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> I'm not sure that task needs a humanoid robot An industrial robot arm with air powered suction cups would do the trick... https://bostondynamics.com/products

> I'm not sure that task needs a humanoid robot An industrial robot arm with air powered suction cups would do the trick... https://bostondynamics.com/products/stretch/ https://bostondynamics.com/products/stretch/ ... ... So the task they work best at is the task there is already cheaper better robots specialized for.

Philip-J-Fry 1y ago
I feel like we're entering the era of general and inefficient solutions to problems. Like LLMs being used to pick values out of JSON objects when jq would do the job 1000x more efficiently. This is what this whole field feels like right now. Let's spend lots of time and energy to create a humanoid robot to do the things humans already decided humans were inefficient at and solved with specialised tools. Like people saying "oh it can wash my dishes for me". Well, I haven't washed dishes in years, there's a thing called a dishwasher which does one thing and does it well. "Oh it can do the vacuuming". We have robot vacuums which already do that.
- superpope99 1y ago
  have you ever googled a simple maths question? I often come back to that and realise we've been in this era for quite a while. Calculator would probably be 1000x more efficient!
  - whartung 1y ago
    Sure, but I have to launch the calculator, instead of just typing it into the ever present search bar of my persistent open browser. If I could just type it into my shell, that would be nice. I’m sure there’s some command (or one could be trivially made) to evaluate an equation, but then you get to play game with shell expansions and quotes. In emacs I have to convolute the equation into prefix. All minor stuff but it adds up.
    - timschmidt 1y ago
      > I’m sure there’s some command (or one could be trivially made) bc https://www.gnu.org/software/bc/manual/html_mono/bc.html https://www.gnu.org/software/bc/manual/html_mono/bc.html
- smegger001 1y ago
  Human form robots are a case of Jake of all trades and master of none. Sure I have a dishwasher thats more efficient at doing the job than me but I still end up doing dishes because the cast iron frying pan can't going in there without ruining the polymerised layer of oils that have been baked into it and i would have to repeatedly oil and reheat it and stink up the house with smoke reseasoning it afterwards, and I have hand wash the thermos and travel mugs, and dishwasher arent good for the sharp knives and etcetera etc etc... sure the rumba can vacume very efficiently but it suck at gating around furniture leg or gaps to small for a 14'' diameter circle to fit through so I have to vacume all of the bits it can't get to. Sure the a robot lawn mower can do my yard very efficiently but it cant move the childrens toys out of the grass or open the gate to the front yard or close the gate to keep the dogs from running out the gate once its open. Specialized tools suck at edge cases. Human form robots if they ever works (big if) can do all of the edge cases and take advantage of all the tools made for humans I already have to do all of the those other jobs.
  - swiftcoder 1y ago
    The real question, is whether the humanoid robot will ever be cheaper than hiring immigrant labour. Because that's a pretty damn low threshold
    - fragmede 1y ago
      The problem is that human immigrant labor is, well, human. Cost isn't the only metric being considered.
    - lugu 1y ago
      There isn't enough migrant to do all labor east asia will need as its population gets quickly older. Plus the societal aspiration of culture dissemination isn't there.
- aeternum 1y ago
  There were plenty of digital circuit engineers back in the 90s that said microprocessors were general and inefficient solutions to problems. And if you needed it programmable, well an FPGA was still almost as general and far more efficient than a microprocessor. Guess what won.
  - iancmceachern 1y ago
    As a hardware engineer I hear this a lot from software/electrical folks. It's Moore's law that largely drove what you describe. Moore's law only applies to semiconductors. Gears, motors and copper wire are not going to get 10x faster/cheaper every 18 months or whatever. 10 years from now gears will cost more, they will cost what they cost now plus inflation. I've literally heard super smart YC founders say they just assume some sort of "Moore's law for hardware" will magicallyake their idea workable next year. Computing power gets, and will continue to get, cheaper every day. Hardware, gears, nuts, bolts, doesnt.
    - lugu 1y ago
      Think about cars. Their manufacturers work really hard on efficient (cost and performance). And what people do with them is a very different story. It could see the same happening with robots.
      - iancmceachern 1y ago
        I dont follow
    - tim333 1y ago
      The nuts and bolts won't change much but the software/compute controlling the thing likely will.
      - iancmceachern 1y ago
        But the nuts and Bolts need to be paid for and manufactured for each robot. The software needs to be done once and then they can just click copy.
- rowanG077 1y ago
  Isn't the entire point that LLMs are unreasonably better at even specific things that you would naively think a purpose build system would be good at.
  - aDyslecticCrow 1y ago
    Could you name an example aside rephrasing text?
    - rowanG077 1y ago
      Considering the entire thing is a text generator it's quite a statement to exclude that. Text is a huge world. Math, programming, stories, chatting, mail, search, website navigation, most things you want to do in the digital space involves text.
- plastic3169 1y ago
  This unoptimizing has been going on since the start of time. Why are the values in json to start with? At somepoint the bad slow generalized version will overtake the specialized ways of doing things.
- anentropic 1y ago
  From the demo videos on the site... it seems now that people have dishwashers they want a robot to load the dishwasher for them
  - spopejoy 1y ago
    That's not that weird, even if it is pretty pathetic. I don't understand it now but I used to dread "doing the dishes" when I was younger even though it was 95% just filling a dishwasher. Laziness drives technology an awful lot, at least from a product POV.
- spopejoy 1y ago
  > LLMs being used to pick values out of JSON objects Or the often-trumpeted "I had Claude do a killer refactor" that an IDE can do locally for zero power faster and 100% reliably
93po 1y ago
I think the use case here is smaller to medium size businesses that don't need a $150k suction robot arm 24/7, but do need 24/7 help with warehousing, packaging, restocking, taking inventory, sorting mailing, applying shipping labes, etc. With a single humanoid robot you can do all that for, at some point, possibly as low as $20k for a one-time robot purchase.
- blackguardx 1y ago
  Why do you think a humanoid robot will be cheaper than a robot arm?
  - xky 1y ago
    If humanoid robots can perform ok on a broader set of tasks then they could reach economies of scale that a robot arm might not.
    - aerostable_slug 1y ago
      To add to that, a good friend of mine is a welder and machinist (and still using Linux on the desktop years after I set him up). A robot 'helper' that just moves things around and maybe does basic machine work (cutting pipe and threading the ends, for example) would put his productivity through the roof. Same story with a guy who specializes in kitchen remodeling. It's hard to find decent general purpose help these days and they would pay good money for a halfway useful helper. Once it's able to weld... That's going to be a massive game changer, and I can see that coming 'round the corner right quickly.
      - sneak 1y ago
        Once it’s able to weld and climb then building skyscrapers will become a lot easier and cheaper as you don’t need safety equipment for them.
        darkwater 1y ago
whatever1 1y ago
Of course it does not. We just add scanners in up down left and right of the conveyor. Never touching the package.
- bjoli 1y ago
  This was my solution as well. Why even have a robot? Give me a conveyor belt, some cameras and a moderately powerful SBC and I think I could probably manage a system that does one package a second with a fallback for humans to process what can't be processed by the machine.
  - aDyslecticCrow 1y ago
    The Boston robot is for packing boxes on and off the conveyor; like a transport car. And it helps having a few degrees of freedom to do that effectively. If it's just checking or adding labels, it's silly to even use that.

Philip-J-Fry 1y ago

I feel like we're entering the era of general and inefficient solutions to problems. Like LLMs being used to pick values out of JSON objects when jq would do the job 1000x more efficiently. This is what this whole field feels like right now. Let's spend lots of time and energy to create a humanoid robot to do the things humans already decided humans were inefficient at and solved with specialised tools. Like people saying "oh it can wash my dishes for me". Well, I haven't washed dishes in years, there's a thing called a dishwasher which does one thing and does it well. "Oh it can do the vacuuming". We have robot vacuums which already do that.

superpope99 1y ago
have you ever googled a simple maths question? I often come back to that and realise we've been in this era for quite a while. Calculator would probably be 1000x more efficient!
- whartung 1y ago
  Sure, but I have to launch the calculator, instead of just typing it into the ever present search bar of my persistent open browser. If I could just type it into my shell, that would be nice. I’m sure there’s some command (or one could be trivially made) to evaluate an equation, but then you get to play game with shell expansions and quotes. In emacs I have to convolute the equation into prefix. All minor stuff but it adds up.
  - timschmidt 1y ago
    > I’m sure there’s some command (or one could be trivially made) bc https://www.gnu.org/software/bc/manual/html_mono/bc.html https://www.gnu.org/software/bc/manual/html_mono/bc.html
smegger001 1y ago
Human form robots are a case of Jake of all trades and master of none. Sure I have a dishwasher thats more efficient at doing the job than me but I still end up doing dishes because the cast iron frying pan can't going in there without ruining the polymerised layer of oils that have been baked into it and i would have to repeatedly oil and reheat it and stink up the house with smoke reseasoning it afterwards, and I have hand wash the thermos and travel mugs, and dishwasher arent good for the sharp knives and etcetera etc etc... sure the rumba can vacume very efficiently but it suck at gating around furniture leg or gaps to small for a 14'' diameter circle to fit through so I have to vacume all of the bits it can't get to. Sure the a robot lawn mower can do my yard very efficiently but it cant move the childrens toys out of the grass or open the gate to the front yard or close the gate to keep the dogs from running out the gate once its open. Specialized tools suck at edge cases. Human form robots if they ever works (big if) can do all of the edge cases and take advantage of all the tools made for humans I already have to do all of the those other jobs.
- swiftcoder 1y ago
  The real question, is whether the humanoid robot will ever be cheaper than hiring immigrant labour. Because that's a pretty damn low threshold
  - fragmede 1y ago
    The problem is that human immigrant labor is, well, human. Cost isn't the only metric being considered.
  - lugu 1y ago
    There isn't enough migrant to do all labor east asia will need as its population gets quickly older. Plus the societal aspiration of culture dissemination isn't there.
aeternum 1y ago
There were plenty of digital circuit engineers back in the 90s that said microprocessors were general and inefficient solutions to problems. And if you needed it programmable, well an FPGA was still almost as general and far more efficient than a microprocessor. Guess what won.
- iancmceachern 1y ago
  As a hardware engineer I hear this a lot from software/electrical folks. It's Moore's law that largely drove what you describe. Moore's law only applies to semiconductors. Gears, motors and copper wire are not going to get 10x faster/cheaper every 18 months or whatever. 10 years from now gears will cost more, they will cost what they cost now plus inflation. I've literally heard super smart YC founders say they just assume some sort of "Moore's law for hardware" will magicallyake their idea workable next year. Computing power gets, and will continue to get, cheaper every day. Hardware, gears, nuts, bolts, doesnt.
  - lugu 1y ago
    Think about cars. Their manufacturers work really hard on efficient (cost and performance). And what people do with them is a very different story. It could see the same happening with robots.
    - iancmceachern 1y ago
      I dont follow
  - tim333 1y ago
    The nuts and bolts won't change much but the software/compute controlling the thing likely will.
    - iancmceachern 1y ago
      But the nuts and Bolts need to be paid for and manufactured for each robot. The software needs to be done once and then they can just click copy.
rowanG077 1y ago
Isn't the entire point that LLMs are unreasonably better at even specific things that you would naively think a purpose build system would be good at.
- aDyslecticCrow 1y ago
  Could you name an example aside rephrasing text?
  - rowanG077 1y ago
    Considering the entire thing is a text generator it's quite a statement to exclude that. Text is a huge world. Math, programming, stories, chatting, mail, search, website navigation, most things you want to do in the digital space involves text.
plastic3169 1y ago
This unoptimizing has been going on since the start of time. Why are the values in json to start with? At somepoint the bad slow generalized version will overtake the specialized ways of doing things.
anentropic 1y ago
From the demo videos on the site... it seems now that people have dishwashers they want a robot to load the dishwasher for them
- spopejoy 1y ago
  That's not that weird, even if it is pretty pathetic. I don't understand it now but I used to dread "doing the dishes" when I was younger even though it was 95% just filling a dishwasher. Laziness drives technology an awful lot, at least from a product POV.
spopejoy 1y ago
> LLMs being used to pick values out of JSON objects Or the often-trumpeted "I had Claude do a killer refactor" that an IDE can do locally for zero power faster and 100% reliably

93po 1y ago

I think the use case here is smaller to medium size businesses that don't need a $150k suction robot arm 24/7, but do need 24/7 help with warehousing, packaging, restocking, taking inventory, sorting mailing, applying shipping labes, etc. With a single humanoid robot you can do all that for, at some point, possibly as low as $20k for a one-time robot purchase.

blackguardx 1y ago
Why do you think a humanoid robot will be cheaper than a robot arm?
- xky 1y ago
  If humanoid robots can perform ok on a broader set of tasks then they could reach economies of scale that a robot arm might not.
  - aerostable_slug 1y ago
    To add to that, a good friend of mine is a welder and machinist (and still using Linux on the desktop years after I set him up). A robot 'helper' that just moves things around and maybe does basic machine work (cutting pipe and threading the ends, for example) would put his productivity through the roof. Same story with a guy who specializes in kitchen remodeling. It's hard to find decent general purpose help these days and they would pay good money for a halfway useful helper. Once it's able to weld... That's going to be a massive game changer, and I can see that coming 'round the corner right quickly.
    - sneak 1y ago
      Once it’s able to weld and climb then building skyscrapers will become a lot easier and cheaper as you don’t need safety equipment for them.
      - darkwater 1y ago

whatever1 1y ago

Of course it does not. We just add scanners in up down left and right of the conveyor. Never touching the package.

bjoli 1y ago
This was my solution as well. Why even have a robot? Give me a conveyor belt, some cameras and a moderately powerful SBC and I think I could probably manage a system that does one package a second with a fallback for humans to process what can't be processed by the machine.
- aDyslecticCrow 1y ago
  The Boston robot is for packing boxes on and off the conveyor; like a transport car. And it helps having a few degrees of freedom to do that effectively. If it's just checking or adding labels, it's silly to even use that.