Technology

Okay somebody probably knows better than me, but what is the advantage of humanoid robots? Why are people kinda, on this, now? It feels very 20th century, as an idea. It's pretty cool, but I don't understand why this would be necessary compared to just like, specialized normal robots that do specialized normal tasks. It seems more efficient, if you wanted a robot to, say, do the dishes, to make a robot that just does the dishes, instead of making a robot in the shape of a person that does the dishes. The one that's in the shape of a person is maybe more broadly applicable to human contexts, software notwithstanding (which does seem like a major hiccup). But it's not as though there's like, an upper limit on the amount of robots which we can have, in total. You could just make more robots, and make them specialized for certain tasks, like stocking shelves or whatever, and that would probably be easier, I would think, than making one robot to rule them all. Like, one robot, with ostensibly an on-board computer and on-board batteries so it's as universal as possible.

It gives me self-driving car vibes, where we could've had them in the 50's if everyone was willing to install metal spikes in the ground every however many feet ahead, but then that maybe doesn't make any sense, because it's just kind of a shitty train or tram. Basically, that nobody's willing to front the cost of infrastructure for anything anymore, so we have to make like, a universal device, and end up quintupling the total cost while making a solution that is either less efficient or doesn't exist.

Also, what's the point of the legs? Is it supposed to go outside, or go up stairs better? We already have pretty efficient wheeled vehicles capable of doing that in most public spaces, or, we're supposed to, anyways, they're called wheelchairs. What do we need this guy to walk around for?

Edit: So far, what I've gotten is ladders, and the scalability of a humanoid design vs other kinds of designs.

For ladders, I think you could probably tackle that with a similar set of constraints what you might need for a stair climbing robot, maybe just with a couple heavyweight anchors inside of it and some gearing or something. Use the robot's big arms, the manipulators, to climb like normal, and then use the bottom wheels to sort of ratchet the robot up. Probably that could work on most ladders with some clever engineering. Could maybe also run a cable from the top of the ladder to the bottom and then have a system where the robot rappels up and down for lots of ladders, but yeah.

I don't think you end up spending all that much on a robot that has wheels vs legs, and I think probably the increased efficiency would be worth it if you want like a generalized robot here. Might be wrong, maybe a roboticist can tell me no, but I dunno. As far as engineering goes it doesn't seem any more complicated than legs. Legs seem better for, offroading, basically. Which are why lots of animals use them, cause animals don't have roads.

For the versatility and scalability thing, I dunno whether or not it's more or less efficient still. While a steam cleaning room does require some amount of consideration to build, I would think that you could really get the price down from the tens of thousands of dollars required for this kind of robot to perform a similar job. Especially if you built it that way up front, retrofits might be much more expensive considering how many bathrooms aren't built correctly. Or you could go with a kind of hybrid approach, which I totally forgot about, but would seem to make some amount of sense, especially for a larger building.

Maybe those savings build up over time, and you could just have a McDonald's staffed by like three of these at once and only spend like 500,000 on it, which does seem like quite a bit to add on top of a McDonald's opening costs. I'm assuming you gotta buy multiple to staff it as a whole and also that you have to buy multiple to have more battery capacity, but maybe one of these will come out with the clever innovation of a swappable battery if/when they come to market. I would definitely hope that'd be the case.

I'm not sure it works out economically. I'm not sure of anything here. These are just suggestions because I haven't seen a lot of FUD on these human robots, except of the Terminator variety, which seems dumb.

I suppose my biggest difference here is just one of philosophy, mostly because I've seen it reflected in self-driving cars. You can make something that's capable in any context. Wind, snow, rain, shine, heavy traffic, pedestrian traffic, intermodal traffic, different kinds of roads not created to a set standard by the state's DOT. You can make a Swiss army knife, right. Maybe there are some economic and QoL savings there if you can do rideshares or do like, johnnycabs, right, if you can eliminate the desire for car ownership and status from the American mind. Maybe you can get all those cars out of parking lots as much as possible, and onto the road, doubling, maybe even tripling the amount of traffic as cars now move from one person going from one place to another place. Maybe you can also solve traffic, if you can get all the human driven cars off the road and totally automate everything so none of the cars ever hit each other or anyone, maybe you could try to do this piecemeal with autonomous vehicle only zones and surmount the nimbys with venture capital to buy a whole local municipality. Maybe you can balance the speed with the safety so we don't have heavy traffic and we get places on time, but when a disaster strikes from ice buildup on the road in a random place, or leaves flying around your car, it doesn't kill everyone. Maybe, you can get all this to not computationally require an energy cost collectively that rivals a medium sized European country. Maybe you can also solve the wireless communication issues that would plague this system, and maybe that allows you to simplify it instead of having every car be self-driving and predictable even though probably a bunch of different companies will be trying to get in on this and will be mingling in traffic, with different softwares.

Maybe you could also make a tram, though. Maybe you could have an electric folding bike you take on the tram. That's also an option. That's just infrastructural cost, and we could do that right now.

Neither of these solutions is necessarily better, right. I mean, in this case specifically it's pretty apparent to anyone with half a brain that the trams are better quite obviously but like, as an analogue about humanoid robots, especially with the point taken about a variety of contexts as opposed to a single high friction context like cars, neither of these solutions are necessarily better. They entail different philosophies. One created a world around the thing, one creates the thing. One changes the world to suit the people, one changes the people to suit the world.

Is what I'm saying making sense, did I get my point across?