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Mercedes is trialing humanoid robots for 'low skill, repetitive' tasks
- Solvency 3y agoI'll never understand this fascination with humanoid robots. It smacks of our innate narcissism, which lead to hilariously ironic and pervasive belief systems like "God made MAN in HIS image!" (surely not the other way around!) Meanwhile the whole world already operates on incredibly precise high-tolerance robots doing low skill and repetitive tasks as well as extremely "high skill" tasks like painting/manufacturing cars or milling metal. And we have wheeled robots like Autostore.com for other automation tasks. A humanoid robot exists only to tickle our perverse self-centric obsessions, and namely: news sites, news consumers, and executives.
- lupyro 3y agoI guess it depends on where you draw the line on what is a humanoid. The world we've built for ourselves is for humans. If you need a robot to flip a hotel room for the next guest it may not need real legs but its probably gonna be column shaped with some arms. That's humanoid to me. Not trying to single out a hotel maid as low skilled, just trying to use an example of a common task in a very human environment
- Nonoyesnoyes 3y agoI saw a 'robot' for a kitchen which was basically two robot arms on a rail installed on the ceiling. It would also be super ugly (potentially) to have those specialized robots.
- Nonoyesnoyes 3y agoA human robot is a robot you can put everywhere were a human can be. this means it's seen as the holy Grail for a / the generic helper. You build it once and replace any human manual laber task. Basically you show the robot what it does by just doing it a few times and than the robot takes over. Specialized 'robots' are closer to an assembly line someone needs to plan and design who knows how to do so and knows how to think like this. Easy for an engineer hard for a normal human. And when you look at.the progress it's not far fetched that this idea is close to become reality in the next 10-20 years.
- RajT88 3y agoWhy build a system today which uses HTTP as its transport protocol for communication? It's not the most efficient or robust, right? It's because there's a robust ecosystem and toolchain around HTTP as a transport protocol. Making humanoid robots, while vain on the surface, does kind of make sense. If it's humanoid, it can be a drop-in replacement for a lot of human tasks using systems designed for human hands and feet. It's just a matter of training for the tasks. You wouldn't task an ED-209 with cleaning an office building. You'd end up with dirty stairwells.
- Cthulhu_ 3y agoLow skill, but higher skill than the automation already in place it seems; it says "like having Apollo inspect and deliver components to human production line workers", but there's less expensive and more reliable ways to do that - like conveyor belts and whatnot. Call me a luddite but it looks like an overly error prone solution looking for a problem to me.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> it looks like an overly error prone solution looking for a problem to me It looks like starting with a small, manageable problem before expanding the robot’s scope of work.
- huytersd 3y agoYou start where you can before moving on harder tasks. A conveyor belt is never going to be able to weld curved joints and be wiring installers in the future.
- owa945jw 3y agoI used to work for Apptronik, and for several other humanoid projects. These robots are not going to be doing tasks that are at the edge of human dexterity any time soon. They can barely drop objects into boxes. Edit: I saw a video a few days ago from Figure where it was putting dishes onto a dish rack at relatively high speed and that was genuinely impressive, possibly the best object manipulation I've seen. But that's still closer to dropping objects in boxes than to the welding and wiring work that I've done.
- huytersd 3y agoFixed machinery already does most of the welding in automotive manufacturing. Changing that to a movable base doesn’t seem like an impossible problem especially if you can use a fixed point on the object and then use relative coordinates like a CNC machine. I could easily see a robot pulling out stamped metal parts, making a couple of welds and then stacking them up.
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- rightbyte 3y agoWouldn't wheeled robots be better for flat factory floors, if it is supposed to deliver parts? What is the point of the legs. "Mercedes has started trialing an undisclosed number of Apollo robots at a factory in Hungary. The country has experienced labor shortages for several years as workers migrate to Western Europe, with Audi and Mercedes having both expressed concerns regarding labor supply in 2016." Raise wages?
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago>Wouldn't wheeled robots be better for flat factory floors, if it is supposed to deliver parts? What is the point of the legs. Yeah but publishing videos of humanoid robots is proven to pump your car company stock to the moon. If Mercedes can also buy a cryptocurrency and a social media platform they're golden. >Raise wages? No no, you see we need open borders and visa free uncontrolled migration so companies have the upper hand and get to pick and choose whatever they want from the world labor pool until they find complacent workers on their terms, instead of having to pay locals competitively. Otherwise it's considered a labor shortage.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> we need open borders and visa free uncontrolled migration so companies have the upper hand and get to pick and choose from the world labor pool instead of the local one Hungary is in Schengen. Their workers left for higher-paying jobs. The company can’t move as easily because they already plopped down a plant. (Hungary is also one of the EU’s most migrant-sceptic members.)
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago/s mate
- JumpCrisscross 3y agoI know. I’m just pointing out that an uncontrolled immigration policy is in effect here, and it shifted power to labour. On the other hand, Hungary’s strict international migrant policy appears to weakening labour’s hand by encouraging automation.
- Ekaros 3y agoDelivering parts? Humanoid carrying single box feels like massive waste. Throw something pallet sized maybe 1,5m high or even higher that has simple mechanics to drop a box and move multiple of boxes. And then make it move multiple boxes at time...
- potta_coffee 3y agoA forklift with the brain of a Roomba
- swizzler 3y agoIt's real! Kiva Systems built the roomba part that can raise a shelf above them and drive it around (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSA5Bq-1fU4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSA5Bq-1fU4). Amazon bought them.
- qgin 3y agoMercedes has really been a dark horse in autonomous tech. First a commercially available level-3 driving system, now this
- acchow 3y agoOnly level 3 in a very specific scenario: “At up to 40mph in traffic jam situations on highways” Which is the easiest possible scenario. Slow speed, highways only (no intersections, no pedestrians)
- huytersd 3y agoTheir level 3 has so many restrictions it’s like saying “level 3 only on 22 miles between Bakersfield and Los Angeles”.
- ximeng 3y agoAlmost any article on automation has a sentence about freeing highly skilled workers for more valuable tasks. Along with the talk of tight labour supply it comes across as disingenuous when the value is replacing the cost of low skill workers.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> when the value is replacing the cost of low skill workers My electrician is highly skilled. He still has to drive himself to the job site and unpack his tools there, which is low-skill labor.
- ximeng 3y agoThis technology will replace your electrician
- JumpCrisscross 3y agoNot in the near future. And given my town has a weeks-long waiting list for electricians (and very few young people taking up apprenticeships), that sounds terrific.
- ximeng 3y agoPeople’s working lives are 50 years or so. If the near future arrives in ten years that’s near enough to derail people’s careers. An electrician is in most cases already not doing that well (otherwise those apprenticeships would be full). Replacing them will be terrific for people employing electricians like you. Not for electricians trying to accumulate their own capital through labour.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> If the near future arrives in ten years that’s near enough to derail people’s careers We aren’t a decade out from electrician robots. > electrician is in most cases already not doing that well (otherwise those apprenticeships would be full) My electrician takes his family on ski vacations in Japan. In many communities, young people simply don’t want to go into the trades. > Not for electricians trying to accumulate their own capital through labour Agree. But at the point we have electrician robots we have also eliminated a lot of other tedious (and dangerous) labour. A house full of servants becomes lower middle-class reality.
- donmcronald 3y agoI bet that robot is amazing at walking down the golden path.
- bpiche 3y agoI think Mercedes built expensive humanoid body doubles in Gibson’s “The Peripheral”? Gonna be interested to see if his predictions come true again
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- karaterobot 3y agoCool, now we just need to continually redefine "low skill" as whatever AI and robots are capable of doing, and we've got an all-purpose justification for laying people off. Step 3 is "profit!". While step 4 may be "widespread suffering and social unrest", we can just redefine our process as ending at step 3, and it's no big deal. All problems can be solved by taking the right perspective!
- guerrilla 3y agoJust wait until police become "low skill." Then we have a serious and potentially permanent problem where AI-robot police efficiently enforce property rights while everyone else starves to death or is killed fighting the police.
- Terr_ 3y ago> low skill I like to quip that the most complex nanotechnological products in existence are all created by unskilled labor--not that I want to devalue your mother's nine months of work. :p
- robotburrito 3y agoI wonder what happens if your consumer base has all had their incomes replaced by AI? Who buys your product your now making with it? Does AI just lead to the end of capitalism as we know it?
- tyingq 3y agoI think people tend to underestimate how awful the shaky interim period might be. Before everyone signs on to some sane way to address this sort of thing.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> Does AI just lead to the end of capitalism as we know it? This reminds me of Marinetti predicting electricity will usher in a post-scarcity world [1]. (Like, students will be hooked up to outlets to learn faster, electricity in the ground will make crops grow faster, flying cities will make land scarcity a thing of the past, et cetera.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filippo_Tommaso_Marinetti https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filippo_Tommaso_Marinetti
- hnbad 3y agoIn retrospect, most of these "technological post-scarcity utopianism" predictions fell flat because they did not account for enclosure. For example, automation may increase worker productivity but that doesn't benefit the worker but the owner: the worker may actually be worse off because the owner will now likely fire workers due to the reduced labor need and the resulting reduction of available jobs suppresses wages. On the other hand, some jobs where workers would outperform automation will be underpriced to the point that it's not worth paying someone a livable wage for the quality advantage over an automated process at a fraction of the cost so those jobs go away too. Or for food production we may be producing an abundance but as the total need is limited, instead of reducing prices because of the increased supply, we end up instead importing out of season produce from the other side of the world, min-maxing convenience food for appeal/addictiveness and destroying unsold goods to avoid lowering the market price. Or for drugs we literally value the sanctity of patents over the lives of people in underdeveloped countries who couldn't afford the medicine in their lifetimes (cf. the refusal to suspend/discount COVID vaccine patents for poorer countries to allow them to produce generics to vaccinate their populations).
- lp4vn 3y agoI think that at some point AI will enter the domain of repetitive physical jobs, like for example an experienced butcher will train an AI arm that eventually will learn to slice meat correctly since that's an activity that normally works with a reasonably standardized product(the animal carcass). Keeping that in mind, honestly for me it's hard not to be very skeptical that it would make any economic sense in the next many decades to have an expensive humanoid robot performing tasks with a very low aggregated value like moving boxes one by one. Just because it's a robot performing an economic activity it doesn't necessarily mean it will be productive or competitive.
- darkwizard42 3y agoI don't know about your example, animal carcasses vary a bunch and it would have to be great at not leaving any meat wasted. Maybe like hammering a nail or properly turning screws and checking tightness? I think it will do well at performing economic activities that don't have real hard time constraints, but just require labor. Ex. moving boxes around from one storehouse to another...leave the last bit of sorting and packing to humans, but now you don't need someone doing the boring work.
- lp4vn 3y ago>I don't know about your example, animal carcasses vary a bunch and it would have to be great at not leaving any meat wasted. Cutting meat in practice is an activity that's more complex than it looks and for sure carcasses vary a lot, but even taking in account all their variation they still follow a pattern. At some point I'm sure we'll have robotic AI arms that will be trainable just like chatGPT is, so after being trained by a profession with thousands and thousands of hours, the hypotetical intelligent robotic arm eventually learns to do the job just fine 99.99% of the time and that's enough.