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I think most people believe that the problem with robots is that we don't have the right software, and if we just knew how to program them then today's robots c

I think most people believe that the problem with robots is that we don't have the right software, and if we just knew how to program them then today's robots could be incredibly useful in everyday life. From that perspective, this move from OpenAI seems dumb. That belief is wrong. Today's robots can't be made useful in everyday life no matter how advanced the software. The hardware is too inflexible, too unreliable, too fragile, too rigid, too heavy, too dangerous, too expensive, too slow. In the past the software and hardware were equally bad, but today machine learning is advancing like crazy, while the hardware is improving at a snail's pace in comparison. Solving robotics is now a hardware problem, not a software problem. When the hardware is ready, the software will be comparatively easy to develop. Without the right hardware, you can't develop the appropriate software. OpenAI is right to ignore robotics for now. It's a job for companies with a hardware focus, for at least the next decade.

pedalpete 5y ago
I'm not an expert, but I'd suggest hardware is trailing software, but there is still great progress happening in materials design, soft-robots, miniaturization, etc. Just as in the computer era, we go through phases where the software is ahead of hardware, then hardware gets ahead of software. It seems that is a pendulum that swings, and the argument many people have to the integrated pipeline Apple operates.
TheRealPomax 5y ago
Dangerous, fast, reliable. Pick three.
- qwertox 5y ago
  One day a person will see a Spot robot and smile at its cuteness, then notice that there's no way to get past it, no way to have it not decide where you can and can't step towards. It won't have a gun, but that person will no longer have a reason to smile at them in the future. Later you will have a Spot robot chasing a person and getting it to stop, surrendering at the machine without being threatened by it, but just by recognizing that there's no longer a point in running away.
  - taneq 5y ago
    You could shorten that down further to just "One day a Spot robot will have a gun."
iandanforth 5y ago
You're demonstrably wrong. I can waldo any number of commercially available arms to do work humans do today. Surgeons waldo precise robots to conduct surgeries as a matter of course. Every piece of construction machinery operated by a human today is an incredibly useful robot lacking sufficiently capable software. "When the hardware is ready, the software will be comparatively easy to develop." I take it you've never written any software for a robot? The long tail of the real world takes years and years to handle. Probably the most advanced robotics company, at the cutting edge of the ML+Robotics, is Covariant and their entire business model rests on an understanding that the long tail can and should be handled by humans. I agree that OpenAI is right to cut out the hardware, but all your reasoning about why is wrong. The reason, which they state, is that data collection on physical devices is slow and modification to those devices is slow and maintenance on those devices is expensive. You want to simulate everything, not because it reproduces the real world in high fidelity, that doesn't matter, but because it gives you approximations with sufficient variety and complexity that you can continually challenge your AI, and you can do all that at 1M fps.
- syockit 5y ago
  Off-topic but this is the first time I've seen waldo used as a verb. It's not in the Urban Dictionary, but from the way you use it I take it that it means "to find the correct thing out of the sea of so many similar things", right?
  - psychomugs 5y ago
    Essentially, to telemanipulate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_manipulator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_manipulator
  - shalmanese 5y ago
    It comes from the Heinlein short story Waldo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldo_(short_story) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldo_(short_story) > Waldo Farthingwaite-Jones was born a weakling, unable even to lift his head up to drink or to hold a spoon. Far from destroying him, this channeled his intellect, and his family's money, into the development of the device patented as "Waldo F. Jones' Synchronous Reduplicating Pantograph". Wearing a glove and harness, Waldo could control a much more powerful mechanical hand simply by moving his hand and fingers.
roombad 5y ago
I don't think it's really true to say that the issue is hardware or software. There is lots of robotics in everyday life, from autonomous vacuums in our homes to autonomous factories producing the goods we consume. The reason we don't have millions of little robots buzzing around us is... there's very little need for it. The average human spends most of their time barely engaged, our brains and bodies are operating far below what we're capable of, the romanticised sci-fi vision of a world filled with intelligent robots performing every menial task for humans builds on the idea that humans have better things to do, but do we? We already have enough knowledge and resources to end world hunger, to bring a high standard of living to every human, but we choose not to: our problem is social, not software or hardware. As an aside, I'd dispute the claim that hardware is lagging behind software: Tesla has lots of money and lots of smart people and they haven't been able to deliver self driving cars after more than a decade of promises (because of software).
- squabble 5y ago
  Can you be more specific about what the social problem is? Do you know of anyone who is working to solve it?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
taneq 5y ago
> Today's robots can't be made useful in everyday life no matter how advanced the software. The hardware is too inflexible, too unreliable, too fragile, too rigid, too heavy, too dangerous, too expensive, too slow. You're absolutely wrong. Anyone with basic electronics knowledge and a few hundred bucks can build a passable robot body out of hobby grade servos and 3D printed parts. If you're willing to spend $10k+ you can make something quite capable. Programming it to then actually do anything, let alone anything useful in the real world, is still out of reach for all but a tiny fraction of companies. Hardware still has a long way to go before it's as capable as biological systems but it's usable. Real world AI is far from that in most areas.
- 317070 5y ago
  No, and yes. You can build something. But even if you imagine tele-operating it 24/7, there is not going to be something relevant you can do with it around the house. It's not about the programming. And that will not even be taking into account the time-to-maintenance of such a system. On the other hand, Boston Dynamics' manifold, where they do the control of the dozens of hydraulical parts, is an absolute marvel of technology that shows what you can achieve with 45 (?) years of dedicated focus. You might be able to teleoperate their robot for something useful in a human environment, and I guess that would be a gamechanger. But even there I want to wait-and-see if they can escape the fate of many that came before them.
  - taneq 5y ago
    Think of literally any piece of equipment that needs a human operator to operate it. If we had the software side figured out, none of these machines would have human operators.
DantesKite 5y ago
I'm just imagining a sentient AGI rolling around in the human equivalent of a toaster, trying to bend the world to its will.
- taneq 5y ago
  It would probably be shouting something like "EX-TER-MIN-ATE!"
justicezyx 5y ago
I think self driving car is an incredibly useful robots where massive adoption is under way (very early stage still); and in many less challenging areas, self driving capable vechles have been taking over.
trainsplanes 5y ago
Robotics software is incredibly complex. Even with machinery that was a perfect replica of a human body to the most minute details, throwing some ML algorithms at it wouldn’t get us anywhere. If it worked that way, my job would be much easier.
dekhn 5y ago
robots do a lot today, it's just not AI and most of it isn't ML. I think the ML folks find what robots do today "tiresome and manually trained" but that doesn't stop robots from producing billions of dollars a year in goods.

pedalpete 5y ago

I'm not an expert, but I'd suggest hardware is trailing software, but there is still great progress happening in materials design, soft-robots, miniaturization, etc. Just as in the computer era, we go through phases where the software is ahead of hardware, then hardware gets ahead of software. It seems that is a pendulum that swings, and the argument many people have to the integrated pipeline Apple operates.

TheRealPomax 5y ago

Dangerous, fast, reliable. Pick three.

qwertox 5y ago
One day a person will see a Spot robot and smile at its cuteness, then notice that there's no way to get past it, no way to have it not decide where you can and can't step towards. It won't have a gun, but that person will no longer have a reason to smile at them in the future. Later you will have a Spot robot chasing a person and getting it to stop, surrendering at the machine without being threatened by it, but just by recognizing that there's no longer a point in running away.
- taneq 5y ago
  You could shorten that down further to just "One day a Spot robot will have a gun."

iandanforth 5y ago

You're demonstrably wrong. I can waldo any number of commercially available arms to do work humans do today. Surgeons waldo precise robots to conduct surgeries as a matter of course. Every piece of construction machinery operated by a human today is an incredibly useful robot lacking sufficiently capable software. "When the hardware is ready, the software will be comparatively easy to develop." I take it you've never written any software for a robot? The long tail of the real world takes years and years to handle. Probably the most advanced robotics company, at the cutting edge of the ML+Robotics, is Covariant and their entire business model rests on an understanding that the long tail can and should be handled by humans. I agree that OpenAI is right to cut out the hardware, but all your reasoning about why is wrong. The reason, which they state, is that data collection on physical devices is slow and modification to those devices is slow and maintenance on those devices is expensive. You want to simulate everything, not because it reproduces the real world in high fidelity, that doesn't matter, but because it gives you approximations with sufficient variety and complexity that you can continually challenge your AI, and you can do all that at 1M fps.

syockit 5y ago
Off-topic but this is the first time I've seen waldo used as a verb. It's not in the Urban Dictionary, but from the way you use it I take it that it means "to find the correct thing out of the sea of so many similar things", right?
- psychomugs 5y ago
  Essentially, to telemanipulate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_manipulator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_manipulator
- shalmanese 5y ago
  It comes from the Heinlein short story Waldo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldo_(short_story) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldo_(short_story) > Waldo Farthingwaite-Jones was born a weakling, unable even to lift his head up to drink or to hold a spoon. Far from destroying him, this channeled his intellect, and his family's money, into the development of the device patented as "Waldo F. Jones' Synchronous Reduplicating Pantograph". Wearing a glove and harness, Waldo could control a much more powerful mechanical hand simply by moving his hand and fingers.

roombad 5y ago

I don't think it's really true to say that the issue is hardware or software. There is lots of robotics in everyday life, from autonomous vacuums in our homes to autonomous factories producing the goods we consume. The reason we don't have millions of little robots buzzing around us is... there's very little need for it. The average human spends most of their time barely engaged, our brains and bodies are operating far below what we're capable of, the romanticised sci-fi vision of a world filled with intelligent robots performing every menial task for humans builds on the idea that humans have better things to do, but do we? We already have enough knowledge and resources to end world hunger, to bring a high standard of living to every human, but we choose not to: our problem is social, not software or hardware. As an aside, I'd dispute the claim that hardware is lagging behind software: Tesla has lots of money and lots of smart people and they haven't been able to deliver self driving cars after more than a decade of promises (because of software).

squabble 5y ago
Can you be more specific about what the social problem is? Do you know of anyone who is working to solve it?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

taneq 5y ago

> Today's robots can't be made useful in everyday life no matter how advanced the software. The hardware is too inflexible, too unreliable, too fragile, too rigid, too heavy, too dangerous, too expensive, too slow. You're absolutely wrong. Anyone with basic electronics knowledge and a few hundred bucks can build a passable robot body out of hobby grade servos and 3D printed parts. If you're willing to spend $10k+ you can make something quite capable. Programming it to then actually do anything, let alone anything useful in the real world, is still out of reach for all but a tiny fraction of companies. Hardware still has a long way to go before it's as capable as biological systems but it's usable. Real world AI is far from that in most areas.

317070 5y ago
No, and yes. You can build something. But even if you imagine tele-operating it 24/7, there is not going to be something relevant you can do with it around the house. It's not about the programming. And that will not even be taking into account the time-to-maintenance of such a system. On the other hand, Boston Dynamics' manifold, where they do the control of the dozens of hydraulical parts, is an absolute marvel of technology that shows what you can achieve with 45 (?) years of dedicated focus. You might be able to teleoperate their robot for something useful in a human environment, and I guess that would be a gamechanger. But even there I want to wait-and-see if they can escape the fate of many that came before them.
- taneq 5y ago
  Think of literally any piece of equipment that needs a human operator to operate it. If we had the software side figured out, none of these machines would have human operators.

DantesKite 5y ago

I'm just imagining a sentient AGI rolling around in the human equivalent of a toaster, trying to bend the world to its will.

taneq 5y ago
It would probably be shouting something like "EX-TER-MIN-ATE!"

justicezyx 5y ago

I think self driving car is an incredibly useful robots where massive adoption is under way (very early stage still); and in many less challenging areas, self driving capable vechles have been taking over.

trainsplanes 5y ago

Robotics software is incredibly complex. Even with machinery that was a perfect replica of a human body to the most minute details, throwing some ML algorithms at it wouldn’t get us anywhere. If it worked that way, my job would be much easier.

dekhn 5y ago

robots do a lot today, it's just not AI and most of it isn't ML. I think the ML folks find what robots do today "tiresome and manually trained" but that doesn't stop robots from producing billions of dollars a year in goods.