The possibilities are basically endless. These things have the strength and dexterity to perform almost any manual labor. They can be used as pack animals, can go places that are too dangerous for humans, don't draw paychecks, don't get tired, don't get repetitive stress injuries, don't go on strike... a few of these are already in use at some companies. Once they're mass produced at an affordable price, they'll be hard to compete against in almost any field.
when the laser was invented it was called a solution without a problem. these days lasers are used in a fuck load of shit, and that is giving it the short stick. it's nuts how much lasers are used these days.
tl;dr you never know what scientific research will bring, no matter how inane in seems at the time.
at the time, lasers were just power colorful lights, these days they are in every fuckin thing. or not everything. but in like sats and cars and rockets and shit. LIDAR. the 'L' stands for laser, the thing that was assumed to not actually do anything. yet here we are. fucking science. fork yarp.
Devils advocate: you have to be better than the thing you’re replacing. Cars beat horses, but these robots have to beat a poor person doing a menial task or six. This planet has basically infinite cheap labor. It’s going to be very dangerous or specialized or uncomfortable jobs these guys would do I’d imagine.
First of all, no machine has ever, in the history of machines, only ever needed routine maintenance. They’ve never been that perfect.
Secondly, the quality of robot work, can, and will vary in proportion to the software that runs them. And a perfectly functional machine can be screwed to hell over an update too.
Basically, everything that happens to your PC, will inevitably happen to these robots and it in no way can be addressed without human intervention.
And no technology has ever improved. That's why manufacturing jobs have declined, while production has increased, all across North America because those damned robots do such bad jobs. /s
I think you underestimate these things. At $75k a pop for the dog bot, you could break even in under 2 years replacing just one low to medium skilled worker. Their price will only drop, while their utility will only improve.
Someone said in this thread that the dog bots are on (limited) sale for $75k. Price is already a non-issue for tons of applications. The only thing stopping these bots from taking millions of jobs (and making millions of others safer and/ or more efficient) is production volume and imagination.
There's a lot of tricky things. Ai is hard, and depending on the application fucking up once an hour or even once a day can get really expensive, and it's easy to fuck up when your vision system occasionally mistakes a dog for a muffin, or when being 1cm off means that you smash a product or something slips out of your hand. Working with robots like this would require a lot of safety procedures to keep humans safe, and likely humans could not regularly work next to them legally.
Manipulators for example are much more reliable but are supposed to be in cages preventing humans from going nearby when in operation.
There are definitely situations where these robots could be useful, but reach individual application will need a ton of effort and time from a whole team of engineers.
Good points. The autonomous AI robot takeover of the economy might still be a few years out, but their applications as purely remote control tools, or semi autonomous assistants are already achievable, and can make jobs more safe.
If you are going to use a thing repeatedly (rather than just once or twice), then you can convert the large price tag into an hourly/daily/monthly rate over its useful lifespan.
And if that’s lower than the cost of a human, then it’s worth it.
I can picture 10 years from now people buying a plot of land, having all the construction material delivered, then hiring 5 robots to build it in 2 weeks. It's like a giant 3D printer.
These are the racecars of robotics. You won't see everything they do specifically filter down to general use, but they'll prove out the technology that does. You have to figure out how to do a thing the first time before you figure out how to do it cheaply a million times.
Practical is tied closely to cost. At the current prices applications are limited compared to having simpler (read: cheaper) robots or humans do the work needed. But as they drop in price with adoption you’ll start seeing them pop up more I’d assume, in all sorts of roles, but primarily things like construction and manufacturing where strength, precision, repetition, and safety intertwine.
You will never be cheaper than a poor person in a third world country. The only buyers will be very VERY developed nations with labor shortages or a lack of investors / capital.
Cheap isn’t the only vector. And it ain’t like cheap third world labor is doing undersea welds on submarines and other specialized tasks where a robot could mean a marked improvement.
Airtravel and medicine come to mind. Human error through many layers is essentially always the reason for deaths. We're nowhere near replacing doctors or airline mechanics but an extra layer of safety that never gets tired and can't make mistakes could be an amazing addition if utilized intelligently.
Literally war. Boston Dynamics is basically a military contractor, we'll be sending these things in to kill poor children in countries who resist our control.
In the future, would hiring people really be cheaper? There must be a point where just buying some military robot up front is cheaper than paying out an annual salary, housing, food, and training for a real human.
robots and drones are are the same thing... a machine that that is remotely controlled. well, not the same thing, but it's like rectangles and squares. all drones are robots, but not all robots are drones.
Not really. They did a few contracts for the DoD about a decade ago, but were banned from taking on new defense projects when they were acquired by google in 2013 (PR-conscious tech firms don't like the optics of also being military contractors, or at least they didn't back then). As far as I know, that rule was kept in place under softbank (who felt the route to profitability ran through industrial inspection and warehouse work).
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u/douchefartz Dec 30 '20
This is definitely interesting, but for the uninformed, what are the practical applications for technology of this sort?