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It seems that he wrote that in a book published in 1953, but it's weird, I find, that he was imagining a robot driving a car. I would have thought he would have imagined that cars would become robots well before there would be humanoid robots wanting to drive them. So by the time you have a humanoid robot wanting to drive a car it's just one robot talking to another robot, electronically. And knives and forks are for eating, which humanoid robots presumably don't need to do, and is it likely that humanoid robots will need chairs in the same way that humans do? Altogether, a bad set of examples, I find. Perhaps the thesis would be more convincing with some better examples.

by thrownthatway4 hours ago|

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I need to get on to one of the prediction markets.

I’m willing to bet we’ll have a humanoid robot that can drive a car before we have level 5 autonomous vehicles.

And by can drive a car I mean a general purpose humanoid robot that can do basic household chores like move the car and wash it with a foaming brush and a hose.

I don’t mean the robot will be capable of sitting in any regular car and doing level 5 autonomous driving.

by mattclarkdotnet3 hours ago|

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So you’re wanting to bet that we’ll get humanoid robots capable of driving a dumb car at L4 before we get cars capable of L5? When we have no humanoid robots driving cars, and many L4 cars driving around? I’ll take that!

by fragmede2 hours ago|

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Geohot's Comma.ai body is going in that direction, so the question is how much do you want to bet?

by conductr4 hours ago|

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Perhaps the samples were chosen specifically as things the audience would have universal familiarity/understanding of thus making his point resonate.

He didn’t craft it for literal interpretation on HN 70 years in the future.

by elil175 hours ago|

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Right, but:

1. Asimov wrote that because he needed robots to be indistinguishable from humans for plot reasons.

2. We do 99% of our tool use with our arms and hands. We are already very good at building robot arms. We are getting better at robot hands. We can build robot legs, but they're very expensive and they pose a major safety risk for the robot itself and surrounding humans (because the robot can fall if there is a failure). For most applications, why not just put biomimetic hands and arms on a rolling base?

Of course, all this humanoid robotics research is still useful because if you can build a fully humanoid robot you can trivially build a torso-on-rolling-base robot. I sort of suspect that most of the humanoid robotics companies already know that the vast majority of their sales will be in that category.

by DoctorDabadedoo5 hours ago|

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It's 100% a HMI and moving costs to the other end of supply chain.

We can have optimized automation in warehouses/logistics, but if you talk to any site manager you learn very quickly that no one wants any downtime or impact to their operation to introduce new machinery or optimize traffic, etc. If it is not built with that from the start it's very hard to introduce it later on unless there is a very clear deployment path and cost structure.

And boy, robotics currently has any of those today. Sure, move those billions in to R&D. Time will tell.

by rob745 hours ago|

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You can still have a humanoid robot that looks very different from an actual human (and most robots from Asimov's novels were of that kind, although one of the main characters wasn't - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._Daneel_Olivaw).

Ok, so maybe a robot with wheels could solve most tasks, but it would still be severely limited: couldn't climb stairs (which would make it unsuitable as a domestic robot in a house or multi-storey flat), couldn't drive a car, truck or any other vehicle designed for humans etc.

by bitwize4 hours ago|

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Remember the Segway?

Its predecessor was a stair-climbing wheelchair: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBOT

One of the codenames for Segway was "Ginger", a reference to Ginger Rogers, because the codename for iBOT was "Fred Upstairs" (a pun on Fred Astaire).

by po1nt5 hours ago|

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Why not make a robotic chair? Why not build our environment out of specialized robots instead of using a hammer for everything?

by rob745 hours ago|

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Sure, there are already robot vacuum cleaners, but I somehow fail to imagine how (a) specialized robot(s) that can e.g. sort your used laundry, wash it, dry it, iron it (if necessary), fold it and put it back into the cupboard would look like?

by po1nt35 minutes ago|

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Well we got well past washing it by hand in a river. I don't think folding it and storing it in a robotic friendly container until requested would be such a demanding task with today's tech.

by fragmede2 hours ago|

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If we're designing magic future devices, why are they separate machines? It wouldn't take a robot, I'd just dump my dirty clothes in one end of the machine, and the other end of the machine is my dresser drawers. We can't even handle smushing the washing machine and dryer into one machine, and that technology exists today.

And the other thing is, why is the washing machine itself not seen as a specialized robot? Like if you're designing a machine to machine machines, doesn't it make sense to revisit the whole thing?