"How will an LLM change the bedpans in the nursing home?""Oh.

[mxchara@seattle.pink]

@futurebird I like robots too (well the idea of them, with genuinely independent intelligence and personality) but it's very difficult to imagine the current crowd of tech boys to come up with anything better than dubious toys for military and police use (and they'll spend public money on anything)

[futurebird@sauropods.win]

@mxchara

"We have a design for a robot, but the parts needed to build it do not exist. We need to use the LLM to design those too now."

Real things people have said.

[lizardbill@hachyderm.io]

@futurebird We just need the unlimited funding of a Project Hail Mary level extinction threat to give us the motivation we need to make this happen.

We at Torment Nexus Industries are proudly providing that threat.

[nonnihil@hachyderm.io]

@futurebird @mxchara
So much this. The only problem in robotics is everything, because each problem in robotics is every other problem in robotics in a trenchcoat.

[p__x@mastodon.social]

@futurebird nothing's more exciting than the thought of getting trapped under a 200-pound biped humanoid robot made of hard plastics and metal that tripped while exchanging one's soiled bed sheets.

[darkling@mstdn.social]

@futurebird It's so great that we've got all these helpful robots taking places in care homes now!

[robotistry@fediscience.org]

@nonnihil @futurebird @mxchara This so precisely correct. Can I steal it for a presentation?

[robotistry@fediscience.org]

@P__X @futurebird Yet another reason why I'm skeptical about humanoid use cases.

[clew@ecoevo.social]

I would like examples, as a complete non roboticist

@Robotistry @nonnihil @futurebird @mxchara

[guillotine_jones@beige.party]

@futurebird
Funny how ALL the gen Ai LLM benefits are in the (currently) nonexistent future, a time when all of us will be dead, and none of us will be able to either benefit from it or to do anything about it.
We have the misfortune of living in a time when money and marketing-speak talk so loudly that every rational voice is drowned out by the sound of greed.

[nonnihil@hachyderm.io]

@clew @Robotistry @futurebird @mxchara
Say I want to climb a stair. Now I need a leg (mech e), which needs a balancing controller (classical control), which means estimating payload inertias (learned control), and I need a big battery (materials science) or a passive dynamic walker design (mech e again) and regenerative motor braking (ee).
Say i dig down on regenerative braking. Now I need a high-rate controller (sw. eng), low-backlash geartrain (mech e), high-rate battery charging (f'ing solid state physics) and a plan for overcharge (safety enge, ee). That plan for overcharge has to include emergency stop (classical control) of a possibly dynamically unsafe system (learned control? probably?) while on uneven terrain (mech e) which is.... back to where we started trying to climb a stair.
This is an example of a _mostly solved_ problem. The real world of unsolved problems is much, much worse. Changing any constant by a millimeter blows up all your assumptions everywhere in the stack in a way that no single engineer can have in their head at once.

Plantigrade humanoids arguably are the worst case of this problem, but autonomous cars have a few notable strange fractal doom loops where nobody can understand it all at once.

[jestbill@mastodon.world]

@futurebird Somehow you have to separate the car enthusiasts from the people who yell "Get a horse", from the grifters and con men.
We're pretty sure that LLMs are keen but can't do a lot without some actual AI in control.

CAD is old hat; hows about CAD+?

Robots? When they show off robots they still point to great new things like ankles(!). The hardware isn't ready yet.

[nonnihil@hachyderm.io]

@Robotistry @futurebird @mxchara
Go right ahead

[clew@ecoevo.social]

Hard because changing one of those parts changes what all the other parts need? Because a little change one place might lead to a huge change elsewhere, even a change of direction?

(Zero robotics, but I have some of the math!)

@nonnihil @Robotistry @futurebird @mxchara

[nagaram@gts.thinkstoomuch.net]

@futurebird

This is what I've been bullying my AI hopeful colleagues for for years.

Robotics hasn't gotten better since the 1990s because it turns out human motion is incredibly precise, adaptable, and REALLY COMPLICATED

We physically can't make an arm shaped thing that works like an arm. We can make an arm shaped thing that can do certain arm like tasks, maybe pick up an ergonomic object, press a few buttons, or I guess flip over packages for 4 hours per that one new "AI" stream. But that same arm can't do surgery, it can't drive operate heavy machinery, hell, it couldn't reach behind a couch to plug in a vacuum with near the ease we have.

I will admit, the compute is probably there. We can probably simulate the motion of a person enough that an AI scale compute system could do the math to plug in a vacuum. But motors aren't getting smaller. Not without becoming uselessly weak. We've hit the physics barrier of electromagnetism.

Hell, look at any video of an incredibly sophisticated hand and just conceptualize how many hand positions it can make. Then try to make one you know it can't. Cross your fingers. Touch your thumb to each finger tip, see how fast you can do it. You are so much more sophisticated than a robot.

And obviously, we could just, redesign the whole world to accommodate bots with just a slew of specialized tools to be a portion of human ability, but that's quite expensive since we've already built the world to our liking.

So unless we want to rebuild the world with the logic of an Amazon Warehouse, the bots aren't going to take over for a while.

[cstamp@mastodon.social]

@futurebird And this misses the part about which the robot collects data about your health, personal habits, contacts and passes them along to someone who sells them to 3rd parties. Maybe the 3rd parties actually are linked to the robot.

Rosie would never have done that.

[fragarach@social.vivaldi.net]

@futurebird @mxchara

It's also design philosophy, so they'll likely design robots that need to be replaced every couple of years with a new, upgraded model. Just like your mobile phone, washing machine and fridge.
Douglas Adams, sadly missed, wrote about an SEP(*) field that allows aliens to walk unnoticed among us.
That same field is in evidence in the thinking of every techbro, most manufacturers and a large number of politicians, most notably when it comes to climate change, depletion of resources, and the poisoning of our planet with the byproducts of manufacturing and disposal.
If anyone is likely to produce a viable domestic robot, my money's on Ukraine.

* Somebody Else's Problem

[fragarach@social.vivaldi.net]

@Guillotine_Jones @futurebird

I suspect that future historians (if there are any) may well decide that the first Luddites were right all along, and that various First Nations and the Amish had the right idea as to how humankind should live in this world of ours.

[nonnihil@hachyderm.io]

@clew @Robotistry @futurebird @mxchara
(To be clear, I love robotics, it is the best job, even better than crazy radio shit)

The problem is that any fix requires fixing multiple levels at once, and those levels are in different, often warring disciplines.

For instance, if you find a vendor underspecced a motor brake (they always do) now you need to reduce the length of limbs, the available torques in software, the available currents in power management, oh right that changes which constraints bind the constraint solver so I hope the controller software has hopped on to renormalizing Jacobians an' shit, also wake up the contract lawyer, negotiate building access for the vendor's technicians, and probably 3D-print some little stop widgets as well to clip onto the motor to backstop any broken brake springs, but maybe those can wait until overnight. Also the new constants for the balance controller to avoid stressing that motor cause the robot to make lots of quick stomping steps, annoying the tenants below your lab because the vibration aerated their anaerobes or something, so your landlord is also on the phone now.

Realistically no individual person in this job _can_ be a specialist in only one area; everyone needs to know enough of everything to at least talk to each other. That sort of hyper-generalist workplace is an absolute trip to work in. And it isn't going to get solved by "AI" in short-to-medium time, although several parts of it will become moderately simpler or cheaper.

[p__x@mastodon.social]

@Robotistry @futurebird ditto.