Yeah I have been thinking we might see a humanoid robotics hype bubble. They’re flashy tech that can look pretty good in a demo, the hardware is to a state where we can convince people it’s a real product, and the software is just far enough along to trick loads of investors in to funding it.
And I don’t know, maybe in ten years time we will have enough AI advances that humanoid robots are useful. But AI is notoriously hard to predict, and if you believe Yann LeCun then all the autoregressive approaches the big LLM companies are using won’t get us to AI that thinks more like an embodied creature, with hierarchical reasoning, variable compute capabilities for solving hard problems, few shot learning, etc.
The latest demos (eg Unitree) have convinced me that it won't take 10 years for useful humanoid robots to start appearing. AGI is the wrong target. If I have to do the dishes a hundred times to generate training data in order to teach the robot to do my dishes for me, that's still better than me doing the dishes for the rest of my life.
The Unitree is what made me think we are headed for a bubble. The machines themselves will become commodity hardware. Tesla bot will push the hype side. I just don’t believe current AI systems have what it takes to operate in the real world. It doesn’t have to be AGI at all, but it needs a bunch of capabilities not present in existing models, some of which cannot be created by training on large corpuses from the internet like text and images. [1]
Also people can’t afford to spend $20k on a robot just to do their dishes. My good friend tried to make a robot that could pick up dog poop from your back yard, and he went to HAX accelerator and everything, and through extensive research he found that the addressable market for dog poop robots is just too small to fund a company. Now he makes farming robots. (I do too as it happens, on a separate project.)
The point is a humanoid robot worth the price of that robot needs to be very useful, and I don’t believe current approaches can get us there.
Maybe some uses will be found, just as current AI systems have their uses, but I say it will be a hype bubble because companies will fund raise on massive promises they will never achieve, and investment will move on to something else after 5 years or so.
Could still be robotics, but I actually think modular purpose built machines make way more sense than general purpose humanoids. What if instead of a humanoid to load the dishwasher you had a dishwasher that cleaned dishes one at a time. You load up to six table settings in to the bin and a little robotic mechanism grabs them one at a time, runs it through a little car wash setup, and stacks them on the other side. That’s what I want, not a humanoid!
[1] I’m really inspired by Yann LeCun’s recent podcast where he talks about the fundamental limitations of current popular (autoregressive) models. https://youtu.be/5t1vTLU7s40
The Nth large house appliance that doesn't need to be a humanoid is the clothes folding machine that'll go next to the washer dryer. The difficulty of the task makes me doubtful if we'll see that machine, but one can dream!
The problem with your proposed non-humanoid dish washer robot arm is that I want the dishes to go into the cabinets, not just into the dish rack, and while the robot doesn't strictly need to be humanoid, it's better that it's mobile, and while uni-wheels like a segway is certainly an option, having cracked bipedal robots, that just seems like a better design choice.
Well, there are problems with both approaches, with intelligence, cost, and sensing fidelity being major unsolved problems with humanoids. We still don’t know how to make good fingers for example with sensitive skin.
Considering how much the industry has struggled with automation in cars, I just don’t actually think humanoids will work in the home any time soon. A fantasy humanoid that works well would be more useful than a robotic dishwashing appliance, but one of those is something I believe can actually be built in the next decade.
While Full Self Driving and Waymo grabs all the attention, Blue Cruise and Mercedes' one is quietly doing what's asked, giving drivers a way to sit in traffic on the freeway and pay less attention. So I agree that it's been a struggle, but it seems the computers a managing to win that struggle. At the point where we're disagreeing on 3 years vs 10 or 20, and if there are enough rich people to afford a $20k house robot, I don't feel a need to convince you of my opinion, I'm simply excited for the future. I don't know what comes next but I 'm optimistic about it.
