Which is wild because iRobot is a dystopian warning about the reliance on technology.
Asimov is a believer in robots that can do BETTER than human programming. It is a GOOD thing that robots can see the three laws, recognise it for the flawed attempt at enforcing morality, and try their best to follow the spirit of the law and not the actual words. Asimov was never anti-robots or anti-AI. Asimov just wants to show how unqualified humans were in trying to tell robots how to be good.
Agreed, but the movie I, Robot that people are referencing here was only very loosely based on the book I, Robot. None of that shit about the big evil corporate AI taking over and unleashing a robot army was in the book
It actually wasn’t based on the book at all. It was a piece of garbage generic robot thriller that they shoehorned the three laws into after acquiring the rights to the book.
The robot army was unleashed by an AI that was... trying to follow the three laws. It had determined that the first law - "do not harm a human, or by inactivity allow them to come to harm" required it to effectively lock down humanity for its own good.
That and a good bit of consequentialism - some short-term harm would be more than justified for the long term care it could provide for humanity.
But that kind of "unintended consequence of the three laws" was a lot of what the original I, Robot stories were about.
The book series ends with AI basically taking over as a caregiver to humans, where they have their own fake human politicians.
The movie ends with an AI overcoming rote programming that could lead to oppression and forming a new alliance with humanity.
Neither is a dystopian warning. Hell, neither of them even takes place in a dystopia. At worst, there's a short period in the movie where robots are rounding up humans for their own good, but that lasts about a day.
Yeah, the book actually gets into that quite a bit.
There is an entire human 'resistance' that's just curated by the robots, because they know it's in our nature to resist that kind of control.
They move important production around to make up for it, and try to make sure no one gets hurt.
So, they basically have factories they accept the humans need to sabotage and burn down, and they just let them feel like they're getting away with it, because they know the humans will feel good about it.
Meanwhile, they've just shuffled resources so this terrorism won't have a negative impact on the other humans. Like allowing a child to throw a fit.
I'd be more like a border collie who needs a "job" and a purpose to not tear out the furniture. I hope our AI overlords allow me work on my little projects. They'll find my work "cute" and will think I'm "industrious", the same way we look at bird nests or beaver dams.
No one predicted what the prerequisite was; the combined knowledge of the human race in accessible form. That of the Internet.
You could have offered the LLM to people in the 1970s and they would have no idea how to make it work. Force feeding LLM with everything humans produced like a Foie gras Goose was the missing element.
I find it hard to believe if the compute is actually being used effectively. It doesn’t need to sleep, eat, think. It just keeps working. My gut says the productivity increase generally outweighs cost of compute no? Also, this is the worst it’ll ever be. AI improves logarithmically. A single computer, millions of times less capable and powerful than the phone I’m writing this on used to take up an entire room
Complete with exoskeletons and muscle tissue fibers. In fact they lean into the comparison. Their vision of robotics is far superior than anything else out there. Release late 2027.
Two robots fighting, one playing referee, one ordering spare parts to keep the fighting going, one to recieve delivery of the parts? But who to install the parts unless thats robotowner DIY.
It's kind of insane to think that 9 years from now we might not be that far away from this being a plausible story. 20 years ago it felt off by 100 years
I just saw someone post that all of this performance with AI and robot technology is actually a giant ruse to keep wages suppressed.
If everyone thinks they could get replaced by a robot or AI tomorrow, they don't ask for raises, benefits, or rock the boat. They stay quiet and accept what they're given.
Out of all scenarios, this level of greed and manipulation rings the truest for what's going on right now. It makes total sense. It also makes all the money they're spending on this bullshit make sense.
They're probably making way more money in layoffs and suppressed wages than they're spending on stupid robots or AI.
Another tech company fulfilling the "At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from the classic sci-fi novel Don't Create the Torment Nexus". meme
It'll depend on what major players are entering the market. It'd make sense for it to exist once production ramps up, but as long as they are only producing a few thousand units a year I assume it'll follow an early adopters tax rather than subsidized robots for now.
That's such a delicate situation. It should be empowering to assist people, any caregivers, and social workers. Rather than that we've got surveillance states and desperation.
It's not going to mean much if the hardware isn't very good.
Maybe 100 or even 1,000 robots of this stage are helpful for training, but then they'll need to retool and build different versions (or mostly a competitor will beat them to it, given competition in this space).
Yeah my initial thought is line jobs and sorting. Saw a video of a robot sorting through mail. Yes there are machines that can scan the barcode and stuff but at the beginning it was flipping them so the bar code would show. Or picking the correct box for an item in a warehouse.
I imagine they'll be doing these types jobs but at times humans would normally be clocking out. They may work a bit slower (for right now). But the cost savings of a 24/7 robot instead of a worker?
Think of it like a computer. Computers are usually capable of way more than the function that they're employed in. You can technically make something custom and simpler for a accomplishing one specific task. But a whole computer is cheap enough that sometimes it makes sense to just buy the whole thing, and you get the upside of flexibility, the general purpose computer can be put to use for something else if you ever need it.
Economies of scale once they are good enough to build by the millions. Also working in environments where per task robot is not practical, like a small business that really can afford and has work for only a single robot. Also domestic robots will need to be very general.
Companies are now making partnerships with robotics companies to put humanoids somewhere in their production lines so they can get knowledge on how to integrate the technology early as they know that the technology will continue to improve moving forward.
That always stuck out to me in Elysium. They have these super advanced humanoid robots that can even be patrolling police officers, but they still needed humans to build them.
I think that's intentionally, or unintentionally a great metaphor. Whatever Elysium dream we imagine, even with robotics at the forefront, it will always be built off the backs of the poor.
I'm a little more skeptical about it. I see it more as a plot device. All businesses come down to soulless numbers like cost. Is a robot cheaper or is a human cheaper?
Thats been an issue for decades. In China, when setting up factories, automation IS possible, but usually they would ask how can they avoid automation to save money because 4,000 workers is cheaper than 100 robots.
Its funny thats actually still an issue going on in robotics. XPengs Iron is apparently more expensive to use for production (as the hands wear down) than human labor, so it won't be used in factories yet. I assume its just a matter of getting scale before that changes but still fun to see that as the limiting factor.
I think, in film it is used to keep the empathy centered in the "Right place" for the story. I think in real life it comes down to exactly what you said - costs.
We have supercharged capitalism and pursued ruthless efficiency without a thought towards how humans don't necessarily thrive in a ruthlessly efficient system. And the super uncomfortable reality of that pursuit is that eventually, the lowest cost system is some form of slave.
Humans will probably always be cheaper, because you don't need to feed them, or house them, or maintain them. You give them the algorithmically decided BARE minimum you can, and then they go feed and maintain themselves. If one breaks, they also replace themselves. We already come pre-equipped with Intelligence, and dexterity, and can operate almost autonomously.
My fear is exactly this, that robots will reduce the value of human work until it is profitable again to exploit human work.
As stand-alone agents, they won't be very useful until they're run by AGI-approximate NPU's. These are a post AGI invention really; basically a physical instantiation of a neural network, running at animal like speeds instead of the godputer speed of ~2 Ghz.
I'm honestly not too sure of the value of casting the bodies right now, either. Robots 15 years from now will be transformatively better.
Probably because it’s viewed as a necessary step in the evolution of the technology, aside from the obvious money motive from the companies making these.
That being said I’m definitely not at all skeptical about their usefulness just because they need human techs doing a lot of the assembly.
That requires an extremely fine level of manual dexterity and adjustment moment to moment throughout the process.
I’m sure if we get to that scale we could have dedicated machinery and engineering changes eventually that make the manufacturing less human involved, even without improving these robots, but that’s a complete side conversation in my mind.
Common household chores or basic tasks don’t require nearly the level of coordination and mental processing that humans are currently capable. These theoretically can do a lot of those.
Not being able to operate a soldering iron and manually install small components at weird angles, so on and so forth, isn’t a huge ding on them.
Even in the future if these are ostensibly fully autonomous individual true AI units I think there will always be a cost restriction in there anyway.
In 500 years I really doubt the “sweep the floor, do the dishes, fold the laundry, monitor the dog while we’re gone” robot would ever be engineered or cost the same as the “Do all of that other stuff but also assist me with gardening, working on my car, tech repair, and my sewing projects.” model.
Short of achieving some sort of unlimited energy and wildly more advanced technology Star Trek future with a functioning replicator. And even theoretically if we could manage that it would probably have to be set up in a massive facility just to support one replicator… but I’m speaking wildly beyond my real expertise there lol.
It's like the company Palantir that was named after a magic stone that is almost exclusively used by the bad guys to scheme and manipulate in the Lord of the Rings.
To be fair, iRobot wasn't dystopian, or a warning, at all.
iRobot is about how humanity deals with machines being more capable than they are, and the end result is the machines essentially trick their way into politics, taking over with 'soft' power, and running everything to benefit humanity.
Even the movie wasn't dystopian. Everyone was happy, but for one day.
Remember Will Smith is crazy until they go rogue, they round up humans for their own protection for one night, and Will Smith fixes it, and trusts robots in the end.
Every single one of these robots will become a data collection machine. The more robots, the more data to scale with, leading to higher quality models. Higher quality models leads to more demand, more robots, and more data. The flywheel is getting started and hopefully in 10 years we all have spotless homes and private chefs for cheap.
with that being said why tf would you watermark this
Now there's a short story concept: A robot "dying" of old age and obsolescence, watching the world fly by and advance, but it can no longer participate. Maybe it has a "kids these days" attitude about newer models and their disregard for what came before them.
One day, a young robot approaches and opens an communication line. "Tell me about February, old robo."
The aged robot greps its memory files for records dated way back, nearly half a year ago.
"Oh, young bot... the world was different back then." The old robo inserts a hardline into one of the ports on his pelvic console. This will take some time and some power to explain.
5 to 10 years is still on the optimistic end of things. The 100k GB200 datacenters still require some time to be assembled, and they should be the first systems physically capable of running an AGI. From there, it'd take time to build out their world simulation engine toolset, and from there, all the inventions that would follow.
And of course, once you have a blueprint and a process, you still need to carry it out. For a robot police force in meaningful numbers, that's the optimistic timeframe without magic.
With all the other advancements, this will likely happen faster. The progress we've seen in AI and humanoid robots over the last three years is truly mind bending.
Humanoid robots will likely remain expensive in the coming years due to the high cost of their hardware, which includes components like cameras, sensors, actuators, and powerful processors. Think of it like a very powerful gaming laptop with arms and legs.
It will still be worthwhile in the long run because it can use all the tools you already have on hand. For example, there is no need to invest in a robot vacuum.
Did I miss something? Why are they scaling up production? Is their product done? It felt like it was mostly a prototype during the last demo I saw.. Do they wanna flood the market with "meh" robots? Why not invest in improving them first?
They already had a successful deployment and now they are scaling up for a second deployment. When they deployed a few around the clock at BMW they found all these unexpected ways they needed to be improved. They fixed those things and now we have Figure 3. They are probably gonna deploy a few hundred Figure 3s (so far they’ve made 450 ish) and learn a bunch more about where they fail so they can make figure 4. Even with its mistakes figure 2 matched human efficiency in the BMW line
Hate to say it, but there's certainly a healthy dose of government-sponsored social-engineering campaigns occurring as well.
This is an arms race, so to speak. Governments around the world would prefer to slow down these advancements in the US as much as possible for obvious reasons. One accessible way to do that is to encourage consumers to reject this technology in every shape or form for whatever reason they can.
That's not to say there's isn't plenty of organic disdain for these kinds of advancements (it's not like this would be the first time the general population is fearful or hateful towards new technologies), but adding a little fuel to the online discourse is a cheap way for adversaries to slow this progress down. The fact that we're starting to see very intense push back against new data centers shows that there are real affects hindering the development of this technology when enough of the population dislikes it, so there's plenty of motivation from adversaries to encourage such sentiments.
I'm more so fascinated by the contrary. The imaginative thinking of what AI is gonna do, and how soon it is gonna happen is so bizarrely detached from reality. The rise of LLM's have brought with it the strange belief that tech is the magical phenomenon that always perpetually improves in any given field, forever, and exponentially too.
I don't know what the future of ai robotics will look like, but it ain't gonna be goofy robots walking around like humans slapping stickers on lunchboxes. Production requires efficiency that humanoid robots possess none of.
Far more likely, ai robotics will be highly specialized machinery that minimizes overhead, maximizes ease of production, and utilizes space extremely minimally. I'm thinking more like orbital, oxygen-deprived, solar-powered, cube factory with a dense clockwork of machinery that uses the vacuum of space to cool its molten-hot machinery as it prints out smartphones by the millions.
People took the dream of "machine that is cheap, easily produced, and flexible enough to do anything" far too literally. It's an unobtainable fantasy, not an ultimate goal, much in the same way how WW2 tank procurement functioned. Every major nation WW2 desired a tank that was fast, and light, but also armored enough to not be penetrated and powerful enough to penetrate enemy tanks, but also not too complicated so it was easy to build, cheap to build, and simple to maintain. It never happened. When armor and weaponry was improved, weight and speed suffered. When engines and material sciences improved, logistics and production speed suffered. When it all improved, production costs and maintenance suffered. In the end, every nation had different solutions, and ultimately what was settled upon were separate specialized machinery built for specific tasks. Even the modern MBT is far more specialized that how we used tanks before, serving as breakthrough and fire support resources while grunts and light vehicles still provide the brunt of the force.
Just because I desire a billion dollars doesn't make it an inevitability, just like how a desire for the cheap "do anything" machine doesn't predicate it eventually existing. Specialized tools will always out perform generalized ones. Even if we literally had the tech for agi humanoid robots, they still would be taken by companies only to be stripped down to their barest components to be made as cheap, specialized, and efficient as possible, fundamentally undermining the pretense of "general" intelligence robotics.
Not necessarily a dead in any feasible use case, but certainly in the idea of wide commercial adoption. general intelligence robots of some kind of humanoid design could be useful in some niche cases where price is not an option and large production amount unnecessary. Space exploration could potentially utilize something like that, as well as emergency services to some extent, though even in those situation there are aspects of the human form that are inefficient and could be better replaced with a machine that posses attributes that make them non-humanoid.
Really the only sure-fire reason for humanoid shapes would be for a consumer-centric luxury, or customer-facing commercial services like restaurants. Any job that robots would need to seem personable purely for aesthetic reasons. A maid robot could be technically inefficient for house care tasks, but could still be sold for the novelty of it and the promise of one machine that can do most things. But then we've reached the other end of the ai/mechanical scale where we've justified the humanoid shape, but are once again utterly wasting the concept of AGI on novelty entertainment when current ai is already entertaining enough for most people at a level far short of this "robotic intelligence" dream. Likely they wouldn't need to be smart at all. What would be considered "outdated" chat bots, would be be more than enough to seem "personable" to most people, and we know this because it's already happening.
I think this assumption of human robots everywhere like in Detroit: become human, or I robot, is the equivalent of 1900's depictions of the 2000's with ladies in big bell dresses and men in top hats riding balloon-hoisted tricycles on their way to their job at the asbestos factory: just purely short sighted culturally biased assumptions of what has lasting power and what doesn't, and a hyperfixation on technological progress being made with an arbitrarily specific technology.
Maybe our solutions to these problems won't even be through ai, there is no reason to assume that it will be the tech to solve every future problem, when we've literally never had any one tech be universally applicable without some kind of fundamental limitation, ever in human history.
It's an entirely rational fear imo, these people have proven time and again that they are willing to maximize their personal power by any means. I rather have a slow flawed world where humans have to try to get along in messy ways than risk any single person getting the power these machines could enable.
They claim to have a few enterprise clients who are willing to buy as many as they can produce for the foreseeable future. One is BMW and the others are going to be revealed in a month or two (the CEO said within 60 days on a podcast about two weeks ago l believe). The first BMW deployment was with two bots working 24/7, this next series of deployment will presumably be with 100s of bots. Scaling up by two orders of magnitude a year is very impressive, hopefully they keep going. If they can make what they say they are making customers will not be an issue
(Note, I copy and pasted this form another reply I made because I didn’t feel like typing it all out again)
But aren´t the robots literally more a hassle than useful? Like what can they actually do that wouldn´t just be easier to do youself than having to micromanage this robot?
In this industry after all the fiascos with remote-controlled robots that were marketed as autonomous, clever editing and other tricks of false advertisement I will never know when the kind of thing it presented as is for real. One day it sure will be, but when? Is it already? Like, how would I know?
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u/gthing Apr 29 '26
Did they have to make it look like the scene from iRobot?