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

AlexandrB

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

vessenes

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.

samlinnfer

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-olympi...

tootie

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.

seydor

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.

C06aka

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

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

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

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.

keeda

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

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

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

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