For some nuts and bolts, I myself struggle with it, almost to the point of giving up.
But what the article misses: We can just rearrange our environment to make it easy to interact with by robots. There might be only standardized nuts and bolts, with IDs imprinted so the robots know exactly how to apply them. Dishes might come in certified robot-known dimensions, or with invisible marks on where to best grip them. Matchsticks might be replaced by standardized gas lighters. Maybe robot companies will even sell those themselves.
That's a great idea actually!
An example that came to my mind: squeezing fruit juice requires a lot of dexterity. But if we sold pre-chopped fruit bits in a standardized satchet, then robots could easily squeeze the delicious and healthy fruit juice from those! And health-conscious people drink fruit juice every day, so this could easily be made into a subscription-based service! A perfect business model right there. You could call it iJuice or juice.ai or even Juicero.
I spent last night bemoaning the sad internet culture of negativity and sarcasm and hatred... But this post made me laugh.
If HN sold the ability to buy more upvotes they would have all my money for this comment.
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(Do not ask about our burst pricing though, it usually screws up the deal)
This is exactly the kinda shit Nietzsche was referring to when he talked about humanity giving up our humanity to better serve machines instead of making machines that better serve humanity.
Aren't the nuts and bolts part of the machine?
Nietzsche and his whole philosophy are stupid, wrong, and ontologically evil. His whole philosophy is poorly reacting to the great ideas of Philipp Mainlanders “the philosophy of redemption”. Philip mainlander and Aruther Schopenhauer were correct in their philosophical pessimism and actual nihilism and nietzschian radical optimism is what motivates nearly all modern totalitarian, fascist, and authoritarian movements.
The only good thing nietzsche produced was the “Wall-E” movie from Pixar, which is a radically nietzschian film.
There's more to Nietzsche than "master and slave morality". I'm a big Nietzsche hater too but you're wrong to dismiss the rest of his work because of one part of it. He's incredibly influential in philosophy to this day, for good reason.
E.g. you can look into Deleuze's reading of his work, which focuses on the continuity from Spinoza and the analysis of ethics from a perspective of capabilities rather than obligations (as in the Kantian framing).
Or more directly, read about the idea of eternal recurrence, which I find to be an incredibly pro-, not anti-, human concept.
I dismissed him over his radical optimism. You claimed I dismissed him over master-slave morality. We are not the same. Also I’ve covet to cover read all of his work. Almost all of it is trash and ontologically bad.
You try to quote fashionable nonsense charlatan grifters like deleuze as though they are worth reading a single word of. Their works, the people who read them, and the entire field of critical theory are direct reasons for the rise of trump and right wing authoritarianism world wide.
Kill critical theory or its hateful children will kill us all
But instead you patronize me by acting like I don’t read. This mentality is why the world collectively hates leftists right now.
Haha you're going to be in strange company claiming to hate ""leftists"" and Nietzsche at the same time. Who, might I ask, do you consider "ontologically good"? Do you believe in a God that could provide such content, or is this just your own definition of what that entails? Ironically enough, between that and your seeming rejection of all prior moral philosophies, it sounds like you're operating quite in line with Nietzsche's actual recommendations -- which is far more than I could say about myself, given my rather more religious tendencies.
> But instead you patronize me by acting like I don’t read.
Rather quaint to be upset about this given the bucket of assumptions you yourself made in the comment above.
elaborate please?
Dead end. You can't redesign and replace the entire world.
It's the same issue as self-driving cars: universal worker robots have to either learn to use the same things humans do, or never leave the labs.
That's exactly what we've been doing since the industrial revolution.
Step in a car factory, plenty of robots but none of them are humanoids. We redesigned the whole factory around specialized robots, rather than have humanoids on a Ford-like moving assembly line.
So you want to turn your home into the equivalent of a car factory, where everything is designed to be handled by robots? I don't think many people would want to live in such a home.
But the reengineering of assembly lines has targeted speed and cost of assembly, not so much automation. Robots do have a role in manufacturing, but I think it's a relatively small fraction of the whole. AFAIK, most part makers don't rely on automation, and even though final assembly has had greater success, it's still far from as adaptable as humans are.
GM's Saturn was relatively early in that space but it didn't scale up anywhere as well as they had hoped. Likewise, Tesla went there 30 years later, but IIRC, they too experienced myriad difficulties building reliable automated manufacturing processes.
If automation among makers were ready for prime time, the work would have migrated to countries with the cheapest power and fastest mobility while ignoring labor costs. AFAIK, that still hasn't happened.
Not the entire world but maybe enough of it.
I mean, think about the batshit idea of raiway transport in Europe. Like trains sound nice in principle, sure, it works on the scale of a mine or a shipyard to move things around, but using that to travel between all major cities (and even most villages) and countries all over? It would require laying thousands and thousands of kilometers of train tracks.
Or introducing electricity and phone lines, public lighting, and adopting various standards, metrification, putting road signage everywhere, etc. etc.
We've done a lot of large scale transformations. But to kickstart the process, robots need to be "good enough" without these infrastructure changes, and then people will see it and want the change. You can't start speculatively. It has to work first, and offer to work better if there is more infra standardization.
We changed the world for combustion cars, why not for self-driving cars?
Combustion cars were already usable even on the roads built for horse drawn carriages - they were, in fact, adapted to the existing world.
They even ran on things like firewood, coal, or, for the first ICEs, relatively common liquid fuels that could be sourced in large cities.
Cars rely on gas stations today - but gas stations only became a thing after cars already became a thing.
Nowadays, Tesla had to make Superchargers happen all by themselves before EVs could really happen - despite EVs already having the crushing advantage of being able to charge overnight in any garage that has power.
Can you see a robot company branching out to be a competitor to McDonalds to prove that their kitchen robot is viable if you design the entire kitchen for it? Well, it's not entirely impossible, but I think it unlikely.
Yes, I can see restaurants easily adopting an entire robot-friendly kitchen if it means robots can handle dish-handling and repetitive cooking tasks.
From that to every manufacturer adopting the standard on every product, independently of the client you just need some competition on their market. I dunno if there is any, but it's not a lot.
If all a robot does is take a package and throw it into the microwave why don't I just save a trip to the "restaurant" and eat at home?
I have no idea how you came from my comment to that idea. But nothing is stopping the chef from just throwing your food into the microwave today, so I don't see what change you are complaining about either.
There's a huge practicality issue for the chef. They don't have the food in microwavable format for many dishes.
But to me thats the end state of this conversation. Like lets take shipping as an example, we came up with pallets and containers not because they're useful for a person to move but because they're helpful for robots (and analogs) to move. People aren't born with palletjacks for hands. So to me it seems as you add more robotics into the kitchen you're going to slowly change your supplies to arrive in more robotic form.
Your comment is actually lagging behind reality. There is a manufacturer of kitchen robots that opened a fully functional demo fast food joint: https://misorobotics.com/CaliExpress/
While in Europe earlier I learned that BYD had to make hybrids for the European market since their charging infastructure isn't quite there.
Typically the world changes when a new market is discovered, making the earth more traversable by car at the time opened up enough of a new market that it was done post haste for better or for worse. The only real way I see self-driving cars opening up markets at a scale that they would justify the amount of overhead is if they created self-driving only lanes with infrastructure closely around them to be quick and easily accessible from the passengers.
Which at that point is really just the Japanese train system and surrounding infrastructure, which many places (at least in the US) don't seem capable or willing to make happen.
How so? roads were already dimensioned for horses, motorways for tanks. Most major change had industry (shipping, logistics etc) or military backing.
We changed the main purpose of roads to be for cars
https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2022/11/08/happy-bi...
Yeah bit we didn't change the world, and we didn't add roads. We just refused the existing ones, building out as necessary.
Only if you think a road back then is the same as a road now.
We changed the layout, the material, added guardrails and guide posts etc.
The 50’s called and wants all its mechanical lever-actuated extendo arm-clasps back!
Joking aside, the present always has a tangential future that never comes to be. Right now the current zeerust is “AI and robots doing everything”. Continuing to have humans do it is good enough.
Imagine an IKEA robot, they could redesign their kitchens to fit it, as well as all of their other products. I'd never step into my kitchen again so why would it need to be made for me anyways?
(They could give the robot instructions on how to set up their furniture as well, the business plan really writes itself)
I've thought about this with roads and automated driving--today automated driving seems somewhat insane because, even if the system can do the right thing on the overwhelming majority of roads, there is an enormously long tail of roadways that have surprises that these systems will not have encountered and automated systems can't easily handle. In the future, it may seem insane that we would allow roads to be built that aren't accommodating of automated driving systems (or maybe we will just develop AI that is not simply "pattern recognition" but which can actively solve somewhat "complex" problems?).
It’s only a stopgap measure. And maybe that explains why autonomous robots in space struggle so much: we first need to adapt space to robot (joke)
Standards are good, but then how about you take up pottery and make a plate yourself and now your robot won’t handle them…
You can do pottery in VR if you want.
That plan sounds viable until you consider how much noncompliant legacy hardware is out there that can't all be replaced but must be repaired, like cars, roofs, appliances, HVAC, electrical, plumbing, etc. If robots can't accommodate the huge fraction of old infrastructure already in place, they'll have limited value indeed -- basically just working on assembly lines in factories.
In New Zealand there are rules, and more extensive guidelines, on "disabled access". (Probably called something different now)
But it means that access to publicly accessible places is possible for a wide variety of disabilities
I wonder if that would help robotic access? For example you do not need to grip and turn a knob to open a door, they should all be levers.
> Maybe robot companies will even sell those themselves.
They will sell them so only their robots can use them.
The article doesn't miss it -- this is exactly the point. We can and will rearrange our environment to support robots, but that means they will never learn dexterity.
That will fail rather quickly if the robot is trying to repair something dirty.
Fully autonomous vehicles will never reach maximum reliability, speed, and efficiency either until we eliminate human drivers, pedestrians, stoplights, buildings, and pave the entire surface of the planet.
And for maximum safety, we'll need physical barriers that prevent the vehicles from leaving their designated path. The easiest way to do this, in my opinion, would be to put a special type of wheel on the vehicle. The wheels would have a flange on the perimeter, and the road surface could have a groove that the flange fits into, thus preventing the vehicle from veering off outside its prescribed lane. This would actually provide such tight control on the vehicles' lateral movement, that it would become possible to connect several vehicles front to back, in a sort of autonomous convoy, which is pretty cool IMO!
Yeah. Also, please refrain from reaching maximum speed and efficiency of the transportation system alone.
That's not an important goal. The important goal is to optimize the life of the people that use the lines, not artificial measures taken from just looking at the machines running in them.
Wait, what if we put them on tracks and they had predetermined stations they stopped at?
I'd be willing to wear clothes that have ultraviolet stripes and QR codes on them if a laundry robot can fold them for me.
Yep, this is what I reckon will be tried too. But then making that robot environment safe for humans to be in will be quite a tough problem.
I imagine things will just be very unified and boring because the same shapes will be recognizable everywhere. But it would be the same things we already have. Just make the robot weak and light enough to not even be able to harm someone. Lighting the kitchen on fire is always a risk though, I guess.
Once the humans in question have paid off the 7 year loan to remodel their kitchen, the real question is what further value do they add to the proposition?
I wasnt thinking Kitchen so much as Data Centre, a lot of whom are already unfriendly to human life, adding 300kg robots, and parts designed for robot interaction are just going to make them even moreso.
> But what the article misses: We can just rearrange our environment...
The article does discuss this...
What boosters of humanoid robots specifically do not want to do