> Companies pay people to spend hours doing routine tasks with their hands while wearing cameras and motion-capture gloves.
Dystopian. Which companies out of interest?
Animats 6 hours ago [-]
We'll know this works when it starts replacing Amazon pickers in quantity. Amazon has been trying to automate that for years, with many demos and contests. So far, nothing can quickly and reliably take random products out of one bin and put them in another. Amazon's robotic systems move larger containers and shelves of bins around, but do not yet pick individual items.
dmix 4 hours ago [-]
There's a lot more money being thrown at this than in previous years. Seems to be growing beyond corporate R&D labs and university research towards startups trying to productize it.
> We'll know this works when it starts replacing Amazon pickers in quantity.
That doesn’t follow. There are plenty of tasks that can be fully and reliably automated but aren’t, for the simple reason that human labor is dirt cheap compared to advanced robotics.
somewhatgoated 4 hours ago [-]
What is the point of humanoid “general” robots then?
We already have pretty reliable ways to make and train humans.
Humans are cheaper and better than robots.
I could imagine robots for some specialised tasks where you don’t want to use a human for eg security reasons, but you don’t need general purpose robots for that
nemomarx 3 hours ago [-]
If robots ever do get cheaper than humans for it, though?
shermantanktop 2 hours ago [-]
In natural ecosystems, nobody beats the apex predator directly, and nobody beats the hyperspecialized niche critter at their own game. The new species has some advantage that’s different than what is there.
If a humanoid robot is slower dumber human that is expensive, requires power, can’t get wet, falls over, and doesn’t understand stairs. Is not sleeping and being radiation tolerant enough of an advantage to be worth it?
Dylan16807 27 minutes ago [-]
The nature comparison doesn't work on a fundamental level because you're only getting a fraction of the human's power based on how much they're happy to sell.
pear01 1 hours ago [-]
You forgot a big one in your description of the hypothetical advantages:
No free will
cindyllm 1 hours ago [-]
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bobthepanda 52 minutes ago [-]
Robots can be optimized for tasks and if they are, their benefits are greater. When cars replaced the horse, it was because they didn’t poop, and because a car designed only for transport would not suddenly have a heart attack and stop working.
chihuahua 3 hours ago [-]
A friend who works at Amazon made the same point: "We don't really need robots in the FCs urgently [other than the Kivas], because it turns out you can just pay people $17/hour"
nine_k 3 hours ago [-]
That's the point of the test condition. When running a robot becomes more economical than paying full-scale humans $17/h, something important about robot abilities will have changed.
WillAdams 2 hours ago [-]
I dunno, I worked in an Amazon Warehouse for a year part-time (and a couple of weeks full-time when in-between jobs) --- on one occasion, I pulled up to a bin full of non-descript cardboard boxes near where a group of trainees were working their way through, grabbed one box, spun it around for the six-sided box check, scanned it, confirming it was the right one, and before I could move on to my next pick, a trainee asked, "How did you know that was the right box?", which required a several minute explanation of how the item description and the slight differentiations of the boxes led to that conclusion.
The big win would be training the folks doing stowing to not create such situations and to put markedly different things in each rainbow bin.
pear01 1 hours ago [-]
This would be a more convincing take if reasoning LLMs didn't already exist. Given the growth in capability over the last few years alone nothing about your description "several minute explanation of how the item description and the slight differentiations of the boxes" seems beyond an artificial intelligence to solve by the time humanoid robots would be ready to physically traverse a warehouse.
Your last point is also interesting given perhaps a robot is more amenable to such instruction, thus creating cascading savings. Each human has to be trained, and could be individually a failure. Robot can essentially copy its "brain" to its others.
Or likely more accurately, download the latest brain trained from all the robot's aggregate experiences from the amazon hivemind hq
Animats 1 hours ago [-]
Mechanical picking has been too slow. It's not a problem with the robot mechanics. Here's 300 picks/minute from 2012.[1] The parts are all the same, so the vision problem is simple.
But picking arbitrary objects from fulfillment bins is still running at a few picks per minute.[2] As the speed picks up, humans become less necessary.
All my life I've loved robotics, so I was very eager to get things in the house, but my primary problem with humanoid robots is that they're very different from my Roomba-successor Dreame vacuum in a crucial way: they can fall. The Dreame can occupy the same space as my toddler, but the more industrial grade robotics machines cannot. The Unitree Sun Wukong is unbelievably impressive and I could completely imagine a world where it replaces humans in existing dangerous spaces without requiring the spaces themselves retooled. But in my house, perhaps the future will be like what these guys say and I'll have an Eka Claw on my kitchen counter and another by my washing machine, and so on.
In the classic example of old-guy-gets-surprised-by-new-tech, I bet people will find a way around the problem: but the thing has to be powerful to be fast, and if it's powerful it can hurt.
Who can tell. It was just prior to the pandemic when I was showing my wife talktotransformer.com and thinking about how much needs to be solved before it's useful. More fool am I HAHA!
stein1946 58 minutes ago [-]
All I want is a machine that I can drop ingredients in it and it can give me a delicious meal
And another that I can just drop all my clothes in, and have them washed and ironed for me.
Doesn't have to be a humanoid.
dmix 4 hours ago [-]
> in a crucial way: they can fall.
The question is do they fall and can't get back up
The main issue is how heavy duty they are, because they operate on lithium batteries you can't make them too heavy otherwise it burns battery. So these humanoid robots durability will be closely aligned with innovation in lithium battery tech, or having larger and expensive robots with lots of battery.
nealabq 4 hours ago [-]
I think he meant it can fall onto his toddler, causing injury.
GCUMstlyHarmls 3 hours ago [-]
Could we not simply encase the weaker unit some kind of armored robotic shell?
m463 3 hours ago [-]
Then we would need better baby-gates. But that might lead to escalating scenarios.
SV_BubbleTime 3 hours ago [-]
Tragedy of the commons toddler armor. Can you guys fucking not? It’s best to death. I’d rather have a Ford vs Chevy vs Ram conversation again.
SturgeonsLaw 3 hours ago [-]
Might as well put an AI chip in the toddler's exosuit and get another bot
4 hours ago [-]
nradov 2 hours ago [-]
Meanwhile the Roomba-successor robots that I've tried still get tangled up on our laptop charger cables and wedged under the coffee table.
Gigachad 2 hours ago [-]
I got given a Huawei one for free which I found useful while I had a housemate with a cat since the place needed a vacuum almost twice a day. But after he moved out I just went back to vacuuming manually since it’s easier than having to scan the floor for every cable or throw rug it might get jammed on.
I don’t want to say home robotics will never happen since it seems likely eventually it will. But I think the deployment will be much much slower than entirely software based products like ChatGPT.
ezconnect 2 hours ago [-]
I don't see a future with humanoid robots inside the house. We probably will have specialized robots for certain task like the roombas.
p1esk 2 hours ago [-]
I fully expect to buy one within the next three years. Probably Optimus 4, depending on the price.
dyauspitr 2 hours ago [-]
You won’t have an eka claw. You will have a humanoid. It’s a no brainer. You will get used to the “danger” just like we got used to the danger involved in driving a car or ceiling fans or propane home heating. Every year you’ll have a handful of injuries/deaths but eventually because of how useful they are no one will care and rightfully so.
RajT88 22 minutes ago [-]
Well, except we have 5 decades of cautionary tales in film that show plausible ways this goes sideways when everything is connected to the internet.
NalNezumi 4 hours ago [-]
I have high respect of Tuomas and his work around SAC for RL in robotics.
But this is slightly unconvincing, most because of the author
>They spend thousands of computer hours practicing movements inside simulated worlds and inventing their own solutions.
This is exactly what almost every other picking startups have been doing for the last couple of years.
I can think of at least a dozens, some even making their custom gripper hardware. It still relies on sim2real transfer and then there's a bottleneck of things such as representing deformable objects. And that's still just scratching the surface of it.
I can definitely see that they have the right team. But the claim made by this author is far removed from the actual demo he describes. I've seen same demo for years, last one was in CoRL by Google (Gemini) and even then you could see clever robotics guy (some Boston dynamics engineers) that came by and gave it a clever task it failed on.
Joel_Mckay 35 minutes ago [-]
Universal Robots ( https://www.universal-robots.com/ ) force sensing collaborative platforms were very advanced years ago, but like most bot firms small market demand made retail consumer pricing unsustainable.
>I can think of at least a dozens, some even making their custom gripper hardware.
The simplest solution sometimes is more robust in practice:
Too many edge-case failure modes in an uncontrolled setting. Building platforms that could seriously harm people by just falling over is an inherent design risk. =3
notatoad 6 hours ago [-]
It seems silly to be talking about a “ChatGPT moment” for a piece of industrial hardware that no regular person will ever have any cause to consider buying.
The ChatGPT moment was when they launched a product that was generally useful to the average person. Something that isn’t a consumer product at all is very unlikely to achieve success in the consumer market.
yakbarber 6 hours ago [-]
In less than 10 years there’s going to be millions of bipedal robots everywhere, doing all sorts of chores for us. They’re going to need hands.
analog31 3 hours ago [-]
I'd consider hands to be more important than bipedal mobility.
I work in R&D, supporting a high-tech factory. The factory has already been laid out so that the entire place is accessible for materials being moved around on carts. The worker could be replaced by a cart with hands. If we could solve the hands problem right now, we'd be buying robots by the dozens.
Also, lots of things could be done right now by stationary robots. But at the present level of technology, what we really lack are programmers. Naturally what I'm saying could be overturned tomorrow by AI, so I'm talking in terms of how things work today. I'm actually one of the few people at the site with experience at industrial automation, but it's not part of my job at present.
In a sense, the hands we lack are hands on keyboards.
FourierEnvy 2 hours ago [-]
Yes, thats your current perspective. But by the time you get programmers, the whole company will be automated
nkrisc 6 hours ago [-]
That’s an incredibly optimistic timeline.
pedalpete 5 hours ago [-]
Slowly, then all at once.
Computers were nowhere for ever, then everyone had them.
The internet was tiny, then everywhere.
Smartphones were a teensy market, then everyone had them.
GLP1s were for a small group of diabetics, now a significant portion of the population take them.
This is how things playout time and time again.
Does it mean the commentors 10 years is correct? No. But it also doesn't need to be incredibly optimistic. All it takes is getting the robots right, and there are multiple companies who seem very close.
marcosdumay 5 hours ago [-]
It took almost 20 years from computers that nobody brought on electronics and photography stores to computers in everybody's desk.
Robots will probably be slower, because there is way less room for optimizing their cost.
Gigachad 2 hours ago [-]
We have had more than 10 years of robotic vacuums and yet they are still a fairly niche product.
jcelerier 5 hours ago [-]
robots have existed for more than 20 years though. Boston Dynamic's dog is 22 years old, Atlas 15-ish
somewhatgoated 3 hours ago [-]
What can I as a normal person use these robots for?
Gigachad 2 hours ago [-]
Nothing. They were designed for the military.
dmix 5 hours ago [-]
Mostly just the cost, yeah. It will be like buying a car. The economics will have to make sense for regular people, while it starts popping up in tons of places and become a status symbol.
bigyabai 5 hours ago [-]
Digital computers existed for ~10-20 years before hitting the consumer market. It took almost a half-century for the microprocessor to become a ubiquitous appliance.
SequoiaHope 5 hours ago [-]
We’re already seeing huge progress in humanoids coming from china. The big problem is software and world understanding, but the data collection from today’s humanoids and the rush to capitalize on their potential now that manufacturing their form is largely solved (save for hands) will see these problems overcome.
I expect it will be common to see them make deliveries in five years. Regular people don’t have to buy them for them to see widespread use.
0xbadcafebee 5 hours ago [-]
So, after they work out all the mechanical kinks (there are quite a few!), and after they work out all the software issues (again, many of them), the last problem is the biggest: production. Anyone can make a half dozen robots by hand. A hundred thousand is a completely different challenge. If they can't be made efficiently, their cost makes them more of a toy than a tool.
nine_k 3 hours ago [-]
One of the Tesla's factories is winding down car production in a plan to convert to producing humanoid robots.
0xbadcafebee 1 hours ago [-]
I can buy China doing it, but not Tesla. They have a terrible track record of production, nothing even close to China's capability. In the past they've "developed" factories by taking huge government incentives and then basically doing nothing with them and pocketing the cash.
fontain 4 hours ago [-]
Deliveries use hands because humans have hands, not because hands are a prerequisite for deliveries. Last mile is already “solved” with the little robots that drive around cities, no need for hands. Humans are useful because of our brains, because we can adapt to almost any situation for very little cost. Humanoid robots will remain a novelty until the cost is reduced far beyond what is plausible.
How do we define common? I’ll bet that in 5 years, the average person, even in somewhere like SF, will not see a humanoid robot during their every day life.
nradov 2 hours ago [-]
I predict that we'll see limited combat use of the latest Chinese bipedal robots within two years. They'll sell to both Russia and Ukraine.
0xbadcafebee 5 hours ago [-]
The bipedal robot thing is interesting, but there's only two places their cost makes sense: industry and war. After war makes them cheap to mass-produce (because an army of robots needs to be sustainable), then they'll be affordable. But they'll still be highly regulated, mostly as a political reaction to "losing jobs". It will probably take 30+ years for us to get to that point, because wars big enough to invest that much expense and manpower aren't common.
nine_k 3 hours ago [-]
Also medical / elderly care. A large market.
Mars008 4 hours ago [-]
Chinese Unitree already makes humanoids for $5K. Cheap enough for average american family to afford if it's useful. Several batteries and automatic replacement station will make it run 24/7 non-stop.
So, it terms of cheap capable hardware we are close. The problem is software and computing power.
0xbadcafebee 1 hours ago [-]
That is interesting, but it looks like the ones used for practical work are $30k. Still, they're targeting 20k units this year, which is a lot more production and a lower price than I imagined they'd be at by now.
walrus01 6 hours ago [-]
I remember a certain public personality who is very big on bipedal humanoid robots these days also promising us that we'd have truly autonomous self driving cars from his company by 2022, or 2023. It's now 2026.
Gravey 5 hours ago [-]
We can debate the meaning of “truly autonomous”, but the Tesla-owning friends and acquaintances of mine have all, without any uncertainty, recently commented to me that the top-tier self-driving plan in the modern Teslas is just that.
One frequently uses it to drive from his house in LA to San Jose, another from Philly to Boston, another from Kamloops to Vancouver (Canada). I personally have never experienced it, but I trust their word and experiences enough to believe that it is at an extremely high level of capability.
boc 5 hours ago [-]
Highway driving is a bit different from complex city conditions. Just look at the difference between the telsa robotaxi performance vs Waymo. Only one of them is truly FSD.
Gravey 4 hours ago [-]
> Highway driving is a bit different from complex city conditions
Fair and valid, but worth noting that these drives are door-to-door, not just advanced highway cruise control.
Any idea where one might find a trusted source for data on the robotaxi performance? Especially curious about the latest self-driving models, rather than historical performance.
chihuahua 2 hours ago [-]
Today, Tesla's so-called full self-driving system is legally classified as SAE Level 2 driver assistance [1]. The human driver must continuously monitor the system, be ready to take over instantly at any time, and is legally responsible for the the car. Tesla is careful to avoid any liability for this by stating this somewhere, perhaps in a 3-point font.
Even if techbros loudly insist that they can take a nap in the back seat, that doesn't change the legal facts. Just like a drunk driver confidently shouting that he's totally fine to drive.
I hate how they are able to avoid liability like this. No human can sit in a car doing literally nothing but being alert ready to take over in an instant. Thats not how brains work. This is obvious but they use this excuse to divert any blame from the automated system to the occupant.
tamimio 4 hours ago [-]
As someone in the robotics, I can tell you that’s never gonna happen, even if you see a fully functional demo of a robot (not just the typical money grab 3D renders), assume the real life performance are 10x worse.. there’s so much monkey business in robotics, plenty of over promising, so much empty hypes, that been going on for years, the only successful breeds are cobotics (like roomba and industrial manipulators) or recently drones, although still very limited due to endurance.
LastTrain 5 hours ago [-]
Why bipedal?
p-e-w 4 hours ago [-]
Because the human world is built for bipedal beings and everything else will encounter obstacles somewhere.
Mars008 4 hours ago [-]
Dogs and cats don't complain. Gorillas and chimpanzee should be fine too.
Bipedal robots suck right now, but superhuman stability is achievable in near future.
roenxi 3 hours ago [-]
Launched a product that, as I recall, was free. No real foreshadowing of what was about to come. Opened up an entirely new product category and started a process of reshaping at least the economy and probably society over the course of less than 5 years so far.
Yeah. I don't see how this is going to be a ChatGPT moment. Robot arms aren't a crazy new product. It might be big news regardless.
boxed 5 hours ago [-]
This might age badly heh. Kinda like "we only need 2 MAYBE 3 computers for Sweden" (real thing people said back in the day).
nullsanity 5 hours ago [-]
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xp84 6 hours ago [-]
“Eka, open claw!!!!”
“I’m sorry, OpenClaw is not approved for an account on your subscription tier.”
suffocates from being choked by robotic claw
SpyCoder77 4 hours ago [-]
This comment is not going unappreciated
vjvjvjvjghv 1 hours ago [-]
I am waiting for a robot that can dust my shelves even when there are things on them. That would improve my life a lot.
ofjcihen 2 hours ago [-]
I don’t know when this ridiculous melodramatic style of writing started to pervade all of tech but it needs to go away. It’s resurrecting the pain of around 2016 when everyone presented like they were giving their own TED Talk.
gurjeet 3 hours ago [-]
A couple of minutes of video (presumably by the author):
Mount 2 of these on a Segway and I can think of several tasks that could be automated where I work.
martythemaniak 9 hours ago [-]
Rodney Brooks has a great essay on why he's skeptical that the current humanoid hype will deliver and the central claim is that human dexterity is extremely advanced any today's humanoids lack even the sensors and data needed to start building the models needed to match human performance.
I saw him post this article on his Bluesky saying that they're the first ones he's seen that are close to cracking this issue (he's an investor/adviser).
nomel 7 hours ago [-]
> needed to match human performance.
This is not a remotely a real world requirement for them to be useful, and for them to sell like crazy.
usrnm 7 hours ago [-]
Isn't it? The whole promise if humanoid robots is replacing humans in a human-centered environment. Instead of specialized hardware or modifying the existing process, just drop a robot in place of a human, bam, done. Otherwise, what's the point?
pzo 7 hours ago [-]
The point is that even if they do something 3x slower and maybe capable of 1/100 tasks they can still this do task 24/7, without holiday and never sick, they can also have more strength e.g in construction.
My smart vacuum is more dump than me when wiping floor and much slower than be but still greatly useful.
throawayonthe 7 hours ago [-]
that's the thing, what's the appeal of humanoid robots then? why not something more fit to the task? imagine if your roomba had legs because well that's what a human uses to move around when cleaning
dogcomplex 6 hours ago [-]
Accessibility and a single chassis that does the vast majority of things. Even if they're never as fully dexterous as the average human (doubt it) they're still as dexterous as a somewhat handicapped human, which is already clearly enough to function decently in most of society and is far from useless.
If you want several bots all custom built to specific tasks, go for it. That will happen too. But a generalist has value of its own.
marcosdumay 5 hours ago [-]
> imagine if your roomba had legs
That would probably be an improvement. Floors are designed for people, and may have several levels. An ideal vacuum would probably look something like a centipede.
Anyway, the appeal would be that it can perform several tasks. It doesn't need to perform all the tasks a human can to fulfill that.
megaman821 7 hours ago [-]
I wonder how accurate joint positions and muscle activations can be from just a POV camera. Maybe it’s not crazy to think someone could get tens of millions of hours of well-labeled training data.
artisin 7 hours ago [-]
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dyauspitr 8 hours ago [-]
Yeah I’m going to completely disregard this because I feel like we are less than a year away from completely human feeling humanoids. This is based on nothing but obsessively watching and following humanoid progress on the internet.
ManuelKiessling 8 hours ago [-]
What was eye-opening, or rather, sobering for me was when I read an interview with an engineer who explained how incredible difficult it is for a robot to orient itself when it is lying on the floor and wants to stand up.
Yes, it can do the required motions just fine, that’s not the point. But think about yourself when you are lying on the floor: it’s really easy to determine if this is safe, if you are lying underneath something and so on. You just feel that.
A robot cannot do that; all they can do is look around as good as possible and visually determine their situation.
jgord 8 hours ago [-]
I naively assumed they have a gravity sensor, so will generally have an approximate up vector ?
ManuelKiessling 8 hours ago [-]
Yeah but imagine yourself lying on the floor with your vision being your only sense, plus an info floating in your mind: „fyi, you are no longer upright“.
That’s all, you feel nothing else. Now your job is to move all parts of your body in just the right way.
Dylan16807 18 minutes ago [-]
Do I know which way my joints are bent (which a robot knows)? Then I can manage it.
And why don't I have any sense of pressure at all? We can put that into robots.
AndrewDucker 8 hours ago [-]
But I have more than that. I can definitely sense which way is up unless I'm underwater.
card_zero 7 hours ago [-]
Or have an amusing inner ear infection. So OK, sure, it's vector, not a flag.
rcxdude 8 hours ago [-]
Theu have an IMU, what they don't generally have is the various aspects of touch.
card_zero 8 hours ago [-]
The point about being aware of lying underneath some object was interesting. Sound might matter, like the frequency of background noise changes when you're in an enclosed space, and listening to your own shuffling noises helps you know when you've planted your feet right - or something. I have some really effective ear plugs and I notice they make it harder to move around.
Having said that, I've probably hit my head on the underside of an open cupboard door five or six times in my life, and I expect to do it again.
LeCompteSftware 8 hours ago [-]
It is also things like "I can feel that my left knee is bearing a little too much weight, I should shift weight to my right hand and use that to push myself up" - things that come automatically to animals after learning the hard way in infancy (some of it is innate; baby animals are clumsy, but usually more mobile than human infants). Regardless of learned-vs-instinct, these abilities rely on sophisticated "sensors" and cognition. I suspect engineering the sensors is actually a bit harder, but I'm also not optimistic about a deep learning approach to the cognition.
A significant underappreciated advantage of animals over AI: lifeforms can "learn the hard way" more easily than 2020s robots because of cheap self-repair. AI labs are reluctant to damage their robots, but an essential part of humans learning to move safely is severely bonking your head and reckoning with the consequences - "hey, dummy, why did you trip and fall and bonk your head? Because you were running like an idiot."
I am learning the hard way to this day :) I have been practicing with work knives. A few months ago I got stupid and impatient, and sliced my thumb nastily. If I didn't block the cut with my thumbnail (still ruined) I might have chopped bone. It is hard to say precisely what I learned from this experience - "don't be stupid and impatient" is facile - but I know I learned a lot. I am actually optimistic about targeted surgical robotics. But for a general-use humanoid robot, I would not want to give it a knife if it's not capable of feeling pain. I never use big knives anywhere near my cats because I understand intuitively that they are nimble and unpredictable and easily stabbed by knives. I didn't need to be trained on this. A robot kind of does. Yikes.
jfengel 8 hours ago [-]
I obsessively avoid any kind of "technology is going thataway" content. So I haven't seen anything that looks like humanoid progress in quite some time. About the only thing that has snuck around my barrier is Musk apparently claiming he'll have it by the end of the year, which is pretty conclusive evidence that they won't have it by the end of the year.
So if you're seeing anything that actually seems to merit attention, I'd love a few pointers. I could use some good news.
nancyminusone 8 hours ago [-]
Well, as someone who has tried to build at least a couple small robot arms, I think we are probably closer to 20-50 years away. Both the power and dexterity are not there.
Right now, only a human can both push over a boulder and pick up a tiny speck from the floor using the same actuator.
rcxdude 8 hours ago [-]
Beware generalising from a carefully curated and presented set of demos to real life.
SpyCoder77 4 hours ago [-]
If Figure acquires Eka they are so winning the humanoid race.
tuatoru 7 hours ago [-]
The robotics Turing test: change the nappies of the designer's and company owners' baby daughters or grand-daughters.
xg15 6 hours ago [-]
I'd already be fine with some decent laundry folding in general.
ceejayoz 6 hours ago [-]
I think the idea is that before they sell it to the public they should trust it with their own loved ones.
dmix 5 hours ago [-]
There's a video of the founder of Figure robotics trusting it enough to let it do laundry next to his kids
No doubt hands are important, but I think you've missed a lot here Wired.
mediaman 7 hours ago [-]
Many of the Chinese companies are doing very impressive open-loop sim2real. They make great demonstrations. They are not great at dealing with the real world and unpredictable environments.
(That's not true of all Chinese companies - some are doing really impressive work with closed loop systems in unpredictable environments. But many of the highly viewed ones with coordinated dance performances or martial arts are intended more as theater to government financial sponsors than useful function. The technically impressive performances do not look as visually impressive.)
darenr 7 hours ago [-]
those were impressive but were also RC. I think an important part of robotics is not just the mechanics of humanoid motion, but the independent control of those mechanics.
unsnap_biceps 7 hours ago [-]
Can you expand on what was RC? Was the compute off device?
chrisweekly 8 hours ago [-]
Anyone else here have happy memories of playing with Armatron? Circa 1984?
pugworthy 6 hours ago [-]
Oh hell yea!
Just a few weeks ago at work we got a Universal Robots UR5 from another project in-house along with a Hand-E gripper.
I've never had so much fun programming and playing with a device ever. And it completely took me back to getting an Armatron 40 years ago and having so much fun - but also wishing I could somehow control it with software.
Back in the 90s, I developed a rule of thumb: if I saw it in Wired, it's because it was either already over, or it wasn't going to happen at all.
I was so disappointed when I saw BetterPlace (the car with replaceable batteries) on the cover of Wired. It seemed like such a good idea. Too bad the rule of thumb meant it wouldn't work.
Rules of thumb were made to be broken. Maybe this time it will be different.
eichin 6 hours ago [-]
Yeah, betterplace made it from 2008 (wired) to 2013 (bankruptcy.) Nio is trying again and it looks like they hit wired in 2018, again in 2023, and are still active today...
serf 4 hours ago [-]
just because it's an article about techie stuff doesn't mean all the photojournalism has to be color-graded like a Matrix movie.
.. but it's kind of funny to read the fluff PR about saving humanity while juxtaposing it against photos that look like they may as well be screencaps from Prometheus or Black Mirror.
Is the person behind archive.today the same operator as archive.is?
papercrane 4 hours ago [-]
Yes, they have a number of domain names, archive.is and archive.today are the most well known ones.
cubefox 7 hours ago [-]
> archive.is is malicious -- as in, uses your browser to launch DDoS attacks, and other things.
I think the attack was itself a response to a doxxing attempt. Also, archive.is being a free service doesn't quite fit with claiming they are malicious. The overall picture seems still positive.
Works for me. I use only Tor so it is actually far more accessible. Archive.is uses Google's Recaptcha, which for some reason rejects valid solutions submitted via Tor.
chatmasta 7 hours ago [-]
I’m not sure that is always a valid CAPTCHA and not one being proxied to you for solving it on behalf of some bot (presumably a crawler).
sanskritical 6 hours ago [-]
I don't know. I think people would notice if Google were being MITM'd on Tor.
chatmasta 6 hours ago [-]
You don’t need to MITM it, this was a common pattern for a long time (not sure it still works though). There was no origin verification so you could just use a different site ID and have people respond to captchas you encountered on that site.
mainmin8t 13 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
SpaceNoodled 8 hours ago [-]
> a ChatGPT moment for the physical world.
That's not a good thing, WIRED.
commandlinefan 7 hours ago [-]
I'm having some house painting done and the painter asked me what line of work I was in. When I said computer programming he said, "ooh, bet you're worried about AI! At least painters are safe!"
gwbas1c 8 hours ago [-]
I want Rosie (fictional robot from the TV show "The Jetsons")
Basically, I want a robotic butler / maid that will do most of the cleanup around the house.
mitthrowaway2 7 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately, the only robots available will be connected to the cloud, paid by subscription, and will gather a continuous feed of audio-video data from you and your home. And sometimes it will be teleoperated, and you might not know when.
I'd rather do my own cleanup, personally.
Ifkaluva 7 hours ago [-]
I bet China will race to the bottom with cheap versions. 3D printers and LLMs, next home robots
dogcomplex 6 hours ago [-]
Why would consumers settle for that? Local models have scaled quite quickly. Just pair the bot with a LAN server as the brain that keeps all your data private.
Barring that, choose bots that use Zero Knowledge Proof architectures for all data so you know there's no in/out of personal data, only security proofs. This makes rental robots certifiably private too.
Becuase 5 hours ago [-]
They've settled for that in:
* Phones
* Cars
* Robotic Vacuums
* Kitchen Appliances
* Televisions
* Home Lighting
* Home security systems, doorbells, and locks
* Web browsers
* Operating Systems
So, uh, yeah, I'm pretty confident users will settle for that in robots too.
progval 6 hours ago [-]
Some of them will be paid by subscription and have ads
davely 8 hours ago [-]
Haha! Instead, you’ll get a robot that will make you art, music, and tell you stories and you get to toil away cleaning the house.
conception 7 hours ago [-]
“Sure I’ll clean up the house, Mr. J. While I’m doing, so have you seen the new shoes from crocs? They’re sponsored by the Jenners and have great new designs with all of your favorite movie characters on them! Would you like me to order you a pair?”
baldeagle 6 hours ago [-]
The first voice accessed (in my brain) by this dialog was Harley Quinn, it took a moment for it to fall back to Rosie.
dataviz1000 4 hours ago [-]
I've spent ~$500 this month trying to get an LLM model to solve a Rubik's Cube. They can't. I'll post my Rubik's Cube MCP server next week if anyone wants to prove me wrong.
1. a human child learning 6 algorithms and a weekend can solve a Rubik's Cube
2. Reenforcement learning can solve a Rubik's Cube
3. The best LLM model using recursive tuning or not can't solve a Rubik's Cube.
Claude 4.6 got 60% of the way but couldn't figure out the last steps after running for 20+ minutes and hundreds of thousands of tokens.
z3c0 7 hours ago [-]
Given how many people attempted to date their computer after ChatGPT launched, I don't even want to imagine what this technology has in store.
Rendered at 04:32:24 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Dystopian. Which companies out of interest?
I've seen multiple articles about robotic claws. This one made the rounds previously https://www.firgelli.com/pages/humanoid-robot-actuators
That doesn’t follow. There are plenty of tasks that can be fully and reliably automated but aren’t, for the simple reason that human labor is dirt cheap compared to advanced robotics.
If a humanoid robot is slower dumber human that is expensive, requires power, can’t get wet, falls over, and doesn’t understand stairs. Is not sleeping and being radiation tolerant enough of an advantage to be worth it?
No free will
The big win would be training the folks doing stowing to not create such situations and to put markedly different things in each rainbow bin.
Your last point is also interesting given perhaps a robot is more amenable to such instruction, thus creating cascading savings. Each human has to be trained, and could be individually a failure. Robot can essentially copy its "brain" to its others.
Or likely more accurately, download the latest brain trained from all the robot's aggregate experiences from the amazon hivemind hq
But picking arbitrary objects from fulfillment bins is still running at a few picks per minute.[2] As the speed picks up, humans become less necessary.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RKXVefE98w
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2X4CU3jmw-g
In the classic example of old-guy-gets-surprised-by-new-tech, I bet people will find a way around the problem: but the thing has to be powerful to be fast, and if it's powerful it can hurt.
Who can tell. It was just prior to the pandemic when I was showing my wife talktotransformer.com and thinking about how much needs to be solved before it's useful. More fool am I HAHA!
And another that I can just drop all my clothes in, and have them washed and ironed for me.
Doesn't have to be a humanoid.
The question is do they fall and can't get back up
The main issue is how heavy duty they are, because they operate on lithium batteries you can't make them too heavy otherwise it burns battery. So these humanoid robots durability will be closely aligned with innovation in lithium battery tech, or having larger and expensive robots with lots of battery.
I don’t want to say home robotics will never happen since it seems likely eventually it will. But I think the deployment will be much much slower than entirely software based products like ChatGPT.
But this is slightly unconvincing, most because of the author
>They spend thousands of computer hours practicing movements inside simulated worlds and inventing their own solutions.
This is exactly what almost every other picking startups have been doing for the last couple of years.
I can think of at least a dozens, some even making their custom gripper hardware. It still relies on sim2real transfer and then there's a bottleneck of things such as representing deformable objects. And that's still just scratching the surface of it.
I can definitely see that they have the right team. But the claim made by this author is far removed from the actual demo he describes. I've seen same demo for years, last one was in CoRL by Google (Gemini) and even then you could see clever robotics guy (some Boston dynamics engineers) that came by and gave it a clever task it failed on.
>I can think of at least a dozens, some even making their custom gripper hardware.
The simplest solution sometimes is more robust in practice:
https://news.uchicago.edu/story/balloon-filled-ground-coffee...
Too many edge-case failure modes in an uncontrolled setting. Building platforms that could seriously harm people by just falling over is an inherent design risk. =3
The ChatGPT moment was when they launched a product that was generally useful to the average person. Something that isn’t a consumer product at all is very unlikely to achieve success in the consumer market.
I work in R&D, supporting a high-tech factory. The factory has already been laid out so that the entire place is accessible for materials being moved around on carts. The worker could be replaced by a cart with hands. If we could solve the hands problem right now, we'd be buying robots by the dozens.
Also, lots of things could be done right now by stationary robots. But at the present level of technology, what we really lack are programmers. Naturally what I'm saying could be overturned tomorrow by AI, so I'm talking in terms of how things work today. I'm actually one of the few people at the site with experience at industrial automation, but it's not part of my job at present.
In a sense, the hands we lack are hands on keyboards.
Computers were nowhere for ever, then everyone had them. The internet was tiny, then everywhere. Smartphones were a teensy market, then everyone had them. GLP1s were for a small group of diabetics, now a significant portion of the population take them.
This is how things playout time and time again.
Does it mean the commentors 10 years is correct? No. But it also doesn't need to be incredibly optimistic. All it takes is getting the robots right, and there are multiple companies who seem very close.
Robots will probably be slower, because there is way less room for optimizing their cost.
I expect it will be common to see them make deliveries in five years. Regular people don’t have to buy them for them to see widespread use.
How do we define common? I’ll bet that in 5 years, the average person, even in somewhere like SF, will not see a humanoid robot during their every day life.
So, it terms of cheap capable hardware we are close. The problem is software and computing power.
One frequently uses it to drive from his house in LA to San Jose, another from Philly to Boston, another from Kamloops to Vancouver (Canada). I personally have never experienced it, but I trust their word and experiences enough to believe that it is at an extremely high level of capability.
Fair and valid, but worth noting that these drives are door-to-door, not just advanced highway cruise control.
Any idea where one might find a trusted source for data on the robotaxi performance? Especially curious about the latest self-driving models, rather than historical performance.
Even if techbros loudly insist that they can take a nap in the back seat, that doesn't change the legal facts. Just like a drunk driver confidently shouting that he's totally fine to drive.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Autopilot
Bipedal robots suck right now, but superhuman stability is achievable in near future.
Yeah. I don't see how this is going to be a ChatGPT moment. Robot arms aren't a crazy new product. It might be big news regardless.
“I’m sorry, OpenClaw is not approved for an account on your subscription tier.”
suffocates from being choked by robotic claw
https://www.wired.com/video/watch/this-company-is-building-s...
https://rodneybrooks.com/why-todays-humanoids-wont-learn-dex...
I saw him post this article on his Bluesky saying that they're the first ones he's seen that are close to cracking this issue (he's an investor/adviser).
This is not a remotely a real world requirement for them to be useful, and for them to sell like crazy.
My smart vacuum is more dump than me when wiping floor and much slower than be but still greatly useful.
If you want several bots all custom built to specific tasks, go for it. That will happen too. But a generalist has value of its own.
That would probably be an improvement. Floors are designed for people, and may have several levels. An ideal vacuum would probably look something like a centipede.
Anyway, the appeal would be that it can perform several tasks. It doesn't need to perform all the tasks a human can to fulfill that.
Yes, it can do the required motions just fine, that’s not the point. But think about yourself when you are lying on the floor: it’s really easy to determine if this is safe, if you are lying underneath something and so on. You just feel that.
A robot cannot do that; all they can do is look around as good as possible and visually determine their situation.
That’s all, you feel nothing else. Now your job is to move all parts of your body in just the right way.
And why don't I have any sense of pressure at all? We can put that into robots.
Having said that, I've probably hit my head on the underside of an open cupboard door five or six times in my life, and I expect to do it again.
A significant underappreciated advantage of animals over AI: lifeforms can "learn the hard way" more easily than 2020s robots because of cheap self-repair. AI labs are reluctant to damage their robots, but an essential part of humans learning to move safely is severely bonking your head and reckoning with the consequences - "hey, dummy, why did you trip and fall and bonk your head? Because you were running like an idiot."
I am learning the hard way to this day :) I have been practicing with work knives. A few months ago I got stupid and impatient, and sliced my thumb nastily. If I didn't block the cut with my thumbnail (still ruined) I might have chopped bone. It is hard to say precisely what I learned from this experience - "don't be stupid and impatient" is facile - but I know I learned a lot. I am actually optimistic about targeted surgical robotics. But for a general-use humanoid robot, I would not want to give it a knife if it's not capable of feeling pain. I never use big knives anywhere near my cats because I understand intuitively that they are nimble and unpredictable and easily stabbed by knives. I didn't need to be trained on this. A robot kind of does. Yikes.
So if you're seeing anything that actually seems to merit attention, I'd love a few pointers. I could use some good news.
Right now, only a human can both push over a boulder and pick up a tiny speck from the floor using the same actuator.
https://x.com/adcock_brett/status/1950685253447913798
The first phase is likely don't let the kids go near it since it could easily hurt a human by accident.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ykiuz1ZdGBc
That sure felt "different".
No doubt hands are important, but I think you've missed a lot here Wired.
(That's not true of all Chinese companies - some are doing really impressive work with closed loop systems in unpredictable environments. But many of the highly viewed ones with coordinated dance performances or martial arts are intended more as theater to government financial sponsors than useful function. The technically impressive performances do not look as visually impressive.)
Just a few weeks ago at work we got a Universal Robots UR5 from another project in-house along with a Hand-E gripper.
I've never had so much fun programming and playing with a device ever. And it completely took me back to getting an Armatron 40 years ago and having so much fun - but also wishing I could somehow control it with software.
I was so disappointed when I saw BetterPlace (the car with replaceable batteries) on the cover of Wired. It seemed like such a good idea. Too bad the rule of thumb meant it wouldn't work.
Rules of thumb were made to be broken. Maybe this time it will be different.
.. but it's kind of funny to read the fluff PR about saving humanity while juxtaposing it against photos that look like they may as well be screencaps from Prometheus or Black Mirror.
see : two startled victims under a blue arctic sun - https://media.wired.com/photos/69f11cbf1b1015e12f65d23e/mast...
Stop using it.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/wikipedia-bans-a...
I think the attack was itself a response to a doxxing attempt. Also, archive.is being a free service doesn't quite fit with claiming they are malicious. The overall picture seems still positive.
Works for me. I use only Tor so it is actually far more accessible. Archive.is uses Google's Recaptcha, which for some reason rejects valid solutions submitted via Tor.
That's not a good thing, WIRED.
Basically, I want a robotic butler / maid that will do most of the cleanup around the house.
I'd rather do my own cleanup, personally.
Barring that, choose bots that use Zero Knowledge Proof architectures for all data so you know there's no in/out of personal data, only security proofs. This makes rental robots certifiably private too.
* Phones * Cars * Robotic Vacuums * Kitchen Appliances * Televisions * Home Lighting * Home security systems, doorbells, and locks * Web browsers * Operating Systems
So, uh, yeah, I'm pretty confident users will settle for that in robots too.
1. a human child learning 6 algorithms and a weekend can solve a Rubik's Cube
2. Reenforcement learning can solve a Rubik's Cube
3. The best LLM model using recursive tuning or not can't solve a Rubik's Cube.
Claude 4.6 got 60% of the way but couldn't figure out the last steps after running for 20+ minutes and hundreds of thousands of tokens.