> Robotics is notably much, much, much harder than AI/ML.

Are you so sure?

Almost every animal has solved locomotion, some even with incredibly primitive brains. Evolution knocked this out of the park hundreds of millions of years ago.

Drosophila can do it, and we've mapped their brains.

Only a few animals have solved reasoning.

I'm sure the robotics videos I've seen lately have been cherry picked, but the results are nothing short of astounding. And there are now hundreds of billions of dollars being poured into solving it.

I'd wager humans stumble across something evolution had a cake walk with before they stumble across the thing that's only happened once in the known universe.

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bc569a80a344f9c 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Yes, robotics is harder. Here’s some links. Wiki as an intro, and a reasonably entertaining write up that explains the concept in some depth, specifically comparing the issue to LLM progress as of 2024

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox

https://harimus.github.io/2024/05/31/motortask.html

Edit: just to specifically address your argument, doing something evolution has optimized for hundreds of millions of years is much harder than something evolution “came up with” very recently (abstract thought).

	▲	echelon 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> Edit: just to specifically address your argument, doing something evolution has optimized for hundreds of millions of years is much harder than something evolution “came up with” very recently (abstract thought). You've got this backwards. If evolution stumbled upon locomotion early -- and several times independently through convergent evolution --, that means it's an easy problem, relatively speaking. We've come up with math and heuristics for robotics (just like vision and optics). We're turning up completely empty for intelligence.

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Avshalom 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Well a large chunk of HN thinks the existing generation of AI is capable of doing 80% of their job, this has not translated at all to robotic stevedores and even less to robotic plumbers so yeah all current evidence supports "Robotics is notably much, much, much harder than AI/ML"

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bryanrasmussen 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

>Almost every animal has solved locomotion, some even with incredibly primitive brains. Evolution knocked this out of the park hundreds of millions of years ago.

>Only a few animals have solved reasoning.

the assumption here seems to be that reasoning will be able to do what evolution did hundreds of millions of years ago (with billions of years of work being put into that doing) much easier than evolution did for.. some reason that is not exactly expressed?

logically also I should note that given the premises laid out by the first quoted paragraph the second quoted paragraph should not be "only a few animals have solved reasoning" it should be "evolution has only solved reasoning a few times"