alt Hacker NewsIn 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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> In less than 10 years there’s going to be millions of bipedal robots everywhere
No, there won't be, and I have no clue why you think this is true. It's been more than 15 years since the first demos of self-driving cars, a much easier problem than useful bipedal robots coexisting in spaces made for humans, and self-driving cars are still hardly anywhere, despite the breathless predictions 15 years ago that all cars and trucks everywhere would be self-driving as of what is now 5 years ago.