We'll know this works when it starts replacing Amazon pickers in quantity. Amazon has been trying to automate that for years, with many demos and contests. So far, nothing can quickly and reliably take random products out of one bin and put them in another. Amazon's robotic systems move larger containers and shelves of bins around, but do not yet pick individual items.
throwaway2037 2 hours ago [-]
You raise a great point. And the Amazon picking staff are onshore in wealthy countries. I guess the minimum wage paid by Amazon is around 15 USD per hour.
I wonder: Is the task of automating this work primaryly difficult in vision or dexterity (motion)? Or maybe they are equally difficult for different reasons.
whiplash451 47 minutes ago [-]
Probably both vision and dexterity, and the first mistake we make as roboticists/engineers might be to distinguish the two like they're separate problems to solve or that a solution exists where the two live a separate life.
There's a lot more money being thrown at this than in previous years. Seems to be growing beyond corporate R&D labs and university research towards startups trying to productize it.
>A humanoid robot takes roughly 5,000 steps per hour. Each step sends a shock of 2–3× body weight through the leg actuators—forces that would be fine occasionally, but become destructive when repeated thousands of times without pause.
As someone who comes from the world of running and knee problems, I feel this misses the issue. Normal walking should not produce these kinds of shocks unless your gait is really jumpy or otherwise screwed up. You only start to see these forces when running and that's where technique becomes important even for humans if you want to prevent damage to your joints over long distances. But at least for walking I suppose that a fully articulated humanoid with all the degrees of freedom of human gait should be mostly a control problem, not a mechanical engineering one.
imtringued 34 minutes ago [-]
The force an impulse generates on a contact depends on the speed of deceleration. It's just F=m*a
Slow deceleration leads to low forces. If you have a contact event with a hard substance, like a rigid metal for accurate kinematics, the deceleration to zero upon a contact has to happen instantly. Meaning the deceleration is incredibly high, resulting in extremely high forces for a few milliseconds.
Human bodies are made out of a flexible and impact resistant material: water. When a contact event happens, your body deforms, which means that the deceleration happens over a longer time frame with less force. Not just that, your muscles also have a certain amount of flexibility in them and basically zero internal inertia. All the inertia is in the limb as a whole, whereas for a robot there is a spinning motor and gearbox that needs to slow down as well.
You could solve this as a control problem by adding series elastic actuators, which means you need to change your mechanical design.
julienfr112 40 minutes ago [-]
Maybe this workforce is useful not because of it's direct output, but for it's mere existence : look politian, I'm creating jobs !
inglor_cz 1 hours ago [-]
As others say, not necessarily. The breakeven point for jobs like Amazon may be quite low (or high? I mean simply "not yet there").
I'd say that we'll know it works when robots with those hands start turning out on the Russo-Ukrainian frontline en masse, because it is there where the lack of manpower has the most pressing and brutal consequences, and cannot be mitigated by usual peacetime incentives (e.g. better benefits).
That frontline has already sucked in all the automatization innovations of the last decade, as long as they proved themselves in combat.
p-e-w 9 hours ago [-]
> We'll know this works when it starts replacing Amazon pickers in quantity.
That doesn’t follow. There are plenty of tasks that can be fully and reliably automated but aren’t, for the simple reason that human labor is dirt cheap compared to advanced robotics.
momojo 3 hours ago [-]
I disagreed, then re-read your post, then re-read the OP, and now I've come full circle to apologize; I think you make a fair point.
I work at a biotech. We spent who knows how much time and money trying to develop a 'lab technician bot' to automate one of our critical assays. Turns out, a 6-figure machine still isn't as economical as my coworker Y, one of the veteran lab-technicians. Sure she takes the occasional sick day but even at our volume (and we do industrial-level, multiple clients batched into a single assay pass) it won't be economical to replace her for a very long time (if we even reach that scale).
somewhatgoated 9 hours ago [-]
What is the point of humanoid “general” robots then?
We already have pretty reliable ways to make and train humans.
Humans are cheaper and better than robots.
I could imagine robots for some specialised tasks where you don’t want to use a human for eg security reasons, but you don’t need general purpose robots for that
jamesrcole 33 minutes ago [-]
technology gets cheaper over time. If they were always going to cost the amount they do now, you might have a point. But they'll eventually get much cheaper.
semi-extrinsic 3 hours ago [-]
Robots are good at things that are "simple" but where human precision is not good enough, or where people would get bored and make mistakes.
nemomarx 7 hours ago [-]
If robots ever do get cheaper than humans for it, though?
shermantanktop 6 hours ago [-]
In natural ecosystems, nobody beats the apex predator directly, and nobody beats the hyperspecialized niche critter at their own game. The new species has some advantage that’s different than what is there.
If a humanoid robot is slower dumber human that is expensive, requires power, can’t get wet, falls over, and doesn’t understand stairs. Is not sleeping and being radiation tolerant enough of an advantage to be worth it?
Dylan16807 5 hours ago [-]
The nature comparison doesn't work on a fundamental level because you're only getting a fraction of the human's power based on how much they're happy to sell.
pear01 6 hours ago [-]
You forgot a big one in your description of the hypothetical advantages:
No free will
cindyllm 6 hours ago [-]
[dead]
imtringued 28 minutes ago [-]
They already are, the problem with humanoid robots is that people think that adding legs to the robot will somehow fundamentally make it more intelligent.
People see a robot arm attached to a stationary platform and understand it requires integration work to perform a single task.
But when those same people see a humanoid robot, they think they can just talk to it like a real human and it will do what you told it to do.
They don't think about the fact that the humanoid robot has to be programmed exactly the same way the stationary robot arm has to be programmed and that programming the legs in addition to the arms is a much more challenging problem.
bobthepanda 6 hours ago [-]
Robots can be optimized for tasks and if they are, their benefits are greater. When cars replaced the horse, it was because they didn’t poop, and because a car designed only for transport would not suddenly have a heart attack and stop working.
tomtomistaken 3 hours ago [-]
Funnily enough, cars have their own way of pooping and dying of a heart attack.
tintor 2 hours ago [-]
Cars can stop working suddenly in many many ways, for many reasons.
chihuahua 8 hours ago [-]
A friend who works at Amazon made the same point: "We don't really need robots in the FCs urgently [other than the Kivas], because it turns out you can just pay people $17/hour"
gizajob 3 hours ago [-]
I was thinking this week that AI token costs are probably going to get so expensive soon that bright spark CEOs are going to realise “why am I paying for such expensive coding agents when I can pay people from the third world to code!?!” and announce outsourcing like it’s some kind of stunning and innovative revelation.
throwaway2037 2 hours ago [-]
> when I can pay people from the third world
C-suite has been saying this for 30+ years. They never tire of it. Ask yourself: At this point in time, why aren't all programmers working from low cost jurisdictions?
gizajob 2 hours ago [-]
I think you didn’t grok the hidden punchline - this is the stage after they’ve replaced all their third world coders with AI agents, until one day a C-suiter has the revelation that humans are cheaper and better, and the company then starts toting its humanistic credentials all over LinkedIn.
Animats 6 hours ago [-]
Mechanical picking has been too slow. It's not a problem with the robot mechanics. Here's 300 picks/minute from 2012.[1] The parts are all the same, so the vision problem is simple.
But picking arbitrary objects from fulfillment bins is still running at a few picks per minute.[2] As the speed picks up, humans become less necessary.
That's the point of the test condition. When running a robot becomes more economical than paying full-scale humans $17/h, something important about robot abilities will have changed.
WillAdams 7 hours ago [-]
I dunno, I worked in an Amazon Warehouse for a year part-time (and a couple of weeks full-time when in-between jobs) --- on one occasion, I pulled up to a bin full of non-descript cardboard boxes near where a group of trainees were working their way through, grabbed one box, spun it around for the six-sided box check, scanned it, confirming it was the right one, and before I could move on to my next pick, a trainee asked, "How did you know that was the right box?", which required a several minute explanation of how the item description and the slight differentiations of the boxes led to that conclusion.
The big win would be training the folks doing stowing to not create such situations and to put markedly different things in each rainbow bin.
pear01 6 hours ago [-]
This would be a more convincing take if reasoning LLMs didn't already exist. Given the growth in capability over the last few years alone nothing about your description "several minute explanation of how the item description and the slight differentiations of the boxes" seems beyond an artificial intelligence to solve by the time humanoid robots would be ready to physically traverse a warehouse.
Your last point is also interesting given perhaps a robot is more amenable to such instruction, thus creating cascading savings. Each human has to be trained, and could be individually a failure. Robot can essentially copy its "brain" to its others.
Or likely more accurately, download the latest brain trained from all the robot's aggregate experiences from the amazon hivemind hq
ghshephard 4 hours ago [-]
The "Markedly Different things" in each bin was a big Amazon Warehouse advance in warehousing. Traditionally - things that were "alike" were put on shelves/bins - but (according to Amazon) it was far more efficient for pickers (at least back in the day - may have changed since then) to have random things on shelves located near each other to allow for equal access to popular items by pickers.
NalNezumi 9 hours ago [-]
I have high respect of Tuomas and his work around SAC for RL in robotics.
But this is slightly unconvincing, most because of the author
>They spend thousands of computer hours practicing movements inside simulated worlds and inventing their own solutions.
This is exactly what almost every other picking startups have been doing for the last couple of years.
I can think of at least a dozens, some even making their custom gripper hardware. It still relies on sim2real transfer and then there's a bottleneck of things such as representing deformable objects. And that's still just scratching the surface of it.
I can definitely see that they have the right team. But the claim made by this author is far removed from the actual demo he describes. I've seen same demo for years, last one was in CoRL by Google (Gemini) and even then you could see clever robotics guy (some Boston dynamics engineers) that came by and gave it a clever task it failed on.
theteapot 5 hours ago [-]
> But the claim made by this author is far removed from the actual demo he describes. I've seen same demo for years
The article describes multiple demos. Are you referring to the chicken nuggets one? That sounded pretty impressive to me. Is there publicly available videos of this?
NalNezumi 8 minutes ago [-]
I'm describing all of them.
As for chicken nugget here's for example one (company) showing same capacity 4 years ago
They today have similar system that can quickly sort dumplings (more sensitive than chicken nuggets) ob conveyor belt.
No sim2real even needed. That haptics sensor is dirtcheap; camera based haptics sensor are today even available as open-source hardware that you can assemble for cheap.
If we don't limit to company demos we can dig up demos from I think almost a decade ago, and at least ~5 years ago for company demos.
Joel_Mckay 5 hours ago [-]
Universal Robots ( https://www.universal-robots.com/ ) force sensing collaborative platforms were very advanced years ago, but like most bot firms small market demand made retail consumer pricing unsustainable.
>I can think of at least a dozens, some even making their custom gripper hardware.
The simplest solution sometimes is more robust in practice:
Too many edge-case failure modes in an uncontrolled setting. Building platforms that could seriously harm people by just falling over is an inherent design risk. =3
xp84 11 hours ago [-]
“Eka, open claw!!!!”
“I’m sorry, OpenClaw is not approved for an account on your subscription tier.”
suffocates from being choked by robotic claw
handfuloflight 3 hours ago [-]
Masterpiece.
SpyCoder77 9 hours ago [-]
This comment is not going unappreciated
arjie 9 hours ago [-]
All my life I've loved robotics, so I was very eager to get things in the house, but my primary problem with humanoid robots is that they're very different from my Roomba-successor Dreame vacuum in a crucial way: they can fall. The Dreame can occupy the same space as my toddler, but the more industrial grade robotics machines cannot. The Unitree Sun Wukong is unbelievably impressive and I could completely imagine a world where it replaces humans in existing dangerous spaces without requiring the spaces themselves retooled. But in my house, perhaps the future will be like what these guys say and I'll have an Eka Claw on my kitchen counter and another by my washing machine, and so on.
In the classic example of old-guy-gets-surprised-by-new-tech, I bet people will find a way around the problem: but the thing has to be powerful to be fast, and if it's powerful it can hurt.
Who can tell. It was just prior to the pandemic when I was showing my wife talktotransformer.com and thinking about how much needs to be solved before it's useful. More fool am I HAHA!
stein1946 6 hours ago [-]
All I want is a machine that I can drop ingredients in it and it can give me a delicious meal
And another that I can just drop all my clothes in, and have them washed and ironed for me.
Doesn't have to be a humanoid.
tikotus 3 hours ago [-]
If you like smoothies, I think I've got something for you!
oblio 2 hours ago [-]
> All I want is a machine that I can drop ingredients in it and it can give me a delicious meal
> In 1971, the original Thermomix VM 2000 was launched on the market – first in France, later in Spain and Italy.
ehnto 3 hours ago [-]
I think the focus has been on lowering mass so that they can move quickly with low kinetic energy.
dmix 9 hours ago [-]
> in a crucial way: they can fall.
The question is do they fall and can't get back up
The main issue is how heavy duty they are, because they operate on lithium batteries you can't make them too heavy otherwise it burns battery. So these humanoid robots durability will be closely aligned with innovation in lithium battery tech, or having larger and expensive robots with lots of battery.
nealabq 9 hours ago [-]
I think he meant it can fall onto his toddler, causing injury.
GCUMstlyHarmls 8 hours ago [-]
Could we not simply encase the weaker unit some kind of armored robotic shell?
m463 8 hours ago [-]
Then we would need better baby-gates. But that might lead to escalating scenarios.
SV_BubbleTime 8 hours ago [-]
Tragedy of the commons toddler armor. Can you guys fucking not? It’s best to death. I’d rather have a Ford vs Chevy vs Ram conversation again.
SturgeonsLaw 8 hours ago [-]
Might as well put an AI chip in the toddler's exosuit and get another bot
hanspeter 49 minutes ago [-]
That's not a robot problem, that's a toddler problem.
We don't leave our young toddlers to roam freely around the house for a reason. Our homes are full of hazards to these risk-seeking small people and a robot is just one more on the list.
9 hours ago [-]
gattr 2 hours ago [-]
Not that big of a problem, right? Just put a lot of power sockets throughout the workspace. Robot gets to its work station, can be tethered and recharge when it's operating there. Similarly in a household.
nradov 7 hours ago [-]
Meanwhile the Roomba-successor robots that I've tried still get tangled up on our laptop charger cables and wedged under the coffee table.
Gigachad 6 hours ago [-]
I got given a Huawei one for free which I found useful while I had a housemate with a cat since the place needed a vacuum almost twice a day. But after he moved out I just went back to vacuuming manually since it’s easier than having to scan the floor for every cable or throw rug it might get jammed on.
I don’t want to say home robotics will never happen since it seems likely eventually it will. But I think the deployment will be much much slower than entirely software based products like ChatGPT.
ezconnect 7 hours ago [-]
I don't see a future with humanoid robots inside the house. We probably will have specialized robots for certain task like the roombas.
p1esk 6 hours ago [-]
I fully expect to buy one within the next three years. Probably Optimus 4, depending on the price.
dyauspitr 7 hours ago [-]
You won’t have an eka claw. You will have a humanoid. It’s a no brainer. You will get used to the “danger” just like we got used to the danger involved in driving a car or ceiling fans or propane home heating. Every year you’ll have a handful of injuries/deaths but eventually because of how useful they are no one will care and rightfully so.
RajT88 5 hours ago [-]
Well, except we have 5 decades of cautionary tales in film that show plausible ways this goes sideways when everything is connected to the internet.
Markoff 5 hours ago [-]
what's the danger involved with ceiling fans (unless you are Korean)?
now that I think about it I can only remember videos of people doing really stupid things with them, then being surprised by really bad results, but never heard about any of them endangering anyone during normal operation
dyauspitr 4 hours ago [-]
In rooms with low ceilings people can sometimes get hit if they’re standing on their beds. Basically the point I’m trying to make is you have something with metal blades spinning really fast only a few feet above your head.
notatoad 11 hours ago [-]
It seems silly to be talking about a “ChatGPT moment” for a piece of industrial hardware that no regular person will ever have any cause to consider buying.
The ChatGPT moment was when they launched a product that was generally useful to the average person. Something that isn’t a consumer product at all is very unlikely to achieve success in the consumer market.
yakbarber 11 hours ago [-]
In less than 10 years there’s going to be millions of bipedal robots everywhere, doing all sorts of chores for us. They’re going to need hands.
hanspeter 42 minutes ago [-]
While I agree we'll see millions of bipedal robots, it won't be because they're doing our chores. People will buy them for the same reason I'd want one today: They're fun toys.
Even though today's robots are vastly more sophisticated, the progress of the last decade shows we shouldn't expect a sudden revolution in their abilities over the next ten years. As is often the case, solving those final few challenges that really make a difference always takes the longest.
analog31 8 hours ago [-]
I'd consider hands to be more important than bipedal mobility.
I work in R&D, supporting a high-tech factory. The factory has already been laid out so that the entire place is accessible for materials being moved around on carts. The worker could be replaced by a cart with hands. If we could solve the hands problem right now, we'd be buying robots by the dozens.
Also, lots of things could be done right now by stationary robots. But at the present level of technology, what we really lack are programmers. Naturally what I'm saying could be overturned tomorrow by AI, so I'm talking in terms of how things work today. I'm actually one of the few people at the site with experience at industrial automation, but it's not part of my job at present.
In a sense, the hands we lack are hands on keyboards.
FourierEnvy 7 hours ago [-]
Yes, thats your current perspective. But by the time you get programmers, the whole company will be automated
nkrisc 11 hours ago [-]
That’s an incredibly optimistic timeline.
pedalpete 10 hours ago [-]
Slowly, then all at once.
Computers were nowhere for ever, then everyone had them.
The internet was tiny, then everywhere.
Smartphones were a teensy market, then everyone had them.
GLP1s were for a small group of diabetics, now a significant portion of the population take them.
This is how things playout time and time again.
Does it mean the commentors 10 years is correct? No. But it also doesn't need to be incredibly optimistic. All it takes is getting the robots right, and there are multiple companies who seem very close.
marcosdumay 10 hours ago [-]
It took almost 20 years from computers that nobody brought on electronics and photography stores to computers in everybody's desk.
Robots will probably be slower, because there is way less room for optimizing their cost.
Gigachad 6 hours ago [-]
We have had more than 10 years of robotic vacuums and yet they are still a fairly niche product.
jcelerier 9 hours ago [-]
robots have existed for more than 20 years though. Boston Dynamic's dog is 22 years old, Atlas 15-ish
somewhatgoated 8 hours ago [-]
What can I as a normal person use these robots for?
Gigachad 6 hours ago [-]
Nothing. They were designed for the military.
padjo 4 minutes ago [-]
And what do the military use them for?
dmix 10 hours ago [-]
Mostly just the cost, yeah. It will be like buying a car. The economics will have to make sense for regular people, while it starts popping up in tons of places and become a status symbol.
bigyabai 10 hours ago [-]
Digital computers existed for ~10-20 years before hitting the consumer market. It took almost a half-century for the microprocessor to become a ubiquitous appliance.
SequoiaHope 9 hours ago [-]
We’re already seeing huge progress in humanoids coming from china. The big problem is software and world understanding, but the data collection from today’s humanoids and the rush to capitalize on their potential now that manufacturing their form is largely solved (save for hands) will see these problems overcome.
I expect it will be common to see them make deliveries in five years. Regular people don’t have to buy them for them to see widespread use.
0xbadcafebee 9 hours ago [-]
So, after they work out all the mechanical kinks (there are quite a few!), and after they work out all the software issues (again, many of them), the last problem is the biggest: production. Anyone can make a half dozen robots by hand. A hundred thousand is a completely different challenge. If they can't be made efficiently, their cost makes them more of a toy than a tool.
SequoiaHope 3 hours ago [-]
Have you seen the mass produced humanoids from China? They’re incredibly capable (again, save for hands which is a huge mechanical and software problem) and cheap.
One of the Tesla's factories is winding down car production in a plan to convert to producing humanoid robots.
0xbadcafebee 6 hours ago [-]
I can buy China doing it, but not Tesla. They have a terrible track record of production, nothing even close to China's capability. In the past they've "developed" factories by taking huge government incentives and then basically doing nothing with them and pocketing the cash.
ReptileMan 2 hours ago [-]
The line between moonshot and scam is thin and elon is known for doing jumping jacks on it.
oblio 2 hours ago [-]
Is that because they're close to building robots or because Chinese EVs are eating their lunch and Tesla is flatlining?
fontain 9 hours ago [-]
Deliveries use hands because humans have hands, not because hands are a prerequisite for deliveries. Last mile is already “solved” with the little robots that drive around cities, no need for hands. Humans are useful because of our brains, because we can adapt to almost any situation for very little cost. Humanoid robots will remain a novelty until the cost is reduced far beyond what is plausible.
How do we define common? I’ll bet that in 5 years, the average person, even in somewhere like SF, will not see a humanoid robot during their every day life.
nradov 7 hours ago [-]
I predict that we'll see limited combat use of the latest Chinese bipedal robots within two years. They'll sell to both Russia and Ukraine.
oblio 2 hours ago [-]
Ukraine already has UGVs and they're tracked or wheeled. I can't imagine bipedal robots being cost efficient for 99% of missions in the near future.
0xbadcafebee 9 hours ago [-]
The bipedal robot thing is interesting, but there's only two places their cost makes sense: industry and war. After war makes them cheap to mass-produce (because an army of robots needs to be sustainable), then they'll be affordable. But they'll still be highly regulated, mostly as a political reaction to "losing jobs". It will probably take 30+ years for us to get to that point, because wars big enough to invest that much expense and manpower aren't common.
nine_k 7 hours ago [-]
Also medical / elderly care. A large market.
Mars008 9 hours ago [-]
Chinese Unitree already makes humanoids for $5K. Cheap enough for average american family to afford if it's useful. Several batteries and automatic replacement station will make it run 24/7 non-stop.
So, it terms of cheap capable hardware we are close. The problem is software and computing power.
0xbadcafebee 6 hours ago [-]
That is interesting, but it looks like the ones used for practical work are $30k. Still, they're targeting 20k units this year, which is a lot more production and a lower price than I imagined they'd be at by now.
walrus01 10 hours ago [-]
I remember a certain public personality who is very big on bipedal humanoid robots these days also promising us that we'd have truly autonomous self driving cars from his company by 2022, or 2023. It's now 2026.
Gravey 10 hours ago [-]
We can debate the meaning of “truly autonomous”, but the Tesla-owning friends and acquaintances of mine have all, without any uncertainty, recently commented to me that the top-tier self-driving plan in the modern Teslas is just that.
One frequently uses it to drive from his house in LA to San Jose, another from Philly to Boston, another from Kamloops to Vancouver (Canada). I personally have never experienced it, but I trust their word and experiences enough to believe that it is at an extremely high level of capability.
boc 9 hours ago [-]
Highway driving is a bit different from complex city conditions. Just look at the difference between the telsa robotaxi performance vs Waymo. Only one of them is truly FSD.
Gravey 9 hours ago [-]
> Highway driving is a bit different from complex city conditions
Fair and valid, but worth noting that these drives are door-to-door, not just advanced highway cruise control.
Any idea where one might find a trusted source for data on the robotaxi performance? Especially curious about the latest self-driving models, rather than historical performance.
chihuahua 7 hours ago [-]
Today, Tesla's so-called full self-driving system is legally classified as SAE Level 2 driver assistance [1]. The human driver must continuously monitor the system, be ready to take over instantly at any time, and is legally responsible for the the car. Tesla is careful to avoid any liability for this by stating this somewhere, perhaps in a 3-point font.
Even if techbros loudly insist that they can take a nap in the back seat, that doesn't change the legal facts. Just like a drunk driver confidently shouting that he's totally fine to drive.
I hate how they are able to avoid liability like this. No human can sit in a car doing literally nothing but being alert ready to take over in an instant. Thats not how brains work. This is obvious but they use this excuse to divert any blame from the automated system to the occupant.
oblio 2 hours ago [-]
To add context, his first predictions are from 2013. And some of those predictions had 2018 as a goal.
tamimio 8 hours ago [-]
As someone in the robotics, I can tell you that’s never gonna happen, even if you see a fully functional demo of a robot (not just the typical money grab 3D renders), assume the real life performance are 10x worse.. there’s so much monkey business in robotics, plenty of over promising, so much empty hypes, that been going on for years, the only successful breeds are cobotics (like roomba and industrial manipulators) or recently drones, although still very limited due to endurance.
LastTrain 10 hours ago [-]
Why bipedal?
p-e-w 9 hours ago [-]
Because the human world is built for bipedal beings and everything else will encounter obstacles somewhere.
Mars008 9 hours ago [-]
Dogs and cats don't complain. Gorillas and chimpanzee should be fine too.
Bipedal robots suck right now, but superhuman stability is achievable in near future.
AngryData 4 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I think 4+ legged bots should be more common than 2 leg variants. 2 legs is neat, but takes far more work and processing to control and balanced. It also requires much more powerful legs, a spider bot has more legs which makes it more "complex" in some ways, but individual legs don't need to hold and maneuver its entire body weight alone and it can hold 3 points of ground contact at all times, even when moving around, making it exceptionally stable. A bipedal robot has to be able to hold like twice its own body weight or more in order to balance and maneuver on a single foot in order to walk around and navigate obstacles.
roenxi 7 hours ago [-]
Launched a product that, as I recall, was free. No real foreshadowing of what was about to come. Opened up an entirely new product category and started a process of reshaping at least the economy and probably society over the course of less than 5 years so far.
Yeah. I don't see how this is going to be a ChatGPT moment. Robot arms aren't a crazy new product. It might be big news regardless.
boxed 9 hours ago [-]
This might age badly heh. Kinda like "we only need 2 MAYBE 3 computers for Sweden" (real thing people said back in the day).
nullsanity 10 hours ago [-]
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ofjcihen 7 hours ago [-]
I don’t know when this ridiculous melodramatic style of writing started to pervade all of tech but it needs to go away. It’s resurrecting the pain of around 2016 when everyone presented like they were giving their own TED Talk.
Morromist 4 hours ago [-]
Problem is talking in a simple, rational way doesn't get people to frantically cram huge wads of money down your pants. Was the same back in the day men in striped suits roamed the land selling curative tonics that were just alcohol and some smelly herbs.
I don't understand these frantic money people, but I do understand if you can figure out how to not be the greater fool you can make a lot of money. Seems kinda dumb this is how innovation is funded.
threefour 2 hours ago [-]
“Trillions of dollars flow through the human hand,” Agrawal says. “To me, this is the biggest problem in the world to be solved.”
They need to work on their messaging. "Human hands are a problem" is going to make enemies. Perhaps "relieve humans of menial chores" and "take over dangerous jobs" and "enable precision not possible with the human hand" etc.
vjvjvjvjghv 6 hours ago [-]
I am waiting for a robot that can dust my shelves even when there are things on them. That would improve my life a lot.
euroderf 2 hours ago [-]
IMHO the big winner is gonna be the toilet/tub/shower-bot.
gurjeet 8 hours ago [-]
A couple of minutes of video (presumably by the author):
The first phase is likely don't let the kids go near it since it could easily hurt a human by accident.
davkan 5 hours ago [-]
Is it automated or is it like when they demoed that neo humanoid robot and it was actually just a dude driving it with vr goggles.
GCUMstlyHarmls 8 hours ago [-]
Notably it does not show the robot turning on the washing machine?
chihuahua 7 hours ago [-]
That requires the ProMax subscription at $2500/month.
davesque 9 hours ago [-]
Stockton Rush trusted his submarine with his own life.
oblio 2 hours ago [-]
> He criticized the Passenger Vessel Safety Act of 1993 as "needlessly prioritiz[ing] passenger safety over commercial innovation".
:-)))
crooked-v 10 hours ago [-]
Or to put it another way, before selling it for laundry folding, make sure it won't fold the baby that was left on the wrong table.
Ekaros 9 hours ago [-]
Other fun things. Living in apartment with only the robot doing any tasks or picking up any inputs like arriving packages.
martythemaniak 13 hours ago [-]
Rodney Brooks has a great essay on why he's skeptical that the current humanoid hype will deliver and the central claim is that human dexterity is extremely advanced any today's humanoids lack even the sensors and data needed to start building the models needed to match human performance.
I saw him post this article on his Bluesky saying that they're the first ones he's seen that are close to cracking this issue (he's an investor/adviser).
nomel 12 hours ago [-]
> needed to match human performance.
This is not a remotely a real world requirement for them to be useful, and for them to sell like crazy.
usrnm 12 hours ago [-]
Isn't it? The whole promise if humanoid robots is replacing humans in a human-centered environment. Instead of specialized hardware or modifying the existing process, just drop a robot in place of a human, bam, done. Otherwise, what's the point?
maccard 2 minutes ago [-]
They don't need to be anywhere near as efficient or effective as me, they just need to be able to do it unattended. Roomba is a great example - it's great to be able to have floors cleaned every day while I'm working, even if it takes 10x longer to do so. If a robot could do laundry while I work, put away the dishes from the dishwasher in the morning, and mow my lawn while I'm BBQ'ing, it's a life changer.
pzo 12 hours ago [-]
The point is that even if they do something 3x slower and maybe capable of 1/100 tasks they can still this do task 24/7, without holiday and never sick, they can also have more strength e.g in construction.
My smart vacuum is more dump than me when wiping floor and much slower than be but still greatly useful.
cyber_kinetist 2 hours ago [-]
The problem - robots do break, they need constant maintenance, repair, and replacement (especially the smaller ones like the humanoids), and can go wrong in all sorts of situations. The costs for robot maintenance largely depend on the reliability of hardware and that should be included in the ROI calculation (which almost no one is doing right now)
throawayonthe 12 hours ago [-]
that's the thing, what's the appeal of humanoid robots then? why not something more fit to the task? imagine if your roomba had legs because well that's what a human uses to move around when cleaning
dogcomplex 11 hours ago [-]
Accessibility and a single chassis that does the vast majority of things. Even if they're never as fully dexterous as the average human (doubt it) they're still as dexterous as a somewhat handicapped human, which is already clearly enough to function decently in most of society and is far from useless.
If you want several bots all custom built to specific tasks, go for it. That will happen too. But a generalist has value of its own.
marcosdumay 10 hours ago [-]
> imagine if your roomba had legs
That would probably be an improvement. Floors are designed for people, and may have several levels. An ideal vacuum would probably look something like a centipede.
Anyway, the appeal would be that it can perform several tasks. It doesn't need to perform all the tasks a human can to fulfill that.
megaman821 12 hours ago [-]
I wonder how accurate joint positions and muscle activations can be from just a POV camera. Maybe it’s not crazy to think someone could get tens of millions of hours of well-labeled training data.
artisin 12 hours ago [-]
[dead]
dyauspitr 13 hours ago [-]
Yeah I’m going to completely disregard this because I feel like we are less than a year away from completely human feeling humanoids. This is based on nothing but obsessively watching and following humanoid progress on the internet.
ManuelKiessling 13 hours ago [-]
What was eye-opening, or rather, sobering for me was when I read an interview with an engineer who explained how incredible difficult it is for a robot to orient itself when it is lying on the floor and wants to stand up.
Yes, it can do the required motions just fine, that’s not the point. But think about yourself when you are lying on the floor: it’s really easy to determine if this is safe, if you are lying underneath something and so on. You just feel that.
A robot cannot do that; all they can do is look around as good as possible and visually determine their situation.
jgord 13 hours ago [-]
I naively assumed they have a gravity sensor, so will generally have an approximate up vector ?
ManuelKiessling 13 hours ago [-]
Yeah but imagine yourself lying on the floor with your vision being your only sense, plus an info floating in your mind: „fyi, you are no longer upright“.
That’s all, you feel nothing else. Now your job is to move all parts of your body in just the right way.
Dylan16807 5 hours ago [-]
Do I know which way my joints are bent (which a robot knows)? Then I can manage it.
And why don't I have any sense of pressure at all? We can put that into robots.
AndrewDucker 12 hours ago [-]
But I have more than that. I can definitely sense which way is up unless I'm underwater.
card_zero 12 hours ago [-]
Or have an amusing inner ear infection. So OK, sure, it's vector, not a flag.
rcxdude 13 hours ago [-]
Theu have an IMU, what they don't generally have is the various aspects of touch.
card_zero 12 hours ago [-]
The point about being aware of lying underneath some object was interesting. Sound might matter, like the frequency of background noise changes when you're in an enclosed space, and listening to your own shuffling noises helps you know when you've planted your feet right - or something. I have some really effective ear plugs and I notice they make it harder to move around.
Having said that, I've probably hit my head on the underside of an open cupboard door five or six times in my life, and I expect to do it again.
LeCompteSftware 12 hours ago [-]
It is also things like "I can feel that my left knee is bearing a little too much weight, I should shift weight to my right hand and use that to push myself up" - things that come automatically to animals after learning the hard way in infancy (some of it is innate; baby animals are clumsy, but usually more mobile than human infants). Regardless of learned-vs-instinct, these abilities rely on sophisticated "sensors" and cognition. I suspect engineering the sensors is actually a bit harder, but I'm also not optimistic about a deep learning approach to the cognition.
A significant underappreciated advantage of animals over AI: lifeforms can "learn the hard way" more easily than 2020s robots because of cheap self-repair. AI labs are reluctant to damage their robots, but an essential part of humans learning to move safely is severely bonking your head and reckoning with the consequences - "hey, dummy, why did you trip and fall and bonk your head? Because you were running like an idiot."
I am learning the hard way to this day :) I have been practicing with work knives. A few months ago I got stupid and impatient, and sliced my thumb nastily. If I didn't block the cut with my thumbnail (still ruined) I might have chopped bone. It is hard to say precisely what I learned from this experience - "don't be stupid and impatient" is facile - but I know I learned a lot. I am actually optimistic about targeted surgical robotics. But for a general-use humanoid robot, I would not want to give it a knife if it's not capable of feeling pain. I never use big knives anywhere near my cats because I understand intuitively that they are nimble and unpredictable and easily stabbed by knives. I didn't need to be trained on this. A robot kind of does. Yikes.
jfengel 13 hours ago [-]
I obsessively avoid any kind of "technology is going thataway" content. So I haven't seen anything that looks like humanoid progress in quite some time. About the only thing that has snuck around my barrier is Musk apparently claiming he'll have it by the end of the year, which is pretty conclusive evidence that they won't have it by the end of the year.
So if you're seeing anything that actually seems to merit attention, I'd love a few pointers. I could use some good news.
nancyminusone 13 hours ago [-]
Well, as someone who has tried to build at least a couple small robot arms, I think we are probably closer to 20-50 years away. Both the power and dexterity are not there.
Right now, only a human can both push over a boulder and pick up a tiny speck from the floor using the same actuator.
rcxdude 13 hours ago [-]
Beware generalising from a carefully curated and presented set of demos to real life.
NDlurker 9 hours ago [-]
Mount 2 of these on a Segway and I can think of several tasks that could be automated where I work.
SpyCoder77 9 hours ago [-]
If Figure acquires Eka they are so winning the humanoid race.
everyone 3 hours ago [-]
"a ChatGPT moment" doesnt seem very momentous. ChatGPT was surprisingly good compared to previous smaller models. But since then the LLM scene has just been insane amounts of hype and bullshit and financial skulduggery. Their actual utility is pretty niche imo.
chrisweekly 13 hours ago [-]
Anyone else here have happy memories of playing with Armatron? Circa 1984?
Just a few weeks ago at work we got a Universal Robots UR5 from another project in-house along with a Hand-E gripper.
I've never had so much fun programming and playing with a device ever. And it completely took me back to getting an Armatron 40 years ago and having so much fun - but also wishing I could somehow control it with software.
voxadam 10 hours ago [-]
I still have mine sitting on a shelf in my office.
iancmceachern 13 hours ago [-]
Yes! The most amazing part about those things was they achieved all those axis' of motion with one or two motors.
euroderf 2 hours ago [-]
And the associated grinding noises were kinda scary but damn if the thing didn't hold up.
HardCodedBias 13 hours ago [-]
This one is different? What about unitree? What about their demo at the Spring Festival Gala?
No doubt hands are important, but I think you've missed a lot here Wired.
mediaman 12 hours ago [-]
Many of the Chinese companies are doing very impressive open-loop sim2real. They make great demonstrations. They are not great at dealing with the real world and unpredictable environments.
(That's not true of all Chinese companies - some are doing really impressive work with closed loop systems in unpredictable environments. But many of the highly viewed ones with coordinated dance performances or martial arts are intended more as theater to government financial sponsors than useful function. The technically impressive performances do not look as visually impressive.)
darenr 12 hours ago [-]
those were impressive but were also RC. I think an important part of robotics is not just the mechanics of humanoid motion, but the independent control of those mechanics.
unsnap_biceps 12 hours ago [-]
Can you expand on what was RC? Was the compute off device?
jfengel 13 hours ago [-]
Back in the 90s, I developed a rule of thumb: if I saw it in Wired, it's because it was either already over, or it wasn't going to happen at all.
I was so disappointed when I saw BetterPlace (the car with replaceable batteries) on the cover of Wired. It seemed like such a good idea. Too bad the rule of thumb meant it wouldn't work.
Rules of thumb were made to be broken. Maybe this time it will be different.
eichin 11 hours ago [-]
Yeah, betterplace made it from 2008 (wired) to 2013 (bankruptcy.) Nio is trying again and it looks like they hit wired in 2018, again in 2023, and are still active today...
Do they mean, the moment when everyone realizes it's not as useful as they at first thought?
theteapot 5 hours ago [-]
> Companies pay people to spend hours doing routine tasks with their hands while wearing cameras and motion-capture gloves.
Dystopian. Which companies out of interest?
serf 9 hours ago [-]
just because it's an article about techie stuff doesn't mean all the photojournalism has to be color-graded like a Matrix movie.
.. but it's kind of funny to read the fluff PR about saving humanity while juxtaposing it against photos that look like they may as well be screencaps from Prometheus or Black Mirror.
I'm having some house painting done and the painter asked me what line of work I was in. When I said computer programming he said, "ooh, bet you're worried about AI! At least painters are safe!"
euroderf 2 hours ago [-]
He "might" be but not any of his kids going into the business. The home maintenance bots will invade slowly, then all at once.
gwbas1c 13 hours ago [-]
I want Rosie (fictional robot from the TV show "The Jetsons")
Basically, I want a robotic butler / maid that will do most of the cleanup around the house.
mitthrowaway2 12 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately, the only robots available will be connected to the cloud, paid by subscription, and will gather a continuous feed of audio-video data from you and your home. And sometimes it will be teleoperated, and you might not know when.
I'd rather do my own cleanup, personally.
tintor 1 hours ago [-]
Cloud connected (robot AI in cloud) home robots would be very unsafe, due to network slowdown/outages. Imagine it freezing/stopping right after it turns on water faucet or stovetop.
Ifkaluva 12 hours ago [-]
I bet China will race to the bottom with cheap versions. 3D printers and LLMs, next home robots
dogcomplex 11 hours ago [-]
Why would consumers settle for that? Local models have scaled quite quickly. Just pair the bot with a LAN server as the brain that keeps all your data private.
Barring that, choose bots that use Zero Knowledge Proof architectures for all data so you know there's no in/out of personal data, only security proofs. This makes rental robots certifiably private too.
Becuase 10 hours ago [-]
They've settled for that in:
* Phones
* Cars
* Robotic Vacuums
* Kitchen Appliances
* Televisions
* Home Lighting
* Home security systems, doorbells, and locks
* Web browsers
* Operating Systems
So, uh, yeah, I'm pretty confident users will settle for that in robots too.
progval 11 hours ago [-]
Some of them will be paid by subscription and have ads
davely 12 hours ago [-]
Haha! Instead, you’ll get a robot that will make you art, music, and tell you stories and you get to toil away cleaning the house.
conception 12 hours ago [-]
“Sure I’ll clean up the house, Mr. J. While I’m doing, so have you seen the new shoes from crocs? They’re sponsored by the Jenners and have great new designs with all of your favorite movie characters on them! Would you like me to order you a pair?”
baldeagle 11 hours ago [-]
The first voice accessed (in my brain) by this dialog was Harley Quinn, it took a moment for it to fall back to Rosie.
conception 2 hours ago [-]
“Hey Mr J for a low 7.99 a month I can unlock the Harley Quinn voice pack! For 39.99 we can upgrade you to unlock TikTok Rosie dance mode with special Harley Fortnite dance, a joker LCD breastplate for me and special “psycho partner” romance mode. What so you say, Mr J?”
dataviz1000 9 hours ago [-]
I've spent ~$500 this month trying to get an LLM model to solve a Rubik's Cube. They can't. I'll post my Rubik's Cube MCP server next week if anyone wants to prove me wrong.
1. a human child learning 6 algorithms and a weekend can solve a Rubik's Cube
2. Reenforcement learning can solve a Rubik's Cube
3. The best LLM model using recursive tuning or not can't solve a Rubik's Cube.
Claude 4.6 got 60% of the way but couldn't figure out the last steps after running for 20+ minutes and hundreds of thousands of tokens.
ReptileMan 2 hours ago [-]
I am not sure how to say it exactly, but right now we are in situation in which we are complaining that a magical technology is not magical enough.
SpaceNoodled 37 minutes ago [-]
No, we're complaining that a technology that's hyped as an expert-level replacement for humans is completely inept.
z3c0 12 hours ago [-]
Given how many people attempted to date their computer after ChatGPT launched, I don't even want to imagine what this technology has in store.
Is the person behind archive.today the same operator as archive.is?
papercrane 9 hours ago [-]
Yes, they have a number of domain names, archive.is and archive.today are the most well known ones.
ReptileMan 2 hours ago [-]
Just run in the console window=null and you are good. It is valuable service until the websites get their shit together and finally fix their payments model.
cubefox 12 hours ago [-]
> archive.is is malicious -- as in, uses your browser to launch DDoS attacks, and other things.
I think the attack was itself a response to a doxxing attempt. Also, archive.is being a free service doesn't quite fit with claiming they are malicious. The overall picture seems still positive.
kentonv 5 hours ago [-]
I don't care what the attack is responding to, nor do I care what services are being provided.
If, when I visit your site, your site causes my browser to participate in a DDoS attack without my knowledge, your site is malicious.
cubefox 2 hours ago [-]
If you didn't care about the service you wouldn't visit their website in the first place, in which case there is no problem.
Works for me. I use only Tor so it is actually far more accessible. Archive.is uses Google's Recaptcha, which for some reason rejects valid solutions submitted via Tor.
chatmasta 12 hours ago [-]
I’m not sure that is always a valid CAPTCHA and not one being proxied to you for solving it on behalf of some bot (presumably a crawler).
sanskritical 11 hours ago [-]
I don't know. I think people would notice if Google were being MITM'd on Tor.
chatmasta 11 hours ago [-]
You don’t need to MITM it, this was a common pattern for a long time (not sure it still works though). There was no origin verification so you could just use a different site ID and have people respond to captchas you encountered on that site.
mainmin8t 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Rendered at 09:23:19 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
I wonder: Is the task of automating this work primaryly difficult in vision or dexterity (motion)? Or maybe they are equally difficult for different reasons.
https://rodneybrooks.com/why-todays-humanoids-wont-learn-dex...
I've seen multiple articles about robotic claws. This one made the rounds previously https://www.firgelli.com/pages/humanoid-robot-actuators
As someone who comes from the world of running and knee problems, I feel this misses the issue. Normal walking should not produce these kinds of shocks unless your gait is really jumpy or otherwise screwed up. You only start to see these forces when running and that's where technique becomes important even for humans if you want to prevent damage to your joints over long distances. But at least for walking I suppose that a fully articulated humanoid with all the degrees of freedom of human gait should be mostly a control problem, not a mechanical engineering one.
Slow deceleration leads to low forces. If you have a contact event with a hard substance, like a rigid metal for accurate kinematics, the deceleration to zero upon a contact has to happen instantly. Meaning the deceleration is incredibly high, resulting in extremely high forces for a few milliseconds.
Human bodies are made out of a flexible and impact resistant material: water. When a contact event happens, your body deforms, which means that the deceleration happens over a longer time frame with less force. Not just that, your muscles also have a certain amount of flexibility in them and basically zero internal inertia. All the inertia is in the limb as a whole, whereas for a robot there is a spinning motor and gearbox that needs to slow down as well.
You could solve this as a control problem by adding series elastic actuators, which means you need to change your mechanical design.
I'd say that we'll know it works when robots with those hands start turning out on the Russo-Ukrainian frontline en masse, because it is there where the lack of manpower has the most pressing and brutal consequences, and cannot be mitigated by usual peacetime incentives (e.g. better benefits).
That frontline has already sucked in all the automatization innovations of the last decade, as long as they proved themselves in combat.
That doesn’t follow. There are plenty of tasks that can be fully and reliably automated but aren’t, for the simple reason that human labor is dirt cheap compared to advanced robotics.
I work at a biotech. We spent who knows how much time and money trying to develop a 'lab technician bot' to automate one of our critical assays. Turns out, a 6-figure machine still isn't as economical as my coworker Y, one of the veteran lab-technicians. Sure she takes the occasional sick day but even at our volume (and we do industrial-level, multiple clients batched into a single assay pass) it won't be economical to replace her for a very long time (if we even reach that scale).
If a humanoid robot is slower dumber human that is expensive, requires power, can’t get wet, falls over, and doesn’t understand stairs. Is not sleeping and being radiation tolerant enough of an advantage to be worth it?
No free will
People see a robot arm attached to a stationary platform and understand it requires integration work to perform a single task.
But when those same people see a humanoid robot, they think they can just talk to it like a real human and it will do what you told it to do.
They don't think about the fact that the humanoid robot has to be programmed exactly the same way the stationary robot arm has to be programmed and that programming the legs in addition to the arms is a much more challenging problem.
But picking arbitrary objects from fulfillment bins is still running at a few picks per minute.[2] As the speed picks up, humans become less necessary.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RKXVefE98w
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2X4CU3jmw-g
The big win would be training the folks doing stowing to not create such situations and to put markedly different things in each rainbow bin.
Your last point is also interesting given perhaps a robot is more amenable to such instruction, thus creating cascading savings. Each human has to be trained, and could be individually a failure. Robot can essentially copy its "brain" to its others.
Or likely more accurately, download the latest brain trained from all the robot's aggregate experiences from the amazon hivemind hq
But this is slightly unconvincing, most because of the author
>They spend thousands of computer hours practicing movements inside simulated worlds and inventing their own solutions.
This is exactly what almost every other picking startups have been doing for the last couple of years.
I can think of at least a dozens, some even making their custom gripper hardware. It still relies on sim2real transfer and then there's a bottleneck of things such as representing deformable objects. And that's still just scratching the surface of it.
I can definitely see that they have the right team. But the claim made by this author is far removed from the actual demo he describes. I've seen same demo for years, last one was in CoRL by Google (Gemini) and even then you could see clever robotics guy (some Boston dynamics engineers) that came by and gave it a clever task it failed on.
The article describes multiple demos. Are you referring to the chicken nuggets one? That sounded pretty impressive to me. Is there publicly available videos of this?
As for chicken nugget here's for example one (company) showing same capacity 4 years ago
https://youtu.be/6SbpfN5ed38?si=srtdZCdKOdPZ_wRn
They today have similar system that can quickly sort dumplings (more sensitive than chicken nuggets) ob conveyor belt.
No sim2real even needed. That haptics sensor is dirtcheap; camera based haptics sensor are today even available as open-source hardware that you can assemble for cheap.
If we don't limit to company demos we can dig up demos from I think almost a decade ago, and at least ~5 years ago for company demos.
>I can think of at least a dozens, some even making their custom gripper hardware.
The simplest solution sometimes is more robust in practice:
https://news.uchicago.edu/story/balloon-filled-ground-coffee...
Too many edge-case failure modes in an uncontrolled setting. Building platforms that could seriously harm people by just falling over is an inherent design risk. =3
“I’m sorry, OpenClaw is not approved for an account on your subscription tier.”
suffocates from being choked by robotic claw
In the classic example of old-guy-gets-surprised-by-new-tech, I bet people will find a way around the problem: but the thing has to be powerful to be fast, and if it's powerful it can hurt.
Who can tell. It was just prior to the pandemic when I was showing my wife talktotransformer.com and thinking about how much needs to be solved before it's useful. More fool am I HAHA!
And another that I can just drop all my clothes in, and have them washed and ironed for me.
Doesn't have to be a humanoid.
https://www.thermomix.com/
> In 1971, the original Thermomix VM 2000 was launched on the market – first in France, later in Spain and Italy.
The question is do they fall and can't get back up
The main issue is how heavy duty they are, because they operate on lithium batteries you can't make them too heavy otherwise it burns battery. So these humanoid robots durability will be closely aligned with innovation in lithium battery tech, or having larger and expensive robots with lots of battery.
We don't leave our young toddlers to roam freely around the house for a reason. Our homes are full of hazards to these risk-seeking small people and a robot is just one more on the list.
I don’t want to say home robotics will never happen since it seems likely eventually it will. But I think the deployment will be much much slower than entirely software based products like ChatGPT.
now that I think about it I can only remember videos of people doing really stupid things with them, then being surprised by really bad results, but never heard about any of them endangering anyone during normal operation
The ChatGPT moment was when they launched a product that was generally useful to the average person. Something that isn’t a consumer product at all is very unlikely to achieve success in the consumer market.
It's been 10 years since Boston Dynamics released this impressive video of Atlas. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVlhMGQgDkY
Even though today's robots are vastly more sophisticated, the progress of the last decade shows we shouldn't expect a sudden revolution in their abilities over the next ten years. As is often the case, solving those final few challenges that really make a difference always takes the longest.
I work in R&D, supporting a high-tech factory. The factory has already been laid out so that the entire place is accessible for materials being moved around on carts. The worker could be replaced by a cart with hands. If we could solve the hands problem right now, we'd be buying robots by the dozens.
Also, lots of things could be done right now by stationary robots. But at the present level of technology, what we really lack are programmers. Naturally what I'm saying could be overturned tomorrow by AI, so I'm talking in terms of how things work today. I'm actually one of the few people at the site with experience at industrial automation, but it's not part of my job at present.
In a sense, the hands we lack are hands on keyboards.
Computers were nowhere for ever, then everyone had them. The internet was tiny, then everywhere. Smartphones were a teensy market, then everyone had them. GLP1s were for a small group of diabetics, now a significant portion of the population take them.
This is how things playout time and time again.
Does it mean the commentors 10 years is correct? No. But it also doesn't need to be incredibly optimistic. All it takes is getting the robots right, and there are multiple companies who seem very close.
Robots will probably be slower, because there is way less room for optimizing their cost.
I expect it will be common to see them make deliveries in five years. Regular people don’t have to buy them for them to see widespread use.
https://youtu.be/mUmlv814aJo https://youtu.be/GzX1qOIO1bE
How do we define common? I’ll bet that in 5 years, the average person, even in somewhere like SF, will not see a humanoid robot during their every day life.
So, it terms of cheap capable hardware we are close. The problem is software and computing power.
One frequently uses it to drive from his house in LA to San Jose, another from Philly to Boston, another from Kamloops to Vancouver (Canada). I personally have never experienced it, but I trust their word and experiences enough to believe that it is at an extremely high level of capability.
Fair and valid, but worth noting that these drives are door-to-door, not just advanced highway cruise control.
Any idea where one might find a trusted source for data on the robotaxi performance? Especially curious about the latest self-driving models, rather than historical performance.
Even if techbros loudly insist that they can take a nap in the back seat, that doesn't change the legal facts. Just like a drunk driver confidently shouting that he's totally fine to drive.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Autopilot
Bipedal robots suck right now, but superhuman stability is achievable in near future.
Yeah. I don't see how this is going to be a ChatGPT moment. Robot arms aren't a crazy new product. It might be big news regardless.
I don't understand these frantic money people, but I do understand if you can figure out how to not be the greater fool you can make a lot of money. Seems kinda dumb this is how innovation is funded.
They need to work on their messaging. "Human hands are a problem" is going to make enemies. Perhaps "relieve humans of menial chores" and "take over dangerous jobs" and "enable precision not possible with the human hand" etc.
https://www.wired.com/video/watch/this-company-is-building-s...
https://x.com/adcock_brett/status/1950685253447913798
The first phase is likely don't let the kids go near it since it could easily hurt a human by accident.
:-)))
https://rodneybrooks.com/why-todays-humanoids-wont-learn-dex...
I saw him post this article on his Bluesky saying that they're the first ones he's seen that are close to cracking this issue (he's an investor/adviser).
This is not a remotely a real world requirement for them to be useful, and for them to sell like crazy.
My smart vacuum is more dump than me when wiping floor and much slower than be but still greatly useful.
If you want several bots all custom built to specific tasks, go for it. That will happen too. But a generalist has value of its own.
That would probably be an improvement. Floors are designed for people, and may have several levels. An ideal vacuum would probably look something like a centipede.
Anyway, the appeal would be that it can perform several tasks. It doesn't need to perform all the tasks a human can to fulfill that.
Yes, it can do the required motions just fine, that’s not the point. But think about yourself when you are lying on the floor: it’s really easy to determine if this is safe, if you are lying underneath something and so on. You just feel that.
A robot cannot do that; all they can do is look around as good as possible and visually determine their situation.
That’s all, you feel nothing else. Now your job is to move all parts of your body in just the right way.
And why don't I have any sense of pressure at all? We can put that into robots.
Having said that, I've probably hit my head on the underside of an open cupboard door five or six times in my life, and I expect to do it again.
A significant underappreciated advantage of animals over AI: lifeforms can "learn the hard way" more easily than 2020s robots because of cheap self-repair. AI labs are reluctant to damage their robots, but an essential part of humans learning to move safely is severely bonking your head and reckoning with the consequences - "hey, dummy, why did you trip and fall and bonk your head? Because you were running like an idiot."
I am learning the hard way to this day :) I have been practicing with work knives. A few months ago I got stupid and impatient, and sliced my thumb nastily. If I didn't block the cut with my thumbnail (still ruined) I might have chopped bone. It is hard to say precisely what I learned from this experience - "don't be stupid and impatient" is facile - but I know I learned a lot. I am actually optimistic about targeted surgical robotics. But for a general-use humanoid robot, I would not want to give it a knife if it's not capable of feeling pain. I never use big knives anywhere near my cats because I understand intuitively that they are nimble and unpredictable and easily stabbed by knives. I didn't need to be trained on this. A robot kind of does. Yikes.
So if you're seeing anything that actually seems to merit attention, I'd love a few pointers. I could use some good news.
Right now, only a human can both push over a boulder and pick up a tiny speck from the floor using the same actuator.
Just a few weeks ago at work we got a Universal Robots UR5 from another project in-house along with a Hand-E gripper.
I've never had so much fun programming and playing with a device ever. And it completely took me back to getting an Armatron 40 years ago and having so much fun - but also wishing I could somehow control it with software.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ykiuz1ZdGBc
That sure felt "different".
No doubt hands are important, but I think you've missed a lot here Wired.
(That's not true of all Chinese companies - some are doing really impressive work with closed loop systems in unpredictable environments. But many of the highly viewed ones with coordinated dance performances or martial arts are intended more as theater to government financial sponsors than useful function. The technically impressive performances do not look as visually impressive.)
I was so disappointed when I saw BetterPlace (the car with replaceable batteries) on the cover of Wired. It seemed like such a good idea. Too bad the rule of thumb meant it wouldn't work.
Rules of thumb were made to be broken. Maybe this time it will be different.
Dystopian. Which companies out of interest?
.. but it's kind of funny to read the fluff PR about saving humanity while juxtaposing it against photos that look like they may as well be screencaps from Prometheus or Black Mirror.
see : two startled victims under a blue arctic sun - https://media.wired.com/photos/69f11cbf1b1015e12f65d23e/mast...
That's not a good thing, WIRED.
Basically, I want a robotic butler / maid that will do most of the cleanup around the house.
I'd rather do my own cleanup, personally.
Barring that, choose bots that use Zero Knowledge Proof architectures for all data so you know there's no in/out of personal data, only security proofs. This makes rental robots certifiably private too.
* Phones * Cars * Robotic Vacuums * Kitchen Appliances * Televisions * Home Lighting * Home security systems, doorbells, and locks * Web browsers * Operating Systems
So, uh, yeah, I'm pretty confident users will settle for that in robots too.
1. a human child learning 6 algorithms and a weekend can solve a Rubik's Cube
2. Reenforcement learning can solve a Rubik's Cube
3. The best LLM model using recursive tuning or not can't solve a Rubik's Cube.
Claude 4.6 got 60% of the way but couldn't figure out the last steps after running for 20+ minutes and hundreds of thousands of tokens.
Stop using it.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/wikipedia-bans-a...
I think the attack was itself a response to a doxxing attempt. Also, archive.is being a free service doesn't quite fit with claiming they are malicious. The overall picture seems still positive.
If, when I visit your site, your site causes my browser to participate in a DDoS attack without my knowledge, your site is malicious.
Works for me. I use only Tor so it is actually far more accessible. Archive.is uses Google's Recaptcha, which for some reason rejects valid solutions submitted via Tor.