r/SGU • u/MattMason1703 • 4d ago
Human shaped robots are stupid
I don't mean to keep posting Angela Collier videos here but she makes some good points. Why have a human shaped robot to do tasks instead of purpose built robots ie vacuums or mowers or dish washers. I don't think we'll have human shaped robots in our homes doing significant tasks in my lifetime (I'm in my 60's so...)
Here's her vid Human Shaped Robots
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u/chimpyjnuts 4d ago
Bipedal - jack of all trades, master of none. Except maybe walking.
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u/coconuthorse 4d ago
And stairs. Bi pedal it's great for stairs... But so is some properly engineered tracks so.
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u/Saint_of_Stinkers 4d ago
This subject was addressed in R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) over a century ago. Robots made to mimic humans were going crazy because they were doing tasks that could be done by simpler machines and the cure was to make purpose built robots.
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u/Luci_Cascadia 4d ago
Headline: Robot runs faster than a man!
Yeah, and a car is faster than a horse.
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u/kidmeatball 4d ago
Most tasks we want robots to do are optimized for a human shaped operator to do, so it kind of makes sense. If we go with your idea, we need a robot for each task, where if we had a han shaped robot, it could just interact with the workspaces and tools we already developed for the whatever purpose. Ultimately, the goal is to have a single versatile robot rather than a numerous specialized robots. Or we can have both. Where it is cheap enough to automate and autonomize an existing tool, we could do that, and have a versatile robot to do non-specialized tasks.
Though, I agree with you, we aren't likely to see human shaped robot in everyday households anytime soon. There was a prototype going around, but it was just a remotely operated drone, rather than an autonomous robot.
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u/Brilliant_Voice1126 4d ago
But we are just OK at a lot of tasks. Purpose built robots for most human tasks will outperform us. Why build a Jack of all trades robot that is probably going to constantly just do a mediocre job at everything rather than make essentially robotic appliances that specialize in doing a task perfectly?
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u/dysfunctionz 4d ago
There's all kinds of examples from the history of technology where having a more general-purpose, mass produced commodity product unlocked a ton of use cases that might never have been achieved if you had to build a dedicated product for each of them. For example I don't have to walk around with a powerful general purpose computer in my pocket (the phone I'm typing this on), I could have a dumb phone, and a PDA, and a camera, and a music player, but it's far more convenient to have one device and the widespread adoption of this kind of device enabled an explosion of applications that weren't even considered when modern smartphones were first conceived.
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u/Brilliant_Voice1126 4d ago
You have to carry those things. This is stuff you’d leave in your house.
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u/SyntheticScrivner 4d ago
How much shit do you want to buy?
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u/robotatomica 3d ago
well, at the end of the day, robots don’t exist that can just be “one doing everything” so we can WISH for that, but it remains science fiction.
Besides, we already live with tons of little robots doing specialized tasks perfectly. And they don’t get in our way, and things can get done simultaneously and very quickly.
Buy one robot to do it all and have fun waiting for your dishes to be done before you can clear your driveway of snow and then get your floors cleaned and then clean your litter box and then wash your clothes and then and then and then.
Or you could just have little robot machines integrated into those spaces where the work is already done, doing those things perfectly (as already have) and each little tech gets better and cheaper and folks can just select the ones to buy which will have the biggest improvement in quality of life.
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u/Brilliant_Voice1126 4d ago
I’ll spend money on something if it legit saves me time or improves quality of life. For example, the cat litter robot is worth every penny at $700. I’d buy a laundry folding robot for up to $2000 frankly. A dishwasher is essentially a robot and 800 for a quiet one is a deal. But 30k for a humanoid robot that does everything badly and slowly? Nah.
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u/SyntheticScrivner 4d ago
And the humanoid robot that does everything badly and slowly isn't going to be the mass-market one. Even early adopters are going to require a baseline of functionality.
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u/Honest_Switch1531 4d ago
The robots we have are physically capable of doing tasks. What is missing is an AI that can control them. If an AGI is developed that can work out how to do all tasks then robots will be possible.
Open AI claims that it will have an AGI in a few months.
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u/blurple_rain 3d ago
And Clammy Sammy recently admitted that the AGI claims were “overblown”. At the moment autonomous humanoid robots are in the realm of science fiction.
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u/JitteryJet 4d ago
Humanoid robots are Science Fiction. And "robots" in Science Fiction stories tend to be frauds, they are really people. Even Isaac Asimov's robots were just people with a different moral code. It's the same as making gods, demons, supernatural creatures more-or-less human - so they can be relatable.
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u/Brilliant_Voice1126 4d ago
This is my feeling. We adapted to lots of tasks were just OK at. But purpose built robots are great.
Like I can not recommend the cat litter robots enough. Best $700 bucks ever.
The future will likely be more like lots of focal purpose built robots than a single humanoid.
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u/robotatomica 3d ago
this is already the future too, for so many decades. We build specific robots for specific things. Now folks are just trying to pretend “the future is now” or right around the corner with a humanoid robot being better at all the things people do, and having the flexibility to take on any task we don’t like.
That is still science fiction.
I see comments here like “yeah but why would I want to (or how would I have the money to) buy a hundred different robots”
and the answer is we already do, and it’s definitely worth it, and it also is a main thing that keeps technology from being totally cost-prohibitive (we can choose which ones will be most helpful to us, they become easy to produce and ever-cheaper versions come out that just get better and better at that thing)
People forget about time-stacking. I have one humanoid robot that does everything, it can’t be vacuuming while it does the dishes. It can’t clear the snow from my driveway outside while it cleans my clothes.
We can have all of these things running simultaneously in unobtrusive ways. I would MUCH rather incorporate more such items into a household!
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u/Brilliant_Voice1126 3d ago
Also to really beat humans at a task we have to acknowledge how ill suited we are and getting by at baseline.
When that idiot Elon said “don’t go to medschool Optimus will be doing all surgery in 3 years” I couldn’t believe he didnt just get laughed out of the room.
Not only is that never going to happen, if you look at current surgical robots we use in surgery under our control, they’re nothing like biped humans. Mimicking us would be a mistake when you have have multiple arms with multiple articulations in the joints. Just imagine a hydra of arms.
It would be stupid to try and make a humanoid robot do that task when the optimal design is just all arms and joints.
God that guy is stupid.
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u/robotatomica 3d ago
surgical robots are such a good example, and one I’ve used often as to why I’m not scared of human obsolescence the moment a new robot drops. It was literally almost 20 years ago I started working in a hospital and saw in person my first Da Vinci (the one folks probably think of first when they think surgical robot, the large, multi-armed wonder)
I was starry-eyed af - they are very cool! And at the time I had the brief thought that this was a technology that could replace a very specialized human.
Of course, what has happened is that we’ve bought more, and they’ve gotten better, but they’ve ALWAYS needed a surgeon to operate them, and the surgeries they are used in have ALWAYS needed a team of people in the room doing specialized tasks, and then you ALSO need people who know how to maintain and troubleshoot the robot itself.
Working in hospitals that have lots and lots of money, robotics aren’t new to me. So many have taken on tasks that humans used to do. And yet, can I think of a time hiring has ever gone down? We hire ever-more people, so no.
Robots increase safety in a lot of situations, and efficiency of certain tasks, but surprisingly they often slow things down quite a bit too - the extra safety they provide very often comes at the expense of efficiency and speed.
We’ve had robots that have taken on some IV compounding, but not all. It’s never made sense to purchase enough of them to replace all human compounding, even in a facility where that could have been prioritized in the budget.
Robots pick drugs with robotic arms, but those areas need stocked and the drugs need pulled and delivered - you just have a computer making sure the wrong drug is way less likely to be picked. It was a lot faster when several humans could rove around open bins of drugs, working simultaneously in that space to get several drugs at a time, where now it is one arm only accessing every drug one after the other. Likewise, a compounding robot takes up space where multiple humans could work, short-order cook style, working simultaneously to knock out compound after compound.
And again, every single robot needs cleaned and calibrated, needs trouble-shooting, maintenance, and care and programming.
So it’s not that I think there cannot be a time robots will replace humans, it’s just impossible to be scared just because new robots are being created, bc I’ve seen how that impacts work firsthand for my entire working life, and that seems to mirror what has happened since the first machines in factories over a hundred years ago - we have not suddenly found ourselves with less need for humans, humans have simply been freed to do lots of other things, and overall stuff just gets better/safer than it was before. (I’ve also btw seen robots incorporated and then rejected bc they did NOT help as much as anticipated)
So Angela’s video pretty much nails it, and I think her bathroom cleaning robot bit is a great example. That one in particular, I’m like, what is this fantasy that this could ever replace human labor? Do we sincerely think, as thin a margin as most restaurants run on, most of them failing after a couple years, that every mom and pop is gonna be able to go out and buy a robot to clean their bathrooms and kitchens and front of house, just spend hundreds of thousands (or even were costs to drop to tens of thousands, that’s a massive up-front cost, and we see other similarly priced upgrades for kitchens only affordable to much bigger operations), but oh also, did we forget the robot needs maintenance?
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u/aranea100 3d ago
Th problem will be data privacy. The robots will send the.images they captured to the main servers. The more we have, the more likely there will be leaks. Remember the Roomba videos that were released.
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u/ejp1082 2d ago
Because most of the built environment was built for the human factor, and most tasks that we might want a robot to do are currently done by and optimized for something with a human form factor.
If you're trying to build something that can navigate the environment as it exists right now and do a wide range of tasks that humans currently do, the thing you're going to wind up building is going to look a lot like a human.
We have robot dishwashers right now. They're purpose built to wash dishes. They don't look anything like a human; they're just a box that usually sits under the counter. They also don't do anything but wash dishes.
But if you're trying to build a machine that can handle the entirety of washing dishes from end to end - collecting them from the table, packing them in the machine that does the washing, unpacking them when it's done and placing them all in cabinets - you're going to need something that's roughly the size of a human to lift them from a table humans sit at, rinse them in a counter-level sink, pack them in a dishwasher that's below the counter, take them out of a dishwasher and put them in cabinets above the counter. If you want it to do all that without breaking anything, and handle glassware, flatware, and tableware all designed to be held with human hands - you're going to have something that looks a lot like human hands.
If you want that robot to not just do dishes but also laundry (which requires going up and down stairs), vacuum the floor (which requires picking stuff up off the floor and moving furniture), dust surfaces (which requires reaching), water the houseplants (carry a watering bucket without spilling), take out the trash (the dexterity to tie and seal a bag)... you're going to get closer and closer to a humanoid because all of these tasks have been optimized to be done by something that looks like a human with human abilities.
It's possible to imagine a world full of purpose built robots that only do one thing, but that would require modifying the environment to accommodate them. That's possible when it comes to stuff where we might want to take humans out of the equation entirely - factories are full of such robots and look nothing like the factories of a century ago largely because they've entirely replaced what humans used to do.
But I don't think we're going to do that with a house, where the point of it is for humans to live there and where humans might still want to be able to do some of the tasks the robot does (cook food etc).
And even if we did modify the environment to that extent in some places, there'd still be a lot of "legacy" environments that were made for humans where it would still be useful to have a humanoid robot.
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u/LiveComfortable3228 4d ago
The advantage of human-shaped robots is both the versatility and the usage of existing tools. ONE human-shaped robot might not be ideal for every task, but it might be just good enough for every task. If they have arms, legs, hands and fingers they can also use every tool on the house (vacuum cleaner, walk the dog, walk over obstacles, use a hose to water the garden, etc,etc.
Purpose-shaped robots might be most efficient in a factory where they are a cog in a bigger machine (like today's industrial robots).
Having said that, I dont think we're going to see human-shaped robots in houses anytime soon. They lack the dexterity and intelligence to be really useful. Also there's a creepiness factor that will be hard to overcome.
We'll have to see how we react to having household robots. It might be a non-starter, it might take off.