4 ms·

Why humanoid robots won't catch up to human workers any time soon

37 points by speckx 1mo ago

AlexandrB 1mo ago
Moravec's paradox remains undefeated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox
- mdberkey 1mo ago
  As someone early in their SWE career (hopefully), I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Knowledge work as a career seems like it’s becoming a less viable option with every advancement. It’s hard to predict the future, but sometimes I wish I took the med school route and just pursued tech as a hobby.
  - maigret 1mo ago
    Med school has its own issues and is a very demanding learning and career path. Lots of stress, long shifts etc. I am very impressed by the people doing it but it’s not for everyone. Anyway, who can predict the future? There are still lots of things to do in IT in the age of AI - actually, more than before. The question is most whether you like writing software and doing planning and bug fixes all day for the next decades.
vessenes 1mo ago
This is a recent essay on robotic workers that does not mention Figure’s 24+ hour livestream of a robot doing package management on a live assembly line. The real reason it’s hard to assess where we’re at with industrial robots is that some of the people who’ve gone hardest at it are secretive, and also believe in power law scaling. So, the first 1,000 robots will only be used to build the next robot factory, which also will be used to build the next really big robot factory. When we see humanoid robots actually out in the wild for sale at retail, they are going to come very very quickly, at scale. Figure and Boston Dynamics sold out next year’s production runs almost instantly sometime last year; I think it’s just incredibly hard to overestimate the impact humanoid robots are going to have on the global economy.
- throwitaway222 1mo ago
  There still seems to be questions around if that was faked. (scorch me if I'm wrong I last looked at this a month ago)
  - tokai 1mo ago
    Questions? It's clear it was faked. The robot kept pushing its non-existent vr googles back up.
    - vessenes 1mo ago
      Ooh interesting. Got a link? I guess you’d want to find out f that’s a weird motion tic falling out of rl training or the much simpler explanation. I thought figure was publicly clear the robots were operating autonomously.
- gjsman-1000 1mo ago
  > So, the first 1,000 robots will only be used to build the next robot factory, which also will be used to build the next really big robot factory. When we see humanoid robots actually out in the wild for sale at retail, they are going to come very very quickly, at scale. This is one of the dumbest ideas I've read here. Seriously; do you honestly believe, that we will be able to linearly scale all of the materials that go into robots? You can't have a factory without motors, aluminum, steel, copper, quality control, CNC manufacturing, precision bearings, ball screws, harmonic drives, semiconductors, batteries, and skilled people to design, install, and maintain all of it. Every one of those is its own supply chain with its own bottleneck, and almost all of them are already constrained and at risk. If anything, I would bet you $500 we will not be able to jump to the robotics age because we don't have enough skilled humans on this earth, due to the excitement about not training them because of their imminent replacement. That's before geopolitics - do you think China, if we actually built working humanoid robots, wouldn't immediately claim all supply for themselves and lock down the supply chain? Of course they would, it would be stupid not to. In the event of a working humanoid robot, every single dependency needs to be onshore, or it's not scaling.
samlinnfer 1mo ago
I really want to see that robot door-opening, shirt-folding, orange-peeling and sandwich making competition. It would be like the housework championships. If your robot works it would sell like hotcakes right there. edit: realised there's a part 2: https://generalrobots.substack.com/p/benjies-humanoid-olympics-part-ii https://generalrobots.substack.com/p/benjies-humanoid-olympi...
- wwwtyro 1mo ago
  Also hand washing!
tootie 1mo ago
I have a few thoughts. Number one is that humanoid robots are probably a dead end. It's movie stuff. It makes me think of Henry Ford saying customers want "faster horses". It is the fault of evolution that we don't have wheels but we don't have to repeat that mistake. Secondly I think robot butlers are a bridge too far. The article explains pretty well why the spatial reasoning is problematic but so would things like battery life. And there'd be zero margin for error. The first time a robot steps on someone's cat or, god forbid, baby there will be a massive backlash. They have to be perfect. We accept LLMs hallucinating once in a while but a physical robot in your home cannot ever be wrong. I think if we want to pilot autonomous robots it will be factory floors and other rote tasks. Maybe installing solar fields or something. Let them achieve a perfect safety record in someplace with more risk tolerance then take the next step.
- johannes1234321 1mo ago
  > It is the fault of evolution that we don't have wheels but we don't have to repeat that mistake. With wheels you can't climb up a steep mountain. Hands and feet allow to hold tight. With wheels you can't hold as much. Feet can be used as a replacement for an arm for some functions when arms are broken. If a wheel is partially broken it's close to impossible to use. If a foot is broken I can walk on heel or toes only and bypass some issue. It's not the best solution for many things, but the flexibility is a big win. That flexibility isn't needed with machines, though. I can have many machines, I can replace machines, ... so I can optimize for the use case. And sometimes the use case might be to simulate a human to trick instincts, which recognize "humans" subconciously. Be it in health care or be it an army of machine soldiers walking towards an enemy.
  - tootie 1mo ago
    Have you ever seen an ATV? You can absolutely drive up a mountain without roads on wheels. Or treads. Also nobody is buying a robot to walk up a mountain. They will spend all their time indoors or on paved roads.
- dosisking 1mo ago
  > I think if we want to pilot autonomous robots it will be factory floors and other rote tasks. Maybe installing solar fields or something. Let them achieve a perfect safety record in someplace with more risk tolerance then take the next step. No, these autonomous robots will be used by the military as soldiers. There will be no attempt to achieve a "perfect safety record". These soldiers are already here, pay attention to what is happening in Ukraine.
seydor 1mo ago
I dont get the investment in humanoids beyond trying to create some kind of stock market bubble again. Factories that have already heavily robotized their production, employ a minimal amount of humans to do niche work. It's going to be immensely difficult to replace that niche work with any kind of robot, let alone humanoids. These humanoid robots (or generally limbed robots) could be useful for the two sectors that are craving for cheap workers, worldwide: agriculture and construction. Yet all the demos i see are fragile lightweight robots not made for rugged work. That makes me conclude that the whole sector is currently like the Metaverse.
- simonsarris 1mo ago
  You can't imagine a more useful Roomba? I think for safety reasons, we won't want any home robots to be very strong. Just precise.
- NegativeLatency 1mo ago
  They’re probably hoping for some hardware version of the software “bitter lesson” I think it’s probably also easier to raise money on a humanoid robot because everyone has some intuitive understanding of the form.
- dawnerd 1mo ago
  And not to mention those robots will require an expensive subscription and maintenance contract which I’d imagine wouldn’t actually save money vs traditional labor. Any company that can optimize labor costs pretty much already has to the point of diminishing returns. The only sector I see any of these selling in any meaningful number is military and police.
- treis 1mo ago
  Housework is the obvious use case.
  - imglorp 1mo ago
    Hands yes, for all the human actuated things. You don't need 2 legs to do that. Cantilevered wheels might be better for stair climbing around the house. A better obvious use case for fully humanoid is vehicles. Jump into a forklift, combine, or golf cart and be immediately productive. Then jump out and a human can use the vehicle still.
C06aka 1mo ago
My first job out of high school was in a factory. Every aspect of production was automated by a machine with extremely high (five 9s) reliability. Despite that, things went wrong constantly because there was so much going on, usually in novel ways that couldn't be optimized away by tweaking or enhancing the machines. Something with human level dexterity and human level intelligence is necessary to fix the machines when things go wrong. On top of that, so many production tasks need that dexterity. I'd love to see a robot that can crochet. This is a good article about where we're at and where we need to be, but I do get frustrated with commenters who say "we don't need humanoids".
jongjong 1mo ago
My main concern is that as people lose their jobs and can't find new ones, an increasing number of people may be forced into a life of crime. We need UBI ASAP.
sashank_1509 1mo ago
I would have said the same of coding and yet here we are. If the only bottleneck is data (we’ve already spent a trillion in compute), I think it’s going to happen in a few years, a decade at most.
jillesvangurp 1mo ago
They don't have to catch up, they just have to be good enough on a narrow set of tasks to be worth the trouble. Perfect is the enemy of good here. Everything I've seen suggests that the prototypes are already pretty good at simple tasks that involve recognizing, picking up, and putting things into/onto other things in some way. All the dancing, jumping, running, etc. is nice for marketing but not actually that urgent for such tasks. Dexterity is nice. There are plenty of examples of humanoid robots doing pretty fiddly stuff like folding t-shirts and other things. The rest is just optimization where these things gradually get faster, efficient, do more complex things, etc.
- teachrdan 1mo ago
  > they just have to be good enough on a narrow set of tasks to be worth the trouble Depends on the context. If they are to work around human beings, particularly in the home, then they must be safe... to work around humans. If a humanoid robot hits a human being, knocks one over, or even falls down on top of one -- especially a child, who is more fragile and whose movements are unpredictable -- then the industry as a whole faces a huge setback. Just look at what happened when a "self-driving" Uber ran over and killed a pedestrian in Arizona.
  - Gareth321 1mo ago
    As always I feel compelled to say that the bar is not "never hurts a human being." It's "hurts human beings less than the status quo." Home helpers, for example, also occasionally hurt human beings. Further, the elderly hurt themselves a lot doing chores around the house. If the sum of these incidents (in severity and frequently) is greater than the sum of accidents by robots, we should still use the robots. I see similar arguments playing out in self driving. People point to the occasional accident and proclaim that the technology is useless. But the bar has never been "perfect." It has always been "better than humans.*The Danish and Dutch government transport departments recently ruled that the evidence is clear: Tesla self driving is now safer than humans.
  - jillesvangurp 1mo ago
    Obviously. But I don't think there are many documented cases of these things being dangerous despite obviously a lot of factories trialing these things now. I expect if you ever buy one for use at home, there will be some clear terms of use limiting liability in case users do misguided, silly and/or wildly inappropriate shit with their robots. Which of course people will probably end up doing regardless. And quite a bit of that will probably end up being shared via social media.
keeda 1mo ago
Substantial displacement of human labor is still very far away, yes, but I'd say it's not due to the lack of dexterity and precision. GenAI is making such rapid advancements that the robotic control systems part may soon be "solved." The real blocker is supply chain constraints for physical parts -- specifically, rare earth elements. Those are essential for the powerful yet accurate electromagnetic motors that make these robots feasible. Oh, and batteries too. However, their supply is severely limited, even without China flexing its strangehold on the market. Last I checked there are no real alternatives or solutions on the horizon for the raw material shortage. Some estimates suggest the global supply currently is a small fraction (like 2% or even lower?) of that needed for mass deployment of the type Elon hallucinates about to pump TSLA stock. The company that solves this or otherwise figures out a way to mass produce dexterous robots is going to be the next trillion dollar company.
tamimio 1mo ago
Humanoid robots are the new qugv (quadruple UGV aka dogs), they are pretty much useless in anything functional but the show off and wow factor. I remember around covid times we got one of these qugv and everyone in the team wanted to be the one working on it, except me, I kept my focus on UAVs and even told them that UAVs are and will be the only robots that has actual use cases (not to include cobotics). That being said, it’s probably a good thing that they only remain as a showoff only, I mean, look at drones, the moment they proved to be functional, humans immediately used it as killing machines rather than something useful. Before that, I remember it was really hard to get a million dollar budget for any UAV project, no one cared about drone delivery, drones that can deliver health equipment to save lives when seconds matters, but as soon as they are used for killing or surveillance you see billions pouring in! So yeah, let humanoid robots be only for shows and hopefully they never become functional or “catch up” any time soon.
hobofan 1mo ago
I think the article takes a completely wrong lense for viewing the Humanoid Robotic Games, and general progress that is being made right now (though admittedly, many robot companies make it challenging with their marketing as well). Most of the advances being demonstrated right now are about establishing a robotic _platform_. They don't necessarily individually have to be able to complete all tasks end to end, but pushing the boundary forward on one of them at a time as a step of progress. The different challenges presented in the article are almost all orthogonal to each other. Some of them are hardware engineering challenges, some of them are software / AI challenges, and most of them ultimately economic challenges. They can all be solved in a mostly independent manner, meaning that they won't be decades away to be resolved, but more likely years. I think robotics is in a space that very much falls into the "people overestimate the progress in one year but underestimate the progress over 5 years" category. A lot of the problems to solve regarding effectiveness (not efficiency) of humanoid robots even as outlined in the article (manipulation = short term spatial planning; long term task planning) greatly benefit from the current advances in AI, and in my estimation are already solvable with better harnesses with the current generation of models.
blahblaher 1mo ago
c'mon people! as soon as we have capable robots, they will be immediately used for the military and policing. factories and home "appliance" robots are a distraction

37 points by speckx 1mo ago

Moravec's paradox remains undefeated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox

mdberkey 1mo ago
As someone early in their SWE career (hopefully), I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Knowledge work as a career seems like it’s becoming a less viable option with every advancement. It’s hard to predict the future, but sometimes I wish I took the med school route and just pursued tech as a hobby.
- maigret 1mo ago
  Med school has its own issues and is a very demanding learning and career path. Lots of stress, long shifts etc. I am very impressed by the people doing it but it’s not for everyone. Anyway, who can predict the future? There are still lots of things to do in IT in the age of AI - actually, more than before. The question is most whether you like writing software and doing planning and bug fixes all day for the next decades.

vessenes 1mo ago

This is a recent essay on robotic workers that does not mention Figure’s 24+ hour livestream of a robot doing package management on a live assembly line. The real reason it’s hard to assess where we’re at with industrial robots is that some of the people who’ve gone hardest at it are secretive, and also believe in power law scaling. So, the first 1,000 robots will only be used to build the next robot factory, which also will be used to build the next really big robot factory. When we see humanoid robots actually out in the wild for sale at retail, they are going to come very very quickly, at scale. Figure and Boston Dynamics sold out next year’s production runs almost instantly sometime last year; I think it’s just incredibly hard to overestimate the impact humanoid robots are going to have on the global economy.

throwitaway222 1mo ago
There still seems to be questions around if that was faked. (scorch me if I'm wrong I last looked at this a month ago)
- tokai 1mo ago
  Questions? It's clear it was faked. The robot kept pushing its non-existent vr googles back up.
  - vessenes 1mo ago
    Ooh interesting. Got a link? I guess you’d want to find out f that’s a weird motion tic falling out of rl training or the much simpler explanation. I thought figure was publicly clear the robots were operating autonomously.
gjsman-1000 1mo ago
> So, the first 1,000 robots will only be used to build the next robot factory, which also will be used to build the next really big robot factory. When we see humanoid robots actually out in the wild for sale at retail, they are going to come very very quickly, at scale. This is one of the dumbest ideas I've read here. Seriously; do you honestly believe, that we will be able to linearly scale all of the materials that go into robots? You can't have a factory without motors, aluminum, steel, copper, quality control, CNC manufacturing, precision bearings, ball screws, harmonic drives, semiconductors, batteries, and skilled people to design, install, and maintain all of it. Every one of those is its own supply chain with its own bottleneck, and almost all of them are already constrained and at risk. If anything, I would bet you $500 we will not be able to jump to the robotics age because we don't have enough skilled humans on this earth, due to the excitement about not training them because of their imminent replacement. That's before geopolitics - do you think China, if we actually built working humanoid robots, wouldn't immediately claim all supply for themselves and lock down the supply chain? Of course they would, it would be stupid not to. In the event of a working humanoid robot, every single dependency needs to be onshore, or it's not scaling.

samlinnfer 1mo ago

I really want to see that robot door-opening, shirt-folding, orange-peeling and sandwich making competition. It would be like the housework championships. If your robot works it would sell like hotcakes right there. edit: realised there's a part 2: https://generalrobots.substack.com/p/benjies-humanoid-olympics-part-ii https://generalrobots.substack.com/p/benjies-humanoid-olympi...

wwwtyro 1mo ago
Also hand washing!

tootie 1mo ago

I have a few thoughts. Number one is that humanoid robots are probably a dead end. It's movie stuff. It makes me think of Henry Ford saying customers want "faster horses". It is the fault of evolution that we don't have wheels but we don't have to repeat that mistake. Secondly I think robot butlers are a bridge too far. The article explains pretty well why the spatial reasoning is problematic but so would things like battery life. And there'd be zero margin for error. The first time a robot steps on someone's cat or, god forbid, baby there will be a massive backlash. They have to be perfect. We accept LLMs hallucinating once in a while but a physical robot in your home cannot ever be wrong. I think if we want to pilot autonomous robots it will be factory floors and other rote tasks. Maybe installing solar fields or something. Let them achieve a perfect safety record in someplace with more risk tolerance then take the next step.

johannes1234321 1mo ago
> It is the fault of evolution that we don't have wheels but we don't have to repeat that mistake. With wheels you can't climb up a steep mountain. Hands and feet allow to hold tight. With wheels you can't hold as much. Feet can be used as a replacement for an arm for some functions when arms are broken. If a wheel is partially broken it's close to impossible to use. If a foot is broken I can walk on heel or toes only and bypass some issue. It's not the best solution for many things, but the flexibility is a big win. That flexibility isn't needed with machines, though. I can have many machines, I can replace machines, ... so I can optimize for the use case. And sometimes the use case might be to simulate a human to trick instincts, which recognize "humans" subconciously. Be it in health care or be it an army of machine soldiers walking towards an enemy.
- tootie 1mo ago
  Have you ever seen an ATV? You can absolutely drive up a mountain without roads on wheels. Or treads. Also nobody is buying a robot to walk up a mountain. They will spend all their time indoors or on paved roads.
dosisking 1mo ago
> I think if we want to pilot autonomous robots it will be factory floors and other rote tasks. Maybe installing solar fields or something. Let them achieve a perfect safety record in someplace with more risk tolerance then take the next step. No, these autonomous robots will be used by the military as soldiers. There will be no attempt to achieve a "perfect safety record". These soldiers are already here, pay attention to what is happening in Ukraine.

seydor 1mo ago

I dont get the investment in humanoids beyond trying to create some kind of stock market bubble again. Factories that have already heavily robotized their production, employ a minimal amount of humans to do niche work. It's going to be immensely difficult to replace that niche work with any kind of robot, let alone humanoids. These humanoid robots (or generally limbed robots) could be useful for the two sectors that are craving for cheap workers, worldwide: agriculture and construction. Yet all the demos i see are fragile lightweight robots not made for rugged work. That makes me conclude that the whole sector is currently like the Metaverse.

simonsarris 1mo ago
You can't imagine a more useful Roomba? I think for safety reasons, we won't want any home robots to be very strong. Just precise.
NegativeLatency 1mo ago
They’re probably hoping for some hardware version of the software “bitter lesson” I think it’s probably also easier to raise money on a humanoid robot because everyone has some intuitive understanding of the form.
dawnerd 1mo ago
And not to mention those robots will require an expensive subscription and maintenance contract which I’d imagine wouldn’t actually save money vs traditional labor. Any company that can optimize labor costs pretty much already has to the point of diminishing returns. The only sector I see any of these selling in any meaningful number is military and police.
treis 1mo ago
Housework is the obvious use case.
- imglorp 1mo ago
  Hands yes, for all the human actuated things. You don't need 2 legs to do that. Cantilevered wheels might be better for stair climbing around the house. A better obvious use case for fully humanoid is vehicles. Jump into a forklift, combine, or golf cart and be immediately productive. Then jump out and a human can use the vehicle still.

C06aka 1mo ago

My first job out of high school was in a factory. Every aspect of production was automated by a machine with extremely high (five 9s) reliability. Despite that, things went wrong constantly because there was so much going on, usually in novel ways that couldn't be optimized away by tweaking or enhancing the machines. Something with human level dexterity and human level intelligence is necessary to fix the machines when things go wrong. On top of that, so many production tasks need that dexterity. I'd love to see a robot that can crochet. This is a good article about where we're at and where we need to be, but I do get frustrated with commenters who say "we don't need humanoids".

jongjong 1mo ago

My main concern is that as people lose their jobs and can't find new ones, an increasing number of people may be forced into a life of crime. We need UBI ASAP.

sashank_1509 1mo ago

I would have said the same of coding and yet here we are. If the only bottleneck is data (we’ve already spent a trillion in compute), I think it’s going to happen in a few years, a decade at most.

jillesvangurp 1mo ago

They don't have to catch up, they just have to be good enough on a narrow set of tasks to be worth the trouble. Perfect is the enemy of good here. Everything I've seen suggests that the prototypes are already pretty good at simple tasks that involve recognizing, picking up, and putting things into/onto other things in some way. All the dancing, jumping, running, etc. is nice for marketing but not actually that urgent for such tasks. Dexterity is nice. There are plenty of examples of humanoid robots doing pretty fiddly stuff like folding t-shirts and other things. The rest is just optimization where these things gradually get faster, efficient, do more complex things, etc.

teachrdan 1mo ago
> they just have to be good enough on a narrow set of tasks to be worth the trouble Depends on the context. If they are to work around human beings, particularly in the home, then they must be safe... to work around humans. If a humanoid robot hits a human being, knocks one over, or even falls down on top of one -- especially a child, who is more fragile and whose movements are unpredictable -- then the industry as a whole faces a huge setback. Just look at what happened when a "self-driving" Uber ran over and killed a pedestrian in Arizona.
- Gareth321 1mo ago
  As always I feel compelled to say that the bar is not "never hurts a human being." It's "hurts human beings less than the status quo." Home helpers, for example, also occasionally hurt human beings. Further, the elderly hurt themselves a lot doing chores around the house. If the sum of these incidents (in severity and frequently) is greater than the sum of accidents by robots, we should still use the robots. I see similar arguments playing out in self driving. People point to the occasional accident and proclaim that the technology is useless. But the bar has never been "perfect." It has always been "better than humans.*The Danish and Dutch government transport departments recently ruled that the evidence is clear: Tesla self driving is now safer than humans.
- jillesvangurp 1mo ago
  Obviously. But I don't think there are many documented cases of these things being dangerous despite obviously a lot of factories trialing these things now. I expect if you ever buy one for use at home, there will be some clear terms of use limiting liability in case users do misguided, silly and/or wildly inappropriate shit with their robots. Which of course people will probably end up doing regardless. And quite a bit of that will probably end up being shared via social media.

keeda 1mo ago

Substantial displacement of human labor is still very far away, yes, but I'd say it's not due to the lack of dexterity and precision. GenAI is making such rapid advancements that the robotic control systems part may soon be "solved." The real blocker is supply chain constraints for physical parts -- specifically, rare earth elements. Those are essential for the powerful yet accurate electromagnetic motors that make these robots feasible. Oh, and batteries too. However, their supply is severely limited, even without China flexing its strangehold on the market. Last I checked there are no real alternatives or solutions on the horizon for the raw material shortage. Some estimates suggest the global supply currently is a small fraction (like 2% or even lower?) of that needed for mass deployment of the type Elon hallucinates about to pump TSLA stock. The company that solves this or otherwise figures out a way to mass produce dexterous robots is going to be the next trillion dollar company.

tamimio 1mo ago

Humanoid robots are the new qugv (quadruple UGV aka dogs), they are pretty much useless in anything functional but the show off and wow factor. I remember around covid times we got one of these qugv and everyone in the team wanted to be the one working on it, except me, I kept my focus on UAVs and even told them that UAVs are and will be the only robots that has actual use cases (not to include cobotics). That being said, it’s probably a good thing that they only remain as a showoff only, I mean, look at drones, the moment they proved to be functional, humans immediately used it as killing machines rather than something useful. Before that, I remember it was really hard to get a million dollar budget for any UAV project, no one cared about drone delivery, drones that can deliver health equipment to save lives when seconds matters, but as soon as they are used for killing or surveillance you see billions pouring in! So yeah, let humanoid robots be only for shows and hopefully they never become functional or “catch up” any time soon.

hobofan 1mo ago

I think the article takes a completely wrong lense for viewing the Humanoid Robotic Games, and general progress that is being made right now (though admittedly, many robot companies make it challenging with their marketing as well). Most of the advances being demonstrated right now are about establishing a robotic _platform_. They don't necessarily individually have to be able to complete all tasks end to end, but pushing the boundary forward on one of them at a time as a step of progress. The different challenges presented in the article are almost all orthogonal to each other. Some of them are hardware engineering challenges, some of them are software / AI challenges, and most of them ultimately economic challenges. They can all be solved in a mostly independent manner, meaning that they won't be decades away to be resolved, but more likely years. I think robotics is in a space that very much falls into the "people overestimate the progress in one year but underestimate the progress over 5 years" category. A lot of the problems to solve regarding effectiveness (not efficiency) of humanoid robots even as outlined in the article (manipulation = short term spatial planning; long term task planning) greatly benefit from the current advances in AI, and in my estimation are already solvable with better harnesses with the current generation of models.

blahblaher 1mo ago

c'mon people! as soon as we have capable robots, they will be immediately used for the military and policing. factories and home "appliance" robots are a distraction