It's interesting, the digital/physical barrier seems like the last line of defense we have against metastasized indifferent agents. Once they start causing problems, how are we gonna feel about robotics? Clearly a future where all of the "thinking problems" are easily solved but we still have to pick up trash kinda sucks. I'm sure they'll figure that out for us though.

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robotresearcher a day ago | parent | next [-]

> I'm sure they'll figure that out for us though.

Imagine I give you for free the perfect trash picking robot control AI software. Works great. Benchmark smashed.

Now imagine what the rest of the robot is like, and how much it would cost. I mean really imagine, not just picture C3PO with a bucket and litter spike. How many motors and what are the torque vs. mass requirements? How is energy stored? It goes on, not all of it is solved, and none of it is cheap. Except compute.

AI likely does accelerate robotics usefully - certainly in sensing and control. But there are major bottlenecks that are not software, that AI can only help with as a generic engineering tool, same as it helps planes and fridges.

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jrowen a day ago | parent [-]

I don't follow. What's the implication?

Imagine I give you a perfect roadmap to build that robot...

Responding to your edit, none of those things strike me as any more challenging than the control software.

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robotresearcher a day ago | parent | next [-]

Maybe the perfect roadmap says the trash picker needs $600B investment and will cost $4M per unit in 10 years time, if we solve all the problems.

That trash picker may never compete with a human. There's no reason to assume it will.

edit:

> none of those things strike me as any more challenging than the control software

Maybe the difficulties of motors and batteries are not intuitive. Look at their improvement rates over time. It's a far cry from transistor counts or FLOPS. And look at the performance and efficiency of humans and other animals. We are absurdly strong, light, efficient and cheap to maintain. The gap is huge and not closing quickly.

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jrowen a day ago | parent [-]

We already have versions of these robots. I don't think it's as wildly unsolved as you make it out to be. A few key efficiencies gained in any part of the process could tip the scales. I would bet something decent is on the market within 10 years.

If it's not C3PO it's a Boston Dynamics dog with a couple appendages, better software, and automated manufacturing.

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robotresearcher a day ago | parent [-]

Boston Dynamics has the best robot mechatronics in the world, and the company is passed around between deep-pocket owners repeatedly because no one can figure out how to make products that pay for themselves. They have been trying since 1992.

iRobot, the company that shipped the most robots in history because they focused super hard on finding a cost-effective subset of cleaning tasks, failed to scale up to other even closely related tasks, went bust and was sold off.

But yeah, it's probably straightforward, right?

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jrowen a day ago | parent [-]

Again I don't think it's any less straightforward than "give you for free the perfect trash picking robot control AI software". The whole point is they can do better than us on these tasks.

	▲	robotresearcher a day ago \| parent [-]
		“Give you for free” is a rhetorical device that focuses the discussion on the remainder that I didn’t give you. I didn’t make any claims about the relative difficultly.

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tavavex a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The problem is that your roadmap requires things that don't exist yet or only exist at prohibitive prices, and it's not knowable how much time or money you will need to solve either one. So a concrete roadmap is impossible.

Advanced robotics would need to become quite cheap for them to become more affordable and convenient than a minimum-wage employee. And physical fields like materials engineering are known for moving quite slowly and at their own pace, so I'm not sure how much automation could help there.

That's the last barrier we have right now that prevents the total obsolescence (and therefore destruction) of the common worker.

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jrowen a day ago | parent [-]

Our starting assumption was "Imagine I give you for free the perfect trash picking robot control AI software." If AI can deliver that, why can't it figure out how to take a Boston Dynamics dog, design it for trash picking, and optimize manufacturing costs?

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robotresearcher a day ago | parent [-]

Two different answers:

1. The discussion setup where you imagine a counterfactual is given by magic does not entail that magic can do any other thing you choose.

“Imagine I give you $100, what do you spend it on?”

“A McClaren, since you could have given me $300K”

2. Taking your question directly: because these are not closely related problems.

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jrowen a day ago | parent [-]

1. The discussion setup where you imagine a counterfactual is given by magic does not entail that magic can do any other thing you choose.

My question was a sincere ask to define, in this scenario, what is prohibiting that other magic?

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SJC_Hacker 21 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The thought experiment was not assuming AGI, but something like an old school perfect expert at a given task. Maybe like C-3PO only useful as a “protocol droid”, but fairly useless at everything else

	▲	jrowen 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I've been so unconvinced by any of these arguments, that all seem to amount to "because I said so." If it can design software that is out of our reach, it can design hardware. It can look at manufacturing data and identify optimizations. "Fairly useless at everything else"? The denial is getting scary, and it's going to come back and bite us.

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robotresearcher a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Then it’s answer number two.

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jimbokun a day ago | parent | prev [-]

> Responding to your edit, none of those things strike me as any more challenging than the control software.

Do you have relevant experience in any of those fields?

	▲	jrowen a day ago \| parent [-]
		Nope. I don't know what that proves. I couldn't have come up with a solution to Navier-Stokes either.

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uludag a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm convinced that businesses will never find offloading menial low-wage labor to robts more cost effective than just hiring underpaid laborers.

	▲	imtringued 13 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That's not incompatible with a surrogate (the movie) style outsourcing society.

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xienze a day ago | parent | prev [-]

> Clearly a future where all of the "thinking problems" are easily solved but we still have to pick up trash kinda sucks.

Oh don't worry Mr. Former Software Engineer. You won't be picking up the trash or cleaning toilets. You have things like an expectation for your work to pay a reasonable wage. You'll be passed over for a third world immigrant who'll work for a pittance, and they'll be replaced only when robots are capable enough and cheap enough to undercut _them_.

	▲	tavavex a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The former software engineer will not be passed up on because he'll have the same demands as the third-worlder. If this comes to pass, we'll all be forced into the race to the bottom because no one wants to starve, so anyone that desperate would be forced to accept working for food or whatever the lowest possible standard of compensation will be in the future.
	▲	a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
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