3 ms·

I totally agree, tech valuations this year are staggering, yet this company is only valued at 1.1bn even as they have started commercializing their spot robot.

• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• qayxc 6y ago
  > I guess we must be missing something... There's a whole ton of unsolved problems: - no true autonomy in chaotic/dynamic environments - powering these machines for longer timespans is currently impossible (batteries endurance is measured in minutes, not hours) - high skill level required for operating these machines (again - they're not autonomous in the slightest) - paradox of complexity: it's easier to genetically engineer tomatoes that can withstand falling to the ground and being swept into a box than it is to engineer a machine that can identify and carefully pick ripe tomatoes as fast, as reliably and as cheap as a human worker - motion planning and navigating unmapped environments is largely unsolved - specialised machines are cheaper, more reliable and readily available: it's often more beneficial to modify the process than to program a generalised machine to perform human tasks, e.g. washing machines and dish washers don't need actual hands and tumble dryers don't need to use clothes lines yet all three work fine/better than the human version of the process - AI safety is still in its infancy (even in the context of "just" motion planning and navigation); there's no such thing as tried and tested safety protocols for fully autonomous robots - the state of the software (in terms of autonomy) is way behind the state of the hardware - even Spot is for the most part still just a super low-volume solution looking for a problem