You’ve probably already seen the video of the stupid Russian AIbot falling flat on its face in its debut, but here it is again.
This is all a waste of money, time, and effort. Before you reply with that “what use is a baby?” line, there’s no there there — these aren’t aware, thinking machines, they all need pre-programmed tasks to follow in their slow, clumsy way. You wouldn’t want one with full autonomy, anyway, given how erratically AI performs in simple text tasks.
Near the end of the above video, they talk briefly about industrial automation, which is good, I’m all for it. Those are repetitive tasks in which you do give the machine a set of programmed operations, and you gotta wonder…what is the “humanoid” part for, anyway? Wouldn’t it be smarter to have just an arm, with specialized grasping elements?
This is just another example of hyping up AI, because a bunch of billionaires make more money by selling server farms and stolen information, but they need flashy stuff to convince the rubes to buy into it.
Also, some of these robots aren’t even independently controlled by AI — they’ve got a guy behind a screen diddling switches and joysticks, in which case they should just cut out the middle android.
Did it learn to walk by imitating drunk Russians?
Whenever I see people building fully humanoid robots, I keep remembering Anthony Boucher’s story, “Q.U.R.”, about a world where robots are all humanoid and are running into all sorts of cost and maintenance headaches. Then, two robot engineers realize that by stripping down robots to just the parts that they need to do their job, they can make them cheaper, more reliable, and actually more versatile.
When I first read this story, I thought it was unlikely to ever actually happen, because it is blindingly obvious that building a full-up duplicate of a human body with all those joints and actuators to do a simple job like sweeping the floor makes no sense when something like a Roomba could do the same thing at a fraction of the cost. But now, with guys like Musk getting all wound up pushing for full-humanoid robots to “do everything”, I’m not so sure.
Silvrhalide @ 1. Yes, I saw this on the BBC and immediately thought ‘Vodka’.
I’m okay with roboticists working on the difficult problem of bipedal locomotion just to figure out how it can be done. Just don’t embarrass yourself by showing a project before it’s fully baked and ready to demo. Unfortunately, the people with money want their robot butler now, Now, NOW!
Even if you’re building a general purpose robot, there’s no point to making it bipedal. A setup with four wheels each on the end of a leg with robust and versatile joints allows for far more rapid motion on a flat surface and much greater stability on pretty much any surface that a bipedal design could handle, all whilst reducing the computational load of keeping balanced on two legs as it’s so much easier to simply keep the centre of mass firmly inside the shape delineated by the legs touching the floor, so small pertutbations won’t cause a loss of equilibrium.