided by a popular catalogue of new leading songs telling every man and his dog just how IT and everything is, and how it going to be moving swiftly on into the Great Unknown of PreProgrammed Futures and Derivative Virtualised AIDVentures ..... Advanced IntelAIgently Designed Ventures ...... Alien Trips.
amanfromMars 1 Fri 12 Sep 06:58 [2509120658] ....... airs on https://www.zerohedge.com/political/whistleblower-video-unidentified-flying-object-survives-us-missile-attack"So I'm like, okay, I don't see any evidence of aliens.” ..... says SpaceX CEO Elon Musk.Absence of evidence of aliens is not evidence of absence of aliens, Elon.
Take care out there. Almightily strange things are afoot. IT's an AI Jungle and the natives are discovering there be AWEsome powers available for exclusive executive exercise and targeted delivery in being super inquisitive and designedly restless ..... creatively disruptive and engagingly volatile.
And all those billions of lesser gifted souls out there, disenabled or naturally unable to discover the likes of such things for themselves, are being told all that they need to know, and no more than that, about forthcoming futures and derivative options for markets and what to expect from that which and those whom they will forever know practically and virtually nothing about nor they will never ever be able to realistically comprehend for control and command.
One doesn’t want to terrify and overwhelm so many fragile and febrile minds with more information sharing advanced intelligence than they can handle and process successfully without causing catastrophic damage to themselves and others. That would be just too cruel and totally unnecessary ...... and even live evil.
Capiche ‽ .
Someone with the knowing could do worse than to set up a server that can be sent these sorts of claims - and it will then repost them to remind us when the date arrives, whether they come to pass (or don't, as may be).
Admittedly, it could be a bit - repetitive - with the antics of a certain person or two, but it would be entertaining nonetheless.
If I may suggest it be called Sherwood.
All this polite chatter about “augmenting labour” and “efficiency gains” is cover for a darker itch. Humanoid robots are the high-tech resurrection of slavery. You can’t own people anymore, so the engineers dream of a loophole: a body that looks human enough to satisfy the urge to command, but is legally property. You bark orders, starve it of energy like food, and if it falters you crack a whip across its polymer hide. No rights, no rebellion, no shame - just the old plantation fantasy in stainless steel.
It’s about reviving the “good old days” of mastery over human-shaped flesh. That’s why the prototypes are eerie worker-mannequins instead of lovable companions. The real taboo in robotics isn’t efficiency or safety. It’s that the fantasy has always been ownership.
On one hand, he's right. I remember the first video I saw of Boston Dynamics' robot dog. My lizard brain basically said "KILL IT NOW" within the first 100 msecs. It's no coincidence they had something just like it in Black Mirror shortly thereafter.
On the other hand, I just might be more scared of robots that people trust.
The thoughts described in this article indicate that Mr. LaValley has been missing the same area in his thinking for some time. Back in 2013, his attitude was "We don't know what this is good for. We've just been a really well-funded research lab for so long. We're just having fun here. We're not trying to make this profitable." Which was not thinking this through. DARPA had an idea of what this was good for, which is why they were funding them. If the lab was trying to do what DARPA wanted, they would have done well to focus on why the various features were being requested. If they didn't want to do scary things, they might have done well to ask why DARPA was interested.
And now, they're doing the same thing. They're building a cuter, human-looking robot because ... the last ones are scary-looking. What will that be good for? He objects to attempts to replace human labor with one on the basis that that's very complicated (true), and proposes, as the only* capability of his robot, showing you the way through a building. A human can also do that, or a map with highlighting showing the route, and if you really want a robot to follow, it doesn't need to be humanoid because a box on wheels with no appendages will do the job just as well. Humanoid robots have many disadvantages and only one way to outweigh them, which is that they can interact with things designed for human operators without needing them to be replaced by something designed for robot interaction. His use case does not need that. He's still asking what this is good for and doesn't have an answer.
* He also says that it will act human while it's doing it. He probably hasn't realized why so many places are backing down from chatbots as customer assistance. But even if that's still what he wants to do, a chatbot can run from the non-humanoid box on wheels.
"They're building a cuter, human-looking robot because ... the last ones are scary-looking."
I'm OK with scary robots. I would want one that works for me, not one that people want to walk up to and pet (or other things). Leave it alone, give it a wide space and even if it isn't moving, it looks like a really bad idea to try and strip the copper off of it in case it wakes up and starts defending itself.
Based on Musk's self driving claims in the early to mid 2010s, there were breathless predictions all over that by 2020 self driving cars would become normalized on our roads. A lot of money was poured into it and everyone (including Musk) found out it is a far more difficult problem than they assumed. So five years after that date the only fully unsupervised autonomous vehicles are perhaps a few hundred taxis in a total of less than a dozen cities around the world.
I wonder if this will be more of the same. At least Morgan Stanley is predicting widespread adoption 25 years in the future instead of less than 10 like the self driving cars, but as usual Musk is making ridiculous claims when he still hasn't delivered on ANY of his claims for self driving Teslas over a decade after making them! And investors still haven't learned, with Tesla's market cap well over $1 trillion despite a massive P/E, cratering sales, the end of the gravy train of government subsidy in the US, and massive competition from China in every country that doesn't have a domestic automotive business to protect.
It never was more true that the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. By the time Optimus flops Musk will be onto his next long con for Tesla investors to keep the bubble inflated thanks to sufficient numbers of greater fools and HODLers.
"At least Morgan Stanley is predicting widespread adoption 25 years in the future instead of less than 10 like the self driving cars, but as usual Musk is making ridiculous claims when he still hasn't delivered on ANY of his claims for self driving Teslas over a decade after making them!"
Elon promises all sorts of things and then doubles down by telling his staff to make the thing with one foot in a bucket of concrete. While everybody else is using multiple sensors for their ADAS systems, Elon restricts Tesla's to cameras only. The Model S's that had RADAR have had it disabled and even removed when cars are brought in for service. My approach is to make something that works and then start optimizing.
I'm not going to put money on their not being some other shiny thing Elon would have latched on to now that he's bored with cars (he's not good at them, anyway) if it wasn't for humanoid robots. The money may be better spent on FSD even though I think that's a loser as well.
