Everyday robots are slowly leaving the lab

https://x.company/blog/posts/everyday-robots

by dharmaturtle • 5 years ago

36 96 5 years ago

rvz• 5 years ago

Shit just got real.

ModernMech6• 5 years ago

I mean, this is demonstrating things the now dead PR2 demonstrated a decade ago, and even then it was nothing new. Since then there have been a string of startups just like this one that have come and gone.

This one comes to mind:

https://singularityhub.com/2013/10/24/willow-garage-spinoff-...

Also:

https://robots.ieee.org/robots/baxter/

These people sell robots that are in stores now:

https://www.badger-technologies.com

We'll see if something with an arm has as much success, but so far not much as evidenced by the graveyard of companies that have been trying. One will crack the code soon, maybe this one.

toomuchtodo• 5 years ago

Avogadro Corp!

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/13184491-avogadro-cor...

blueflow4• 5 years ago

I strongly feel like this is an insult to life itself. I do not wish to incorporate such technology into my daily life.

dgritsko• 5 years ago

This feels a little hyperbolic - did we read the same article? I'm looking at a GIF of a robot pushing a chair a few inches, and fail to see how it could come across as "an insult to life itself." What provokes such a strong reaction for you?

As someone who knows very little about this space, the concept of using a virtual world to rapidly train on various tasks seems fascinating. I had a similar reaction upon hearing how GTA V was used to help train a neural network for self-driving cars a few years back.

blueflow4• 5 years ago

After a decade of working with computers both in my free time & at work, i'm disgusted by the idea of computers walking around, even having arms.

martythemaniak• 5 years ago

People's opinions are in many circumstances driven primarily by the current zeitgeist. Less reasoning and more reflection and amplification of large scale moods.

GP mentions in a sibling comment that they've been working with computers for decade, as if that's a long time. Some of us have been at this for many decades, long enough to see the zeitgeist shift and things really change. The current tech backlash mood started sometime in the early 2010s and really kicked into high gear in the mid 2010s. GP has never really known a world that wasn't overtly negative towards tech.

teddyh• 5 years ago

When you leave for work, better leave behind your smartphone, car, glasses, shoes and clothes, then. They are apparently insulting you.

epberry• 5 years ago

How can you not think this is great? Freeing humans from menial tasks is the way forward. Remember when people (mostly women) would spend hours washing? Machines and automation freed them.

howaboutnope• 5 years ago

If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.

-- Stephen Hawking, https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/3nyn5i/science_ama...

willis9362• 5 years ago

The solution isn't less robots. Automation isn't the enemy, poverty is.

dahfizz• 5 years ago

"__If__ machines produce everything we need..."

People have been asserting that machines imply post scarcity since the communist manifesto in 1848. I am not convinced.

joey_bob2• 5 years ago

From the quote, I read:

"most people can end up miserably poor" == "ever-increasing inequality"

Which begs the question - is the misery of poverty due to the lack of access to important goods or services, or because of the relative wealth standing?

Spoom• 5 years ago

Manna[1] is a good short story that talks about these two potential futures. I agree that in particular, it seems more likely that the unemployment welfare hellscape might be more likely, unfortunately.

1. https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

RationPhantoms• 5 years ago

I really want to shout out Maytag for pushing woman's rights forward. Without all that haphazard laundry out of the way, they never would've garnered equal pay or saw themselves as equal in the workplace.

Please.

To think there are only positives in this change is a naive approach of the future. Sure, there will be some benefits but we are in for a world of hurt if we maintain our current social structures (at least in the US) and decimate the working population.

MontyCarloHall3• 5 years ago

With all that haphazard laundry in the way, they would never have even found themselves in a workplace.

Have you ever done laundry by hand? My grandmother did. It took literally an entire day of scrubbing.

alpaca128• 5 years ago

we are in for a world of hurt if we maintain our current social structures and decimate the working population.

History has shown that maintaining the status quo until everyone's in a world of hurt is the standard approach.

dougmwne• 5 years ago

Two reductive takes do not a complex one make.

Labor saving home appliances, changes in family size, and convenience foods are a pretty big deal for how people of any gender spend their time. Time spent cleaning has decreased, and been replaced with other activities. Parenting has changed a lot and become much more intensive. One did not cause the other, but our modern lives absolutely co-evolved with appliances.

https://www.nber.org/digest/oct08/hours-spent-homemaking-hav...

username_my1• 5 years ago

it's not even about that.

any large scale, long running space colonies will need huge effort of robots that don't mind the hostile environment, without much much more advanced robots space colonization is a dream and so the end of life as we know it is certain (just wait for a big enough asteroid or a near supernova).

amelius3• 5 years ago

Since automation, almost everything has become lower quality. There's a reason why "handmade" is better.

danpalmer2• 5 years ago

My washing machine does a lot better job than I could. My oven is much more reliable at heating than I am at building campfires. My computer is much quicker at maths than I am. My TV is cheaper than going to the theatre.

Automation is great when it works well, we just forget about it when it does, so we generally only recognise the bad.

guerrilla2• 5 years ago

It really depends on who owns the robots. As it is now, the richer you are the more robots you'll be able to afford and the less labor you'll need. When labor isn't in demand anymore and most people don't have robots, then most people won't have income anymore, forcing them into poverty and revolution. Robot police and military could make successful revolution impossible.

Gys• 5 years ago

I think robots will follow a pattern similar to cars, tv's, kitchen machines, computers and such. First only a few can afford them, but in time prices come down and functionality goes up.

jjkaczor• 5 years ago

Capture them, hack them and re-program them...

foogazi• 5 years ago

Did that happen when washing machines became available?

Everyone owns washing machines now - people just move on to do other things

e2le• 5 years ago

Hopefully this will lead to robots being made available on the market that can take over those kinds of service jobs.

ehnto3• 5 years ago

Could you elaborate on why you want that?

finolex1• 5 years ago

Just curious, do they use an in-house simulator for research? Or a more commonplace one like Unity/Gazebo?

annoyingnoob• 5 years ago

I want to see what happens when it runs over a banana or has to wipe yogurt off the table.

toisanji• 5 years ago

the problem with all of these robots is that they can't go where humans go. Humans and animals can basically travel on any terrain. they have to be on flat surfaces and so the floors need to be made for them. That means they can't go on stairs, uneven surfaces, dirt, grass, docks, rocky surfaces, etc. If this is solved, it opens up so many more opportunities.

ModernMech6• 5 years ago

That's why you start with indoor robots. Because of the ADA, they should be able to go anywhere that a person with a wheelchair can go... which is pretty much all the places in our public life. Yes, they won't go off-roading, but that's okay as a starting point.

wpietri3• 5 years ago

For sure. And the other solution is facilities built for machinery first, not humans. As an example, pretty much any factory floor is designed on this principle.

The interesting question to me is how much household design will shift. Both the rise of the automobile and the decline of household servants have shifted architecture.

lnsru2• 5 years ago

I wish, we will not create world with robots as shown in movie Elysium. I wish we could create a world with universal basic income where warehouse slaves are replaced with robots and people can do something better than picking orders in constant fear of being too slow.

TheBlight• 5 years ago

UBI and full automation sounds nice but it leaves you with no leverage. You will end up relying completely on the compassion of your rulers.

ModernMech6• 5 years ago

This is why UBI is the capitalist solution to a post-scarcity world; it still places capitalists at the top of the pyramid as the owners and beneficiaries of capital. The solution we should be striving for in a post-scarcity world is democratic ownership of capital like robots, so that we may all share in the fruits of their labor.

mvid• 5 years ago

Unlike now, where low income workers are notorious for their leverage

wpietri3• 5 years ago

Not sure why you're getting downvoted. It's a real risk. For example, Saudi Arabia, which practices UBI [1] and otherwise transfers a lot of oil wealth to citizens, also is pretty low down on ratings of citizen freedom. [2] Many observers see it as Saudi royalty buying political compliance.

Given that the US is now on the list of backsliding democracies [3], and given the era in US politics where government money was used to cement political loyalty [4], any sort of serious UBI plan has to have a plausible story of how it won't end in anti-democratic corruption or worse.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen%27s_Account_Program_(S...

[2] E.g.: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/freest-co...

[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/11/22/united-state...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoils_system

costcopizza• 5 years ago

Such a tech fantasy. Not everyone has a forlorn passion just waiting to escape once they don't have a workweek taking up time.

Menial jobs give meaning to leisure for many and are another form of socialization.

amelius3• 5 years ago

Sadly, unlike technology our social structures will never advance.

airstrike2• 5 years ago

I'd say we've come a long way from chiefdom

yourapostasy2• 5 years ago

A current fully-automated restaurant uses 46 different types of robots [1], costs $29M USD [2] to deliver a 600 seat venue serving a 200 dish repertoire. The opex costs on that alone are going to draw out the capex payback quite a bit, before even getting into how the startup cost was around 5-10X conventional restaurants' startup costs. There isn't a Moore's Law for robots and their opex costs that lets us wait around for 10 years and then start innovating at 1/10th cost basis.

Someone please correct me where I'm going wrong here, because with my investor hat on, I can't make the numbers pencil out in these pop press robot-replacing-labor scenarios. In continuous manufacturing, high-risk environments, and all that sort of existing problem spaces, sure, but general Moravec's Workforce type activities, the numbers are nowhere near adding up for me.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoZ7lWzl6tk

[2] https://www.nspirement.com/2020/09/27/china-just-opened-the-...

lnsru2• 5 years ago

I can only speculate, but the 40 robots does not like to cost more than $4M: https://cobotsguide.com/2016/06/universal-robots/ The software can be reused in 2nd restaurant reducing the cost dramatically. And then buying another 10 set of robots reduce unit cost by another ~30%.

madiator• 5 years ago

Any progress is great progress here. I am looking forward to a day when I can buy a robot that can do laundry end to end, from taking to the laundry machine, transferring to the dryer, to folding the clothes!

nynx• 5 years ago

Looks like a company doing meaningful work. Wonder if they have internships.

airstrike2• 5 years ago

God, this "smooth" scrolling is unbearable

madamelic• 5 years ago

They should design a robot to slap them across the face every time someone suggests "Let's change how scrolling works"

Please. Stop. Don't do that. It's weird and unnatural, leave scrolling alone.

dang• 5 years ago

"Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be interesting."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

sleepysysadmin• 5 years ago

We have ever increased the number of bullshit jobs that produce nothing. They don't even do anything to pretend they do something. David Graiber talked at length about this issue.

On the left wing, people like Andrew Yang, are proponents of UBI. The right wing is scared of UBI because if we do UBI, those bullshit job holders might just stay home. That will be a disaster in so many ways.

Flipside, lets not do UBI and instead do automation. We put all these bullshit job holders out of a job. It's exactly the same disaster, possibly even worse.

Lets now propose the government makes only themselves the only legal owner of any commercial robot. So Ford has to rent the robots from the government. That rent money goes to paying the bullshit job holders. It's the same disaster.

It's not just economical or political disaster. It's even mental health. There's a very large number of people whose entire self-worth derives heavily from their job. Pay them to stay home and they'll be depressed at home.

I think Keynes is someone who figured out first. The 40 hour work week needs to die. The best solution any government can do is stop changing minimum wage but start decreasing the threshold for overtime. We need to pressure the 40 hour work week down. Which is happening to some degree. Many countries have pressured down to ~37 hours. This is where we must go to solve the problem.

gwbas1c• 5 years ago

Meta: Something on that page really screws with the scroll wheel. I barely touch the wheel and the page scrolls an entire screen.

It's like someone put some kind of smooth scrolling plugin on the page.

Everyday robots are slowly leaving the lab

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