alt Hacker NewsIsaac Asimov already explained that better than I could (https://www.reddit.com/r/asimov/comments/pm84ud/why_robots_a...):
> Besides that, our entire technology is based on the human form. An automobile, for instance, has its controls so made as to be grasped and manipulated most easily by human hands and feet of a certain size and shape, attached to the body by limbs of a certain length and joints of a certain type. Even such simple objects as chairs and tables or knives and forks are designed to meet the requirements of human measurements and manner of working. It is easier to have robots imitate the human shape than to redesign radically the very philosophy of our tools.
Replies
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.
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.
Why not make a robotic chair? Why not build our environment out of specialized robots instead of using a hammer for everything?
But he was wrong already at the time. The world is made with humans in mind now. As soon as robots that are not human-like become useful enough, the world changes and adapts to them.
Just like the world had no asphalt and curbs before the car. Or just how heavily automated manufacture lines in factories have nothing that looks like a human can interact with it except a few buttoms here and there.