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But "useful humanoid robot" is way more forward-looking than anything else he's done this with I think flipping a giant rocket on its way back down to have it

But "useful humanoid robot" is way more forward-looking than anything else he's done this with I think flipping a giant rocket on its way back down to have it land upright sounded just as nutty as this awhile back, let alone a startup competing (successfully) against the military industrial complex. The entire car industry is also adopting electric. No, I think Musk has enough notable wins to get a pass here. It seems as though a lot of people (not the GP) really want to be apart of the narrative change on Musk, whatever humanity’s obsession is with building up and then destroying someone, followed with the redemption story. He really doesn’t have to prove anything anymore in my book.

piiswrong 5y ago
But if you really think about it, flipping rocket is a trivial toy problem in simulation. But useful humanoid robot is very hard even in simulation. Just look at some of the SOTA control theory research. Their simulated robots looks stupid.
- runawaybottle 5y ago
  Universal Healthcare is also a toy problem, but a true albatross concept beunricratically in the US. I say it’s a toy problem because we literally have copy and paste templates from most of the western world that we can use. Flipping that rocket and getting NASA contracts to go actually do it against Boeing/Lockheed/etc is not a toy problem. I don’t want to say it would never have happened without Spacex, but probably it would not have happened in our lifetime.
  - majewsky 5y ago
    Flipping rockets is a simpler problem in the sense that it the required technology already existed, there just wasn't anyone with enough incentive and resources to actually do it. Human-level robotics, on the other hand, is not a problem of missing incentive. For all I know about the field (as a casual observer), we are still several breakthroughs away from achieving this goal.
    - rlt 5y ago
      How do you define the “required technology” for these problems? We have actuators, sensors, and computers to build humanoid robots, isn’t it “just” a software problem like flipping rockets was?
  - itsoktocry 5y ago
    You seem to be missing the point that landing the rocket is a cool trick that may or may not be useful right now. There's a difference between not being able to do something, and not having a reason to.
    - runawaybottle 5y ago
      Some of you are absurd. Landing rockets is a neat trick? Okay, how about doing it for NASA contracts? Enough.
itsoktocry 5y ago
>I think flipping a giant rocket on its way back down to have it land upright And herein lies the problem: landing the rocket is really cool, but normal people overestimate the difficulty. Because of this feat, "Elon can do anything!" The reason we don't land rockets is half technical, half economic. The list of things Elon has said they will achieve, and have not, far exceeds the list of exceptional tech his companies have produced.
- panick21 5y ago
  I really don't get the problem here. They want to work on a very difficult problem, they have admitted it is difficult. Are people angry that Musk said he will have a prototype in a 18 month? Are they angry because he dared even mention wanting to work on that problem. > landing the rocket is really cool, but normal people overestimate the difficulty. Building the biggest rocket in the world, building new engines that are better then any invented in human history, coming up with a complete new way of reentering and doing a never before done landing maneuver and doing that from a space port that was basically a swamp only 1.5 years earlier is quite different then 'landing a rocket'. Of course it doesn't mean he can magically do anything but his companies have enough engineering credit between them that when they announce to put serious resources behind something we should at least not dismiss them out of hand. The have fully vertically integrated AI, power electronics, manufacturing robots and batteries both design, testing&validation and manufacturing facilities. Not to mention lots of capital and a CEO who clearly is supportive of the project if its gone make short term money or not. I for one am interested to see where this is in 2-3 years. > The list of things Elon has said they will achieve, and have not, far exceeds the list of exceptional tech his companies have produced. Questionable. If you give an product announcement a 3-4 year lead time for development and commercialization. When you go back over the existence Musk companies, I would suggest that most has actually happened. Sure they didn't do Red Dragon, propulsive Dragon landing, Roadster and Semi is not out yet FSD clearly didn't go as he hopped. I guess we could come up with some other abandoned and delayed projects. I guess they just delayed Cybertruck for a few more month but that is hardly noteworthy in the automotive industry. The Starship projects is still remarkably close to the timeline from 2016 (that was considered beyond delusional by industry experts), Raptor and Vacuum Raptor outperform what was announced, Starlink are regularly launching and they are mass producing phase array antennas. Falcon 9 platform reached the 10 relights that was the initial target. The have managed to deliver humans to Station and bring them back (years before the competitor who will get 2 extra billion will be able to). Tesla despite people clowning Musk about how dumb he is about manufacturing has scaled manufacturing as fast as almost no other manufacturing company ever has and there is no end in sight (new factories coming online as soon as this end of this year). Not to mention that they have achieved industry leading unit margins on that production. They are by far the largest produces of BEVs in the world by volume and by a even larger amount by revenue. They are producing Plaid power train cars and have made the fastest production car in history. They are in the final stretch of having completed a re-design and re-engineering of a battery manufacturing line and battery. They did this almost fully vertically integrated building much of their own manufacturing equipment. This project alone is a gigantic engineering effort of a scale that is hard to really grasp. The end of this year is very likely when the first actual cars with these batteries will be sold. I think FSD is by far their most visible and most relevant failure and by far the most talked about on HN, but overall I think its hard to point to any companies that did better in terms of technology development last decade (specially considering that when the decade started these companies were tiny).

piiswrong 5y ago

But if you really think about it, flipping rocket is a trivial toy problem in simulation. But useful humanoid robot is very hard even in simulation. Just look at some of the SOTA control theory research. Their simulated robots looks stupid.

runawaybottle 5y ago
Universal Healthcare is also a toy problem, but a true albatross concept beunricratically in the US. I say it’s a toy problem because we literally have copy and paste templates from most of the western world that we can use. Flipping that rocket and getting NASA contracts to go actually do it against Boeing/Lockheed/etc is not a toy problem. I don’t want to say it would never have happened without Spacex, but probably it would not have happened in our lifetime.
- majewsky 5y ago
  Flipping rockets is a simpler problem in the sense that it the required technology already existed, there just wasn't anyone with enough incentive and resources to actually do it. Human-level robotics, on the other hand, is not a problem of missing incentive. For all I know about the field (as a casual observer), we are still several breakthroughs away from achieving this goal.
  - rlt 5y ago
    How do you define the “required technology” for these problems? We have actuators, sensors, and computers to build humanoid robots, isn’t it “just” a software problem like flipping rockets was?
- itsoktocry 5y ago
  You seem to be missing the point that landing the rocket is a cool trick that may or may not be useful right now. There's a difference between not being able to do something, and not having a reason to.
  - runawaybottle 5y ago
    Some of you are absurd. Landing rockets is a neat trick? Okay, how about doing it for NASA contracts? Enough.

itsoktocry 5y ago

>I think flipping a giant rocket on its way back down to have it land upright And herein lies the problem: landing the rocket is really cool, but normal people overestimate the difficulty. Because of this feat, "Elon can do anything!" The reason we don't land rockets is half technical, half economic. The list of things Elon has said they will achieve, and have not, far exceeds the list of exceptional tech his companies have produced.

panick21 5y ago
I really don't get the problem here. They want to work on a very difficult problem, they have admitted it is difficult. Are people angry that Musk said he will have a prototype in a 18 month? Are they angry because he dared even mention wanting to work on that problem. > landing the rocket is really cool, but normal people overestimate the difficulty. Building the biggest rocket in the world, building new engines that are better then any invented in human history, coming up with a complete new way of reentering and doing a never before done landing maneuver and doing that from a space port that was basically a swamp only 1.5 years earlier is quite different then 'landing a rocket'. Of course it doesn't mean he can magically do anything but his companies have enough engineering credit between them that when they announce to put serious resources behind something we should at least not dismiss them out of hand. The have fully vertically integrated AI, power electronics, manufacturing robots and batteries both design, testing&validation and manufacturing facilities. Not to mention lots of capital and a CEO who clearly is supportive of the project if its gone make short term money or not. I for one am interested to see where this is in 2-3 years. > The list of things Elon has said they will achieve, and have not, far exceeds the list of exceptional tech his companies have produced. Questionable. If you give an product announcement a 3-4 year lead time for development and commercialization. When you go back over the existence Musk companies, I would suggest that most has actually happened. Sure they didn't do Red Dragon, propulsive Dragon landing, Roadster and Semi is not out yet FSD clearly didn't go as he hopped. I guess we could come up with some other abandoned and delayed projects. I guess they just delayed Cybertruck for a few more month but that is hardly noteworthy in the automotive industry. The Starship projects is still remarkably close to the timeline from 2016 (that was considered beyond delusional by industry experts), Raptor and Vacuum Raptor outperform what was announced, Starlink are regularly launching and they are mass producing phase array antennas. Falcon 9 platform reached the 10 relights that was the initial target. The have managed to deliver humans to Station and bring them back (years before the competitor who will get 2 extra billion will be able to). Tesla despite people clowning Musk about how dumb he is about manufacturing has scaled manufacturing as fast as almost no other manufacturing company ever has and there is no end in sight (new factories coming online as soon as this end of this year). Not to mention that they have achieved industry leading unit margins on that production. They are by far the largest produces of BEVs in the world by volume and by a even larger amount by revenue. They are producing Plaid power train cars and have made the fastest production car in history. They are in the final stretch of having completed a re-design and re-engineering of a battery manufacturing line and battery. They did this almost fully vertically integrated building much of their own manufacturing equipment. This project alone is a gigantic engineering effort of a scale that is hard to really grasp. The end of this year is very likely when the first actual cars with these batteries will be sold. I think FSD is by far their most visible and most relevant failure and by far the most talked about on HN, but overall I think its hard to point to any companies that did better in terms of technology development last decade (specially considering that when the decade started these companies were tiny).