AI does not mean the robots are coming
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Pepper the humanoid was born in 2014. It enjoyed a brief wave of hype, including: visit to the Financial Times to meet the editor. “It’s a robot that behaves autonomously, fed by love,” declared Masayoshi So, the head of its main backer.Alibaba and Foxconn have also invested hundreds of millions to make robotics a ubiquitous part of everyday life : It wasn’t to be, though. You still occasionally find Pepper in a public library in Japan, unplugged, like a four-foot-tall Pinocchio daydreaming. to become a boy, but never did.Production ceased in 2021 and only 27,000 units were ever produced.
However, the vision of humanoid robots—machines like us that can do all the jobs we don’t want—has long been too attractive to pass up enthusiasm for robotics. “The next wave of AI is physical AI. AI that understands the laws of physics, AI that can work within us,” chip designer Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang ventured AI model training boom, becoming the world’s second largest company by market capitalization.
Billions of dollars in venture capital are pouring into robotics startups. They aim to apply the same kind of learning techniques that allow computers to predict how a protein will fold or generate startlingly realistic text. They aim to let robots understand what they are see in the physical world, and second, to naturally interact with it, solving the enormous programming task embodied in something as simple as taking an object and manipulate.
Such is the dream. The latest round of investors and entrepreneurs, however, will likely end up as disappointed as those who backed Pepper. It’s not because AI isn’t useful. Rather, it’s because the obstacles to creating an economically viable robot, that can cook dinner and clean toilets is a hardware problem, not just a software one, and one AI doesn’t solve by itself, let alone solve.
These physical challenges are many and difficult. For example, a human arm or leg must be moved by motors. Each axis of motion through which the limb must move requires more motors, as shown provide the robotic arms of factories, but the high-performance motors, gears, and gearboxes involved create mass, cost, power requirements, and multiple components that can and will spoil.
After creating the desired movement, the challenge of sensing and feedback comes in. If you pick up a piece of fruit, for example, the human nerves in your hand will tell you how soft it is and how hard it is to let you squeeze it. You can taste whether food is cooking and smell whether it’s burning.Neither of those senses are easy to provide for a robot, and to the extent that they are possible, they add to the cost. Machine vision and artificial intelligence can compensate by looking at whether the fruit is squished or the food in the pan is the right color, but they are imperfect substitutes.
Then there is the problem of government. Any autonomous vehicle needs its own power source. In factories, the robot’s arms cannot move. A humanoid robot will likely use a battery, but then there are trade-offs with size, power, flexibility, uptime, and cost. : These are just a few of the problems. Many smart people are working towards solving them. But the problem is that they are long-term and difficult the intelligence revolution is not forcing them to leave.
So what does AI make possible in the physical world?Rather than imagining how the technology will enable new machines, it’s more practical to imagine how existing machines will change when AI is applied to them.
Self-driving cars are an obvious example. In this case, the car does not need to be changed at all. the movement of the car in the physical world and through the power source will work as always, while the sense involved in driving is almost entirely visual. The hype cycle of autonomous cars has died down. In fact, it should be the opposite. autonomous driving is a huge market, and it’s the real-world challenge that AI can most easily overcome, a point that anyone tempted to invest in other robotics applications should consider.
It also makes sense to think about how existing robots, from industrial robotic arms to robotic vacuum cleaners, will subtly increase the range of tasks a robot arm can perform and make them safer to work alongside humans , disposable devices like robot vacuum cleaners will gradually become more useful.In Chinese hotels, for example, it is already quite common to have a robot bring deliveries to your room. Such limited and controlled autonomy is most easily delivered.
This way, AI will slowly bring us closer to androids.As for a robot like Pepper that can clean the toilet, it’s unfortunately a lot easier to write bad poetry, and that’s unlikely to change anytime soon.
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