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This won’t be vaporware forever. Seeing the latest from Boston Dynamics makes that abundantly clear. The utility for general purpose robots is immense in diffic

This won’t be vaporware forever. Seeing the latest from Boston Dynamics makes that abundantly clear. The utility for general purpose robots is immense in difficult environments like the surface of Mars, where O2 wouldn’t be needed. I anticipate a small number of companies making the hardware, and a large, diverse workforce training, supervising, and maintaining android fleets for a variety of tasks. The legal system will have a lot of work to do, along with the general economy. It’s still far out, but not that far.

qzw 5y ago
Would you say this will come out before or after level 5 autonomous vehicles?
- deleted 5y ago
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- deleted 5y ago
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judge2020 5y ago
A future of actual autonomous robots, a la I, Robot, is probably further away that self-driving cars.
- chairhairair 5y ago
  …probably?
  - Clewza313 5y ago
    Both are technologies we've expected to have for quite a while, yet here were are, still waiting for anything that's not just a tech demo.
autoexec 5y ago
Industrial use will certainly happen. Personal use not so much though. By the time robots are feasible you'd be crazy to have one in your home. Like all new tech these days robots will be leveraged against you at every opportunity. They'll be constantly recording audio and video and reporting the events and contents of your household to companies and to the state. Maybe the legal changes will happen eventually to prevent that, but I expect Americans will have general purpose robots long before our laws do anything meaningful about surveillance capitalism and the erosion of our Fourth Amendment rights
- handmodel 5y ago
  I'm still befuddled what the industrial applications are. At some point a car factory had people moving stuff around and screwing things in and out. Now we have arm robots and conveyor belts and other machines which do not resemble humans at all but are obviously way better. We still have humans involved but I think the best way to minimize how often they are on the floor is with better specialized tools. I feel this is the equivalent of building a robot to be your rickshaw driver instead of just realizing you can build a self driving vehicle with nothing that resembles a human invovled.
  - autoexec 5y ago
    I don't think all robots need to be 1:1 replicas of humans but you might be underselling versatility. One robot for every specific task might be a good idea in some places where as in others it might be better to have robots capable of performing several types of tasks giving you the freedom to assign them to different roles as needed. It cuts down on the number of robots (and back up robots) you need to keep available. A more human form would allow for that versatility and allow for easier interaction with the world and the items within it which we've built with accommodation of our own bodies in mind. I am generally a fan of the 'do one thing and do it well' type of philosophy though and ideally we'll have a mix of specialized machines and general purpose ones.
  - postingawayonhn 5y ago
    > We still have humans involved but I think the best way to minimize how often they are on the floor is with better specialized tools. Tesla tried this and it was a disaster. They had to rip a bunch of their robots out and replace them with humans. There's still a ton of really fiddly tasks that specialized robots find really hard to do.
iab 5y ago
General purpose field robots like this are further away than level 5 driving, by a long margin
- gamegoblin 5y ago
  I think they could see use in cities for delivery or patrol type jobs. The stakes are so much lower for a 50kg robot moving at walking pace compared to a car. Consider a pizza delivery operation. You could imagine having dozens of robots delivering pizzas, and even if you had to have one or two humans driving around town getting robots out of stuck edge cases when they happened, it could still be a net gain. Consider that Boston Dynamics Spot robot dog is already operating on industrial sites today. Having it stand upright is not too different from a deployability point of view (see the Atlas robot).
  - jazzyjackson 5y ago
    Do you know how little pizza delivery guys get paid? Not a chance they get replaced by a million dollar robot this century. And lest we forget: “HitchBOT, the hitchhiking robot, gets beheaded in Philadelphia” https://www.cnn.com/2015/08/03/us/hitchbot-robot-beheaded-philadelphia-feat/ https://www.cnn.com/2015/08/03/us/hitchbot-robot-beheaded-ph...
    - gamegoblin 5y ago
      I assume if Tesla actually does intend to build them, they will be targeting a price point in the tens of thousands instead of $1M range. That is, priced comparable to a car. If a robot cost say, $50k, they could seriously be cost effective compared to humans if they don’t have a ton of maintenance costs.
  - rlt 5y ago
    > Consider that Boston Dynamics Spot robot dog is already operating on industrial sites today. In fact, SpaceX has one in Boxa Chica. https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-robot-dog-wreckage-exploded-starship-rocket-2021-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-robot-dog-wreckage-ex...
stingrae 5y ago
what we also see from boston dynamics is that this kind of tech takes decades to develop. It is an immensely difficult problem that Elon seems to think is easy and doable in a year.
neillyons 5y ago
Interesting. Maybe Tesla Bot will be on the first test mission to mars.

qzw 5y ago

Would you say this will come out before or after level 5 autonomous vehicles?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

judge2020 5y ago

A future of actual autonomous robots, a la I, Robot, is probably further away that self-driving cars.

chairhairair 5y ago
…probably?
- Clewza313 5y ago
  Both are technologies we've expected to have for quite a while, yet here were are, still waiting for anything that's not just a tech demo.

autoexec 5y ago

Industrial use will certainly happen. Personal use not so much though. By the time robots are feasible you'd be crazy to have one in your home. Like all new tech these days robots will be leveraged against you at every opportunity. They'll be constantly recording audio and video and reporting the events and contents of your household to companies and to the state. Maybe the legal changes will happen eventually to prevent that, but I expect Americans will have general purpose robots long before our laws do anything meaningful about surveillance capitalism and the erosion of our Fourth Amendment rights

handmodel 5y ago
I'm still befuddled what the industrial applications are. At some point a car factory had people moving stuff around and screwing things in and out. Now we have arm robots and conveyor belts and other machines which do not resemble humans at all but are obviously way better. We still have humans involved but I think the best way to minimize how often they are on the floor is with better specialized tools. I feel this is the equivalent of building a robot to be your rickshaw driver instead of just realizing you can build a self driving vehicle with nothing that resembles a human invovled.
- autoexec 5y ago
  I don't think all robots need to be 1:1 replicas of humans but you might be underselling versatility. One robot for every specific task might be a good idea in some places where as in others it might be better to have robots capable of performing several types of tasks giving you the freedom to assign them to different roles as needed. It cuts down on the number of robots (and back up robots) you need to keep available. A more human form would allow for that versatility and allow for easier interaction with the world and the items within it which we've built with accommodation of our own bodies in mind. I am generally a fan of the 'do one thing and do it well' type of philosophy though and ideally we'll have a mix of specialized machines and general purpose ones.
- postingawayonhn 5y ago
  > We still have humans involved but I think the best way to minimize how often they are on the floor is with better specialized tools. Tesla tried this and it was a disaster. They had to rip a bunch of their robots out and replace them with humans. There's still a ton of really fiddly tasks that specialized robots find really hard to do.

iab 5y ago

General purpose field robots like this are further away than level 5 driving, by a long margin

gamegoblin 5y ago
I think they could see use in cities for delivery or patrol type jobs. The stakes are so much lower for a 50kg robot moving at walking pace compared to a car. Consider a pizza delivery operation. You could imagine having dozens of robots delivering pizzas, and even if you had to have one or two humans driving around town getting robots out of stuck edge cases when they happened, it could still be a net gain. Consider that Boston Dynamics Spot robot dog is already operating on industrial sites today. Having it stand upright is not too different from a deployability point of view (see the Atlas robot).
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  Do you know how little pizza delivery guys get paid? Not a chance they get replaced by a million dollar robot this century. And lest we forget: “HitchBOT, the hitchhiking robot, gets beheaded in Philadelphia” https://www.cnn.com/2015/08/03/us/hitchbot-robot-beheaded-philadelphia-feat/ https://www.cnn.com/2015/08/03/us/hitchbot-robot-beheaded-ph...
  - gamegoblin 5y ago
    I assume if Tesla actually does intend to build them, they will be targeting a price point in the tens of thousands instead of $1M range. That is, priced comparable to a car. If a robot cost say, $50k, they could seriously be cost effective compared to humans if they don’t have a ton of maintenance costs.
- rlt 5y ago
  > Consider that Boston Dynamics Spot robot dog is already operating on industrial sites today. In fact, SpaceX has one in Boxa Chica. https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-robot-dog-wreckage-exploded-starship-rocket-2021-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-robot-dog-wreckage-ex...

stingrae 5y ago

what we also see from boston dynamics is that this kind of tech takes decades to develop. It is an immensely difficult problem that Elon seems to think is easy and doable in a year.

neillyons 5y ago

Interesting. Maybe Tesla Bot will be on the first test mission to mars.