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A brief, incomplete, and mostly wrong history of robotics
- taneq 1y agoHalfway through and this is hilarious. Are you trying to tell me that AI originally stood for Anomalously-small Istanbulians? :D Edit: Oh. In hindsight this (and other similarly snarky backronyms) is obviously why any time computers can do a thing it stops being “AI”.
- Symmetry 1y agoThe YouTube videos will never stop. But I think the author missed a trick by not including that time one of our Spots got shot. https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/boston-dynamics-robot-dog-shooting-massachusetts/ https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/boston-dynamics-robot-do... EDIT: And a link to the programming languages inspiration for this post if you haven't read it already. https://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-mostly-wrong.html https://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-...
- robobenjie 1y agoIf I had known... Somehow I missed that story when it happened. Thanks for sharing. :)
- albert_e 1y agoOff topic ..did the CBS page heavily hijack the browser back button. I struggled to get back to this page.
- gdiamos 1y agoWas this thing written by ChatGPT?
- dmillard 1y agoClearly not - it's quite funny (or at least I thought so). Anyway, the author is a well known writer in the robotics world.
- gdiamos 1y agoThe future part didn’t land for me at all. To me it just goes completely off the rails. “”” 2035: AI is 10,000 times smarter than the smartest human.7 It composes “A Brief, Exhaustive and Completely Correct History of Robotics” which is much funnier than this one. 2035: Technological utopia arrives. “”” That’s okay, humor requires taking a risk.
- robobenjie 1y agoI had a dickens of a time with the ending. Having it end at the present seemed super abrupt (as it really feels like we are in the middle of a big shift) but I didn't really want to venture into my own predictions. One of my early readers had the suggestion of using prominent AI CEO/VC's predictions about the near future and treating them seriously as if they were inevitable fact, which I found very funny. And really this is all about amusing myself.
- robobenjie 1y agoaww thanks David.
- robobenjie 1y agoThere is exactly one joke by ChatGPT. For Stability AI's CEO's prediction that there are no longer any human programmers by 2028 I liked the idea of referencing Stanford's intro to CS class which is semi-famously a bell-weather for the tech industry. My original replacement class was "Growing food for Sustenance" which kind of worked but I thought was weak. I asked ChatGPT for alternates and it gave me about 15, of which "Barter Economics and Goat Management" was clearly the funniest, and annoyingly funnier than mine.
- modeless 1y agoThe problem with Google's robotics acquisitions was that they fired Andy Rubin less than a year after he made them. They floundered after that. It's clear that Google's management simply didn't have the patience to continue putting money into hardware development before the software was ready. They forced premature commercialization on BD and then dumped them on SoftBank. Strong top-level executive support could have changed that. I wonder what Google robotics could have been.
- no_wizard 1y agoWorth remembering he was fired due to sexual harassment[0]. While Google did the right thing in firing him, they deserve far more criticism for the cover ups. Both of which are frankly unacceptable [0]: https://archive.is/gmvI7 https://archive.is/gmvI7
- immibis 1y agoGiven the choice between having a sexual harasser on staff, or missing out on a billion dollars of profit, every company in the world will choose to keep the sexual harasser and the profit, so that can't be the only reason.
- whatshisface 1y agoThat's a very unrealistic perspective on management. To begin with, no individual is ever seen as personally irreplaceable.
- immibis 1y agoSome are, but it's usually based on how much the CEO plays golf with them, not their talent. But in exceptional cases, like an acquihire, it might be. There's literally no point doing an acquihire and then firing the people you acquihired. That's just burning money.
- robobenjie 1y agoYeah, having been there during Andy's firing I can vouch that the thunderdome era of replicant actually intensified after he left (and lasted until boston was sold off and the rest of us moved into X) but nuance is hard and less funny and I did warn folks that the history is mostly wrong... ;)
- mooseling 1y agoI'm going through a breakup right now and really enjoying posts like this. Interesting, funny, accessible. The Grug Brained Developer also really hit the spot. Any other recommendations in this vein? Thanks!
- fydorm 1y agoLifting weights
- ianbicking 1y agoWhy do folks think remote telepresence never became popular, outside of the occasional appearance in sitcoms?
- Groxx 1y agoBecause almost nobody has ever seen a telepresence robot in use. Like, factually. Unless you count video calls as telepresence, but I think most do not.
- Groxx 1y agoOn rereading the thread, maybe I'm just misreading? I read your question as "they're popular, why do people think they are not" but you could also have meant "why doesn't anyone want them". For the latter: because it's far higher friction than a phone call (or any similar tool). On the extreme end, I can walk into a meeting room and push a couple buttons and have a zoom meeting. And doing that with your computer or phone is significantly easier, often just one or two buttons whether you're a two person business or 200k. Versus telepresence robots at the simplest: it requires charging, far more complicated UI to do anything that a video call cannot do, and is many times more expensive so you almost certainly do not have one everywhere you have a video-call-capable display. And the display is probably dramatically smaller, so you still need a separate display if you want to show anything useful. For very nearly everyone, that's just "a video call with extra baggage". They can work just fine where those tradeoffs are offsetting vastly more expensive and higher friction things, e.g. in highly specialized surgery, and you do see them in those areas. That's just a rather small niche compared to "has a computer or phone".
- ge96 1y agoMaybe the remotely-operated robots, no face though
- BriggyDwiggs42 1y agoFundamentally it’s just easier to send an email or call.
- whiplash451 1y ago
- degrees57 1y agoI was hoping to see a mention of Odex 1 by Odetics. I was working in a printed circuit board factory at the time (1983), and we got to build boards for it. Later on, there was a demo where it lifted one end of a small pickup truck off the ground.
- smath 1y agoSerious Q: What are the best known approaches for getting robots to fold clothes / do dishes? Doesn’t need to be humanoid
- aaronblohowiak 1y agoif you have a good dishwasher and don't overfill it, you probably are over-washing by hand. with two dishwashers (one dirty, one clean,) and most of the problem is solved.
- aetherson 1y agoI've seen a lot of people claim this for 15 years, but every experience I've ever had with minimal or no handwashing of dishes before putting them in the dishwasher has resulted in visibly dirty dishes. It's possible that the (several) dishwashers I've used have been "not good enough," but if so I suggest most people's dishwashers aren't good enough.
- pflenker 1y agoFather here with a family of 4. our dishwasher runs multiple times per day and we never hand wash before, and I can tell you that the dishes tend to be very dirty before they go in. They always come out sparkling clean. Here is what works for us: - keep the salt tank filled as well as the rinsing agent. Don’t use these tabs which claim to have all of this in there combined. - don’t overload the dish washer - clean it regularly. Once per week I take out the sieve at the bottom, clean it (takes less than 5 minutes) and then I use one of these bottles of cleaning fluid with a wax cap. You put it in, start a cleaning program, the wax melts and the fluid does its work. That’s also when I refill the salt and rinsing agent. Total time effort per week: 15 mins. We have a low mid-tier dish washer, but I had the same results with cheaper ones.
- aetherson 1y agoOkay, a heated debate in my slack group is now going. We need more deets: * When you say that you don't hand-wash, can you clarify? Does that mean you just take the dish and put it directly into the dishwasher after throwing any large chunks of food away? Or do you rinse it or even soap it, you just don't scrub it thoroughly? * You mention washing the dishes multiple times per day. Does any food actually dry on your plates before the dishwasher gets run? * You don't have a problem with fingerprints or lipprints on glassware? * Do you feel like the salt tank has benefits beyond hard water mitigation?
- z3ratul163071 1y agogreat history. one of the hidden gems inside: "the wildly successful ROS operating system. ROS is used to this day by enthusiastic researchers and frustrated companies who can’t figure out how to migrate off of it"
- jvanderbot 1y ago"We should use ROS to move fast" <first stage prototyping done> "As we grow we need to move off ROS" <slippery market and customers require new hires and agility> "ROS has this thing that can replace 1000 lines of your bespoke code, and it works pretty well" Round and round and round we go. Seen it happen first hand, will see it again.
- dima55 1y agoROS usage is a great quick way to evaluate the doofusness levels of an org. It's such a dumpster fire on every level, no reasonable human should be going within a mile of that thing.
- all2 1y agoI've tried a few times to get into ROS for personal projects. I guess I understand the gist of it, but I still don't understand it. Suppose I've got a motor, a motor driver, and an Arduino. How does ROS work with that? There's all this message passing and distinct blocks of stuff, but how do I get my motor to turn? I'm sure there are tutorials out there... I get tired trying to approach their docs. I typically understand things from the ground up or from the top down. Their docs seem to start in the middle and work up/down at the same time. [edit] What are my alternatives in this space? What is better than ROS?
- dima55 1y agoROS is a collection of mostly-independent components, each of which is a not-as-good implementation of existing tooling. The implementers and the users mostly haven't grasped how to use the existing tooling, and the whole community is full of the blind leading the blind. Alternatives for what? The build system? The IPC?
- nsxwolf 1y agoSerious question: Why would I want to read something with this title? Is this some much more abstract form of a "How Not To" article?
- theamk 1y agoIt's humor, a robotiscist joking about their field. If you are interested in robotics, you'll find it funny. If not, you will be confused.
- ackfoobar 1y agoAs stated in the article, it's a reference to a piece by James Iry on programming languages. From the title I expect something wrong, funny, but mildly insightful.
- outside1234 1y agoJust awesome stuff: "Tesla deploys thousands of their Optimus humanoids working in their automotive factories.1 The robots are slower and less productive than human workers, but make up for it by being more expensive and harder to train."