5 ms·

For some nuts and bolts, I myself struggle with it, almost to the point of giving up. But what the article misses: We can just rearrange our environment to mak

• protocolture 1y ago
  Yep, this is what I reckon will be tried too. But then making that robot environment safe for humans to be in will be quite a tough problem.
  • manmal 1y ago
    I imagine things will just be very unified and boring because the same shapes will be recognizable everywhere. But it would be the same things we already have. Just make the robot weak and light enough to not even be able to harm someone. Lighting the kitchen on fire is always a risk though, I guess.
  • noduerme 1y ago
    Once the humans in question have paid off the 7 year loan to remodel their kitchen, the real question is what further value do they add to the proposition?
    • protocolture 1y ago
      I wasnt thinking Kitchen so much as Data Centre, a lot of whom are already unfriendly to human life, adding 300kg robots, and parts designed for robot interaction are just going to make them even moreso.
• KaiMagnus 1y ago
  Imagine an IKEA robot, they could redesign their kitchens to fit it, as well as all of their other products. I'd never step into my kitchen again so why would it need to be made for me anyways? (They could give the robot instructions on how to set up their furniture as well, the business plan really writes itself)
• jiehong 1y ago
  It’s only a stopgap measure. And maybe that explains why autonomous robots in space struggle so much: we first need to adapt space to robot (joke) Standards are good, but then how about you take up pottery and make a plate yourself and now your robot won’t handle them…
  • meindnoch 1y ago
    You can do pottery in VR if you want.
• meindnoch 1y ago
  That's a great idea actually! An example that came to my mind: squeezing fruit juice requires a lot of dexterity. But if we sold pre-chopped fruit bits in a standardized satchet, then robots could easily squeeze the delicious and healthy fruit juice from those! And health-conscious people drink fruit juice every day, so this could easily be made into a subscription-based service! A perfect business model right there. You could call it iJuice or juice.ai or even Juicero.
  • johndhi 1y ago
    I spent last night bemoaning the sad internet culture of negativity and sarcasm and hatred... But this post made me laugh.
  • brk 1y ago
    If HN sold the ability to buy more upvotes they would have all my money for this comment.
    • tclancy 1y ago
      I can rent them to you. Contact us for pricing today! (Do not ask about our burst pricing though, it usually screws up the deal)
• noduerme 1y ago
  Fully autonomous vehicles will never reach maximum reliability, speed, and efficiency either until we eliminate human drivers, pedestrians, stoplights, buildings, and pave the entire surface of the planet.
  • meindnoch 1y ago
    And for maximum safety, we'll need physical barriers that prevent the vehicles from leaving their designated path. The easiest way to do this, in my opinion, would be to put a special type of wheel on the vehicle. The wheels would have a flange on the perimeter, and the road surface could have a groove that the flange fits into, thus preventing the vehicle from veering off outside its prescribed lane. This would actually provide such tight control on the vehicles' lateral movement, that it would become possible to connect several vehicles front to back, in a sort of autonomous convoy, which is pretty cool IMO!
    • marcosdumay 1y ago
      Yeah. Also, please refrain from reaching maximum speed and efficiency of the transportation system alone. That's not an important goal. The important goal is to optimize the life of the people that use the lines, not artificial measures taken from just looking at the machines running in them.
    • noduerme 1y ago
      Wait, what if we put them on tracks and they had predetermined stations they stopped at?
• ACCount37 1y ago
  Dead end. You can't redesign and replace the entire world. It's the same issue as self-driving cars: universal worker robots have to either learn to use the same things humans do, or never leave the labs.
  • croes 1y ago
    We changed the world for combustion cars, why not for self-driving cars?
    • Avicebron 1y ago
      Typically the world changes when a new market is discovered, making the earth more traversable by car at the time opened up enough of a new market that it was done post haste for better or for worse. The only real way I see self-driving cars opening up markets at a scale that they would justify the amount of overhead is if they created self-driving only lanes with infrastructure closely around them to be quick and easily accessible from the passengers. Which at that point is really just the Japanese train system and surrounding infrastructure, which many places (at least in the US) don't seem capable or willing to make happen.
    • ACCount37 1y ago
      Combustion cars were already usable even on the roads built for horse drawn carriages - they were, in fact, adapted to the existing world. They even ran on things like firewood, coal, or, for the first ICEs, relatively common liquid fuels that could be sourced in large cities. Cars rely on gas stations today - but gas stations only became a thing after cars already became a thing. Nowadays, Tesla had to make Superchargers happen all by themselves before EVs could really happen - despite EVs already having the crushing advantage of being able to charge overnight in any garage that has power. Can you see a robot company branching out to be a competitor to McDonalds to prove that their kitchen robot is viable if you design the entire kitchen for it? Well, it's not entirely impossible, but I think it unlikely.
      • marcosdumay 1y ago
• efnx 1y ago
  The 50’s called and wants all its mechanical lever-actuated extendo arm-clasps back! Joking aside, the present always has a tangential future that never comes to be. Right now the current zeerust is “AI and robots doing everything”. Continuing to have humans do it is good enough.
• croes 1y ago
  > Maybe robot companies will even sell those themselves. They will sell them so only their robots can use them.
• treyd 1y ago
  This is exactly the kinda shit Nietzsche was referring to when he talked about humanity giving up our humanity to better serve machines instead of making machines that better serve humanity.
  • cl0ckt0wer 1y ago
    Aren't the nuts and bolts part of the machine?
  • Der_Einzige 1y ago
    Nietzsche and his whole philosophy are stupid, wrong, and ontologically evil. His whole philosophy is poorly reacting to the great ideas of Philipp Mainlanders “the philosophy of redemption”. Philip mainlander and Aruther Schopenhauer were correct in their philosophical pessimism and actual nihilism and nietzschian radical optimism is what motivates nearly all modern totalitarian, fascist, and authoritarian movements. The only good thing nietzsche produced was the “Wall-E” movie from Pixar, which is a radically nietzschian film.
    • achierius 1y ago
      There's more to Nietzsche than "master and slave morality". I'm a big Nietzsche hater too but you're wrong to dismiss the rest of his work because of one part of it. He's incredibly influential in philosophy to this day, for good reason. E.g. you can look into Deleuze's reading of his work, which focuses on the continuity from Spinoza and the analysis of ethics from a perspective of capabilities rather than obligations (as in the Kantian framing). Or more directly, read about the idea of eternal recurrence, which I find to be an incredibly pro-, not anti-, human concept.
      • Der_Einzige 1y ago
        I dismissed him over his radical optimism. You claimed I dismissed him over master-slave morality. We are not the same. Also I’ve covet to cover read all of his work. Almost all of it is trash and ontologically bad. You try to quote fashionable nonsense charlatan grifters like deleuze as though they are worth reading a single word of. Their works, the people who read them, and the entire field of critical theory are direct reasons for the rise of trump and right wing authoritarianism world wide. Kill critical theory or its hateful children will kill us all But instead you patronize me by acting like I don’t read. This mentality is why the world collectively hates leftists right now.
• bokchoi 1y ago
  I'd be willing to wear clothes that have ultraviolet stripes and QR codes on them if a laundry robot can fold them for me.
• amluto 1y ago
  That will fail rather quickly if the robot is trying to repair something dirty.
• throwaway894345 1y ago
  I've thought about this with roads and automated driving--today automated driving seems somewhat insane because, even if the system can do the right thing on the overwhelming majority of roads, there is an enormously long tail of roadways that have surprises that these systems will not have encountered and automated systems can't easily handle. In the future, it may seem insane that we would allow roads to be built that aren't accommodating of automated driving systems (or maybe we will just develop AI that is not simply "pattern recognition" but which can actively solve somewhat "complex" problems?).
• larkinrichards 1y ago
  The article doesn't miss it -- this is exactly the point. We can and will rearrange our environment to support robots, but that means they will never learn dexterity.
• randcraw 1y ago
  That plan sounds viable until you consider how much noncompliant legacy hardware is out there that can't all be replaced but must be repaired, like cars, roofs, appliances, HVAC, electrical, plumbing, etc. If robots can't accommodate the huge fraction of old infrastructure already in place, they'll have limited value indeed -- basically just working on assembly lines in factories.
  • worik 1y ago
    In New Zealand there are rules, and more extensive guidelines, on "disabled access". (Probably called something different now) But it means that access to publicly accessible places is possible for a wide variety of disabilities I wonder if that would help robotic access? For example you do not need to grip and turn a knob to open a door, they should all be levers.
• worik 1y ago
  > But what the article misses: We can just rearrange our environment... The article does discuss this... change how things are done in order to automate them away from human labor What boosters of humanoid robots specifically do not want to do