If robots can fight entropy for us, all the better.
But only for me because I have the feeling i lived out my normal environment and i'm not rich enough yet to expand so I can become busy again in a more meaningful way. Specifically having a big house/workshop to do things in my future workshop.
Also one of the chores I hate doing the most is folding clothes. If I could have a machine that does it well every time, I'd buy it.
It's us, flesh blobs. Long after we cover everything in AI and robots around us, we will not change easily. Societal drift is slow, genetic drift is slower.
(For the record: Gimme my robot, but interesting thought nonetheless)
Honestly a game changer. Sounds stupid, but there's just something very satisfying about being able to quickly fold a bunch of clothes and get very nice results.
And if we get humanoid robots at some point, they can use them too.
You can wash the dishes and tidy up after every meal, rinse and sort your recycling but you're still trashing the planet more or less the same as the person who does none of those things.
Why is it so important to you that people fold their own clothes and wash their own dishes?
Why do you idolize a life of increased drudgery?
There is not a magic portal opening up when you are able to optimize ever aspect away of living and you will gain access to enlightment and everything is different.
And don't get me wrong, I have no clue how our society would look like if everything is done by ai and robots because we as a society don't talk about it and don't give everyone the resources they want or need if they have suddenly no 'drugdgery' anymore.
Give me a million today and i will spend the next 10 years rebuiling an old castle and I will have A LOT of fun doing this. Let me check, my bank balance is not at one million.
Instead i have to pay for a lot of things and then I have to work for 40 hours. Suddenly i'm great at my job, get valued but this is just Drudgery even if its complex work. Its work for someone else which doesn't matter to me.
On the other hand, would the removal of these inconveniences allow for the highest calling of humanity - I argue creativity - to flourish to the fullest? My gut reaction is once again that inconveniences are actually a very important resistance to creativity, like how you need gritty sand paper to create smooth wood.
You can buy an expensive robot, or maybe you can meditate and be mindful that inconveniences play an important role in the meaning of your life. I am of course speaking of the household use here - I think the debate is likely different for a business setting.
Besides, servants are nothing new. They're rare in the US but common in some other countries, and the people who grow up with them are maybe somewhat different but not radically changed IMO.
One reason that caught my attention was how she described the behavior of these people, who have the world at their fingertips, who have never really known hardship, and in turn have full blown meltdowns about the most trivial annoyances. What car will we drive on our trip?! The salmon cracker appetizers are too salty to be served! They stocked the wrong oat milk in the mini-fridge!
Almost like the need to get upset over inconveniences is ingrained, and when there is a lack of real ones, your brain just latches onto whatever it can to let the "freakout" out.
If my cleaner was a robot, I'm sure I'd eventually lose that sense of embarrassment. I'm usually polite with ChatGPT but I think that's also passing...
Alongside the full replacement of jobs and with autonomous robots, This is the exact definition of "AGI".
The thing to watch out for is: deployments. How many units are they pushing and to who. What kind of tasks can those robots accomplish well enough to warrant actually using them. How hard is it to adapt those robots to deployments. How that changes over time.
The hardest problem of creating a universal robot is, and always has been, AI. If Figure can deliver sharp, highly adaptive, easy to use AI? High generalization, good performance on a diverse range of tasks and in many environments out of the box? Then they have a killer product.
And a proxy to track that is reports of how many robots they deploy and to who. If they start shipping to small companies and deploying to high uncertainty spatially complex fields like construction or maintenance? If you start seeing robots unloading trucks and restocking shelves at a small town Walmart, unannounced? Big.
Commoditization and Walmart-level deployments at scale are still a few gens off.
The key difference between now and then isn't smaller actuators, cheaper sensors or denser power electronics. It's the AI breakthroughs.
Doesn't need to be "at scale". Scale is a useful proxy though. But if you see two robots deployed to your average Walmart, and doing a good enough job there to cut the staff in half?
Doesn't matter that it's just two robots at a few Walmarts. Making more robots isn't that hard. The scale would inevitably follow.
That tells me that the design is amenable to aftermarket service and maintenance and that the machines are capable of participating in relatively sophisticated manufacturing processes.
A graph with one line representing the number of hours of physical labour by humans per unit produced with another line representing number of hours of physical 'labour' by these robots per unit produced would be interesting to look at.
The intersection point between those two lines and the point where human input drops to zero are key points in humanity.
On the robot side, there are many things that have to go right. Hardware needs to become good enough, reliable enough and cheap enough to scale. Then you have the software stack on top that needs to scale in training, fine-tuning, control and generalisation. None of these are "easy" even in a lab setting. Doing it at scale, in production will be huge. And then there's data collection, where whoever does it better will probably win. Collecting data in peoples houses is problematic, but on the factory floor should be ok.
ATM my bet is on Tesla being the best positioned to best deliver (eventually). They have plenty of experience on all fronts, and more importantly they have ample places to test them. Their factories are as automated as possible, so it's safe to say that every human being still doing manual labor is critical in their role. As soon as they can replace some of them with humanoids, and see the "task success" number go up, they can scale it up all over their floors. And we know they can scale.
I used to think that generalist humanoid robots are still 10y out, due to hardware and generalist software stacks, but it seems like things are heating up. It's gonna be an interesting next decade.
This is silly. Wireless charging is inefficient and costly compared to cables but we use it for the convenience of humans, to avoid the annoyance of having to plug something in repeatedly. Obviously a humanoid robot should simply plug in its own cable! No human need be inconvenienced. Wireless charging has no benefit here at all.
> Each fingertip sensor can detect forces as small as three grams of pressure - sensitive enough to register the weight of a paperclip resting on your finger
Three grams would be a very heavy paperclip. I have seen several types of touch sensor and while the technology is impressive I don't think any of them are durable enough for real use. Even human skin doesn't rely on durability alone. Healing is critical. But healing is infeasible for robots so instead we need to design repairable, replaceable, disposable, ideally recyclable parts, especially for the fingers that touch everything. This hand looks monolithic and not repairable.
All that said, I'm looking forward to seeing if their claims about cost and manufacturing volume pan out. Those are the things that matter the most right now, along with reliability. We need large numbers of robots operating continuously in the world to collect the data that will enable us to train robot AI. Right now there's basically only one or two companies with scaled humanoid production (for a very loose definition of "scaled") and they are in China. I'm rooting for anyone who can manufacture robots outside of China.
30 years ago we figured out how to contact charge cordless phones with metal pads and prongs.
Then the robot would just go to its station and swap its own batteries. Why even have wireless charging at all? Or even a cable? Or even have it "charge"? Battery swapping seems to make way more sense here. Am I missing something?
Bonus points if the robot has data on the degradation and can order its own replacement batteries, take them out of the box, and ship the old ones to a recycling facility...
More bonus points if the charging station is actually outside under a 1KW solar array pergola thing, that way you don't even have to pay for the electricity either. Don't worry, the robot will lock the door when it goes out to grab its batteries. It'll also bring in the whole setup if the weather isn't great.
But a cable is a fair question.. you'd think it could plug itself in...
Maybe that's a hint at the robots actual capabilities at this point... or, they didn't want to bet on the unpredictability of environments: what if there's something in the way of the cable, though something could also be in the way of the inductive charger
There are practical advantages to being able to charge wirelessly, sure. But if they're doing that because of AI limitations? Bad sign.
Yes, like gasoline. But still batteries. Maybe some kind of bearing sized batteries which can be poured like a fluid?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_cell
Well established and even commercialized (Toyota sells fuel cell cars today IIRC), just not as cost effective in cars from a full infrastructure perspective (fueling specifically).
> Bonus points if the robot has data on the degradation BMS that can tell battery health is common so this should be there.
Also, the charge rate matters. If robot can charge to 80% in say 30 minutes, then it can take small charging breaks during the day between critical tasks.
Also, if the feet have inductive chargers, it's possible to place the robot on a large charging mat that allows it to run indefinitely, like in a factory environment. If your robot takes 30 minutes to fold the laundry or do dishes, why not place a charging mat at these locations so it can work and charge at the same time.
In the future, new homes might include charging coils embedded in the floor every 12 inches so that your robots can work all day.
Yet, it's being sold as capable of doing and folding your laundry.
I would sell th stock to the next idiot the moment they announced this.
[1] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/05/...
A more simpler/realistic scenario is it happens while driving
https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/podcast/2023/01/a-private-...
They've shown the "putting dishes in the dishwasher" bit before, it seems to be getting better, but I imagine it still has a high failure rate.
I wonder if this company started off or has some founder that's really interested in the "handling deformable stuff" space. They really seem keen to promote that it can do tasks like folding a shirt or working with soft packages.
Definitely seems like a carefully curated video, but the longer videos make me think that either they are running a scam or they have some of this stuff working well enough.
To answer your question -- folding clothes is easy, because clothes easily deform, do not break, fall smoothly when you drop them and most importantly are easily resettable task. Just through the well folded cloth up and voila start again.
The hotel reception use case seems ridiculous though, if you get rid of a human receptionist, you lose the human element of the check in process, which people like. If you're getting rid of the human and losing all the benefits of that, then just replace it with a kiosk (or mobile check in), which will do a far better job than a robot.
I mean standing there for 10 minutes and giving them my passport to give me a plastic card with a digital code has very little to do with human touch.
I want that human touch at a bar perhaps but not at a reception.
If your critisism is only about the reception part: There has to be a transition part and a 'let a human do it for a bit' or 'here is a complicated case please robot move aside i'm here'.
All factors of "it was Vegas" aside, one of the things that stood out to me was that the hotels have moved rapidly to rapid checkin/checkout systems where you punch in your confirmation code or name/dob and present a photo ID of some kind (passports can just be slapped against the reader) and it asks a few questions ("do you need late checkout", etc), directs you to the exact place your room is (and prints it, which was nice) and tells you where the bellhop station is if there's more than a little while before your room is ready and it can't dispense your cards.
All told, four of these stations had roughly 90% the throughput of the four real humans, but they "moved faster" because it didn't feel like queuing for a human, more... "waiting for a toilet"?
Kiosk based stuff is great until it fails. Spend an hour in the checkin area of a major airport and you'll see any number of interesting failure modes.
As for the washing machine bit: Why not push for more standards usage in home automation? We have Thread, which is really cool, and which is driving the home automation future that we're slowly getting. Once it's loaded, a homebot should't have to check the thing manually, it should get information about when, what, and how and be able to have "eyes in the back of its head" so to speak.
Probably about 1% of the cost of the humans though...
>Kiosk based stuff is great until it fails. Spend an hour in the checkin area of a major airport and you'll see any number of interesting failure modes.
A robot would be less reliable than a kiosk, so if you're going to have some kind of machine replace the human, you might as well have a kiosk.
The ideal model (IMO) is a hybrid model, where you have lots of kiosks for the 90% of cases where there are no issues, and a few humans on standby to drop in and assist people who are having issues.
Or better yet, do away with the check in desk, and let people check in on their phone (some hotels already do this, and you tap your phone on the door to unlock)
I have no idea about the maturity of this company in particular, but it's interesting that glossy robotics startups never lean in on that as a core user base.
I think we have A LOT of old people in precare situations because they are not aware of the possible difference this can make.
Equal parts terror, awe, fear, when it comes to having a robot in my home.
In the 2010s everyone purchased those rumba vacuums, because whatever, they're cheap. Now I usually see them collecting dust.
The strong use-case for robotics is industrial/manufacturing and construction, agriculture probably more than ever. They don't need to be humanoid at all, and in fact maybe they shouldn't be because that very feature could spook unions and labor groups. Robots that actually look like they're "just tools" will be more willingly embraced.
Aha, now its clear ;)
> Helix: Figure 03 features a completely redesigned sensory suite and hand system which is purpose-built to enable Helix - Figure's proprietary vision-language-action AI.
If we make the robots humanoid, they get compatibility with human systems for free
"Building Figure won’t be an easy win; it will require decades of commitment and ingenuity."
"Our focus is on what we can achieve 5, 10, 20+ years from now, not the near-term wins."
At least it's not Musk's forever "next year".
The problem with the principled approach to high-uncertainty projects is that if you slowly execute on a sequential multi-year plan, you will almost certainly find out in year 9 that multiple of the late-stage tasks are much harder than you thought.
You just don't know ahead of the time. Just look at how many corporations and research labs had decades-long strategies to build human-like AI that went nowhere. And then some guys came up with a novel architecture and all of sudden, you can ask your computer to write an essay about penguins.
Musk's approach is that if you have an infinite supply of fresh grads who really believe in you and are willing to work crazy hours, giving them a "next year" deadline is more likely to give you what you want than telling them "here's your slow-paced project you're gonna be working on for the next decade". And I guess he thinks to himself that some of them are going to burn out, but it's a sacrifice he's willing to make.
This feels incredibly generous. I'm pretty sure his approach is that he needs to keep the hype cycle going for as long as possible. I also believe it's partially his willingness to believe his own bullshit.
We are nowhere near the same for autonomous robots, and it's not even funny. To continue to use the internet as an analogy for LLMs, we are pre-DARPANET, pre-ASCII, pre-transistor. We don't even have the sensors that would make safe household humanoid robots possible. Any theater from robot companies about trying to train a neural net based on motion capture is laughably foolish. At the current rate of progress, we are more than decades away.
Neural networks for motion control is very clearly resulting in some incredible capability in a relatively short amount of time vs. the more traditional control hierarchies used in something like Boston Dynamics. Look at Unitree's G1
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/mP3Exb1YC8o
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPSLMX_V38E
It's like an agile idiot, very physically capable but no purpose.
The next domain is going to be incorporating goals and intent and short/long term chains of causality into the model, and for that it seems we're presently missing quite a bit usable training data. That will clearly evolve over time, as will the fidelity of simulations that can be used to train the model and the learned experience of deployed robots.
The current best neural networks only have around 60% success rates for small horizon tasks (think 10-20 seconds e.g. pick up apple). That is why there is so much cut-motions in this video. The future will be awesome but it will take time a lot of research still needs to happen (e.g. robust hands, tactile, how to even collect large scale data, RL).
Indeed, all the videos/examples are marketing pieces.
I would love to see a video like this "Logistics"[0] one, that shows this new iteration doing some household tasks. There is no way that it's not clunky and prone to all kinds of accidents and failures. Not that it's a bad thing - it would simply be nice to see.
Maybe they will do another video? Would love that.
As someone who worked in the robotics industry, 90% of the demos and videos are cherry-picked, or even blatantly fake. That's why for any new robot in the market, my criteria is: Can I buy it? If it's affordable and the consumer can buy it and find it useful in day to day life, then this robot is useful and has potential; other than that, it's just an investor money grab PR hype.
I'm not sure that task needs a humanoid robot, but the ability to grab and manipulate all those packages and recover from failures is pretty good
The video shows plenty of glitches. From the comments:
1:05 a box flip
3:03 Mr. Short Hands
3:30 double-check
3:55 he liken't boxes
5:19 the tuf one
6:10 the tuf two
8:55 Box ruins again
13:23 exact moment he decides not to eliminate boxes... for now
14:18 the Fall
19:03 burn out by short hands (real trouble)
24:13 hooman
26:53 twins + the crumple one that mentally broke him
28:40 the Fall 2
31:00 what are u?
31:34 - 32:18 the Fall (good ending)
33:35 He. Hates. Boxes. + PTSD
39:00 watched a box => get triggered
41:00 hooman 2
41:23 the sticky fallen + another box
47:52 ...
From there, it's a question of could they bring costs down.
It is breaking news if there is a $40K robot that had a 12:1 efficiency ratio.*
Because production is so nascent and small, cost doesn't mean too much, no ones scaled yet.
At only $40K capital investment, even a guaranteed 12:1 efficiency ratio would be an absolute no-brainer financially for many, many, wealthy people and certainly businesses. I do 1-2 hours of chores a day if I'm lucky. If I had the equivalent of a robot vacuum working 24/7 it'd do a much better job than me.
* The whole thing is written up and shown in a way that makes you think we're on the second refining release of a breakthrough**. I don't think they've gotten to the breakthrough yet - we would have seen > 0 videos from outside the company by v3.
** Really, the whole thing has an audience of one: Musk. (c.f. focus on fingers which was recently reported as the major pain point for whatever he calls their robot not making it to production; aping of Musk-y things like the factory itself a product)
"Today, manual labor compensation is the primary driver of goods and services prices, accounting for ~50% of global GDP (~$42 trillion/yr), but as these robots “join the workforce,” everywhere from factories to farmland, the cost of labor will decrease until it becomes equivalent to the price of renting a robot, facilitating a long-term, holistic reduction in costs.”
Renting a robot? What are the chances of robot rent-seeking becoming a drop in replacement for today's increasing costs of labor. A high likelihood potential outcome.
People being super negative about this is a bit surprising to me.
If they make a hundred of these, it'll be impressive. If they make a thousand it'll be scary.
To train GPT, all of the training data (the internet of text, scanned books, etc) had already existed, even before the GPT project began. Arguably, the compute required (for GPT-3) also already existed, even before GPT-2.
The GPT project really just came down to investing in all of the pieces to take the ideas from a 2017 research paper to the next level. Nobody knew if X thousand GPUs, plus all of the internet's text, plus neural network transformers, would work out. But somebody took a risk in putting together the existing pieces, and proved that it can.
There's no analogy here to humanoid robotics. Not only is the data required for neural network operated humanoids close to non-existent (at the scale needed), but the nature of the data itself is enormously more complicated that taking a list of tokens in a vocabulary, and outputting 1 more token from the same vocabulary.
That being said, I still applaud the ambition of the Figure team. While I think it's clear they are presenting incredibly cherry-picked examples, they aren't trying to mislead consumers with a product for sale (because... they can't). Instead, they are productizing important research to investors, who would otherwise waste money on less important and less ambitious projects. So overall I find projects of this nature to be a net positive for technical innovation.
dpcx•3h ago
> allowing the entire fleet to upload terabytes of data for continuous learning and improvement
Ugh.
Edit: Yes, I meant I, Robot the film. U.S. Robotics and the like.
ACCount37•3h ago
causal•2h ago
browningstreet•2h ago
psunavy03•1h ago
renewiltord•43m ago
- novel idea or technology
- counterintuitive effect of technology
I think the second is easier written as "what if Good Thing was actually Bad". So that's what you get. The former style is perhaps still available in books like Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
But the latter style is much more readily written and consequently has dominated sci fi as more authors enter the field.
The Torment Nexus view is mostly driven by context blindness. "oh my god, they'll scan the mother's blood to perform eugenics if they have sequencing technology and it will be horrible". Well, advanced societies do that a lot: Down's is scanned for using a Maternal Serum Alpha Foetoprotein test. "oh my god, they'll use ultrasounds to find undesirable genetics, torment Nexus" but Nuchal Translucency tests are fairly routine in advanced societies and we're fine with them.
This might appear like a fixation on dystopian literature to others. "omg gattaca this MSAFP". It's just generic technoluddism because almost all near future tech is explored via sci fi in the "what if Good is Bad" genre.
marcellus23•2h ago
nerdjon•2h ago
I agree on the data part. I love the potential idea of a humanoid robot at home to take care of chores, but now it seems like the potential for it not being constantly connected and collecting data is gone out the window.
I find it quite strange that they are openly bragging about how much data it will be gathering and uploading from within your home. That feels like the part you would not say out loud.
genpfault•1h ago
The modem[1] folks? :)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USRobotics