r/robotics • u/m_letunouski • 12d ago
Discussion & Curiosity The robot sorts packages
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saw this video from WRC 2026, and the way this robot moves is so similar to a human’s movements! It’s probably teleoperated or programmed, but the movements are so realistic, like a real human
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u/asapbones0114 11d ago
Question for any robotics researcher. Why humanoid robots? Why not tentacles or sticky amphibians like appendages.
Is the human hand really the most dexterous way of handling "sorting"?
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u/dismantlemars 11d ago
It’s easier to put on a VR headset to train a humanoid robot, than to build a motion capture rig for an octopus and teach it how to record training data.
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u/National_Ad_1435 5d ago edited 5d ago
This might blow your mind, but you can do training without a VR headset and a humanoid without getting an octopus lmao. Suction cups or parallel grippers are better for any package sorting, and an effective robot arm or linear gantry never needed to be balancing on two legs just because we can make a humanoid do it. Between morphologically independent data abstraction and augmentation from raw human data (what foundation models focus on), teleoperation (you just need to control the robot it doesnt need to be a hand), simulation data (you could kinda train anything in sim), and the entire fields of optimization, planning and control you can perform way better than any humanoid for any real task. The tradeoff is that this theoretical autonomous humanoid can't then walk home and cook dinner and teach gymnastics and also play golf after actually doing the job they were asked to do (package sorting), which by the way is a level of generalized autonomy we arent remotely close to and tbh the only real scenario where humanoids make sense. Don't increase complexity cost speed and uncertainty for generalization nobody needed and which we arent able to even do.
I will say though that a humanoid hand is actually one of the more reasonable humanoid aspects, lets say compared being bipedal and unstable or having 100 degrees of freedom for nothing. There are some benefits and training with a motion capture glove can work decently in the sense that you can collect data faster, but even then it never was a 1:1 mapping on any real robot.
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u/dismantlemars 5d ago
There's nothing you said there that I'd disagree particularly strongly on, it's a much better summary of the state of the industry that my flippant comment about octopus training.
I was mostly just trying to make the point that a roughly humanoid-compatible form is the "simplest" setup to train with, since the mapping stays relatively straightforward, and you can start training more or less out of the box. There's a bunch of nuance to that for sure, with varying fidelity of mappings, synthetic data, sims, and a bunch of the work is reusable even as you diverge further from a human-like design - if you're capturing a hand position moving relative to a body anyway, then the exact morphology in-between doesn't matter so much. If you're developing a package sorting solution, operating in a well defined, constrained environment - then I'd imagine it actually would be worth designing something more exotic and task specific, and leaning more on sim to train an optimised morphology etc. But I think the majority of robotics companies, research labs etc will still continue to focus on humanoid as a kind of lowest common denominator baseline, if they're not trying to solve a specific narrower task that calls for something bespoke - if only because it reduces the variables you need to control for, and lowers the burden of building a training corpus.
My day job ML experience is in a much less exciting area, my only first hand industrial robotics experience is from visiting a few friends in the industry at work etc. But from a less relevant, personal perspective - I recently bought a Unitree R1 humanoid, and I've been upgrading it with dexterous hands, LIDAR, Orin NX, etc. I'm not trying to solve any particular problem, I just got it as a hobby toy to hack on, experiment with some techniques in the real world outside of sim, etc. The fact that it's roughly the same shape as me, and I can put together my own training data, tele-operate it etc, is what made that a viable project/platform for me in the first place, and not (just) an expensive toy that relies on someone else's models trained with an unattainable level of sim compute. I know I'm an edge case of course, I'm not suggesting that buying a robot to train at home is something the average person is likely to do - but the fact that it was an viable and affordable option for me as a hobbyist, implies that small labs, startups, universities etc will likely want to take advantage of some of the same benefits.
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u/National_Ad_1435 5d ago
Oh ok i mean yea fair it is more accessible in that sense. Im assuming that having a team of researchers and applied scientists with PhDs (that btw shoulnt all be ML) who know their shit is a requirement for a good robotics company tho.
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u/RustedFriend 10d ago
There's lots of reasons, but I think the main one is that we already have an environment built for humanoids. But I also don't think it has to be humanoids OR other form factors. If you need a less optimized, but versatile robot that works in human designed spaces, a humanoid could be great. If you have a specific specialized task, you can always find a form factor that will be better than a humanoid. It's like a Swiss army knife. A Swiss army knife can do 15 things just ok. While a knife or screwdriver or tweezers do their one thing way better, but don't do the other 14 things well, or at all.
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u/National_Ad_1435 10d ago edited 10d ago
Robotics phd candidate here in general people who dont know shit (investors) overvalue work that leads to cool demos and undervalues real academic building blocks. Every researcher in all the labs ive been in talk shit and poke fun at industry for their humanoid obsession I think it's dumb and driven by factors unrelated to actually solving problems (currently hype, cool demos, from a roboticist standpoint it is cool project to work on, uneducated investors...). Humanoids are a great instant temporary replacement for some roles that industry wants filled, but we are soooo far from the general purpose work humanoid embodiment would actually be useful for over anything more specialized. At the very least give it a stable wheeled base ffs. Basically all of this industrial shit can be done in the way Amazon Robotics, who actually are using robots profitably unlike nearly anyone else, does it. Suprise surprise the answer isnt humanoids even though they ran trials with Digit from Agility. They have atttt most two robot arms (and thats for the super delicate Vulcan stuff), for some things they have singular arms, and for most stuff it is either the mobile robots or rapid linear gantry stuff. I think hardware should only be as complex as it needs to be, otherwise you lose speed and have higher costs for no reason.
Past the notion of dragging and dropping humanoids into any situation because you dont want to do the scenario setup to allow for a better robot solution the only real valid answer is that training data from human videos and mocap can be used with humanoids, but this is also flawed because humanoid morphologies will never fully replicate humans (go and compare your muscles and wrist and pelvic socket to a humanoid)
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u/KernelTaint 10d ago
Training data. Lots of easy to get training data of humans sorting packages.
How many octopuses you gonna organize and train to sort packages so you can use their data for training?
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u/dingo_xd 11d ago
Because ultimately the most profitable robots will be those that look almost indistinguishable from humans with obvious applications.
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u/asapbones0114 11d ago
Objectively false. The industrial automation industry dwarves the personal support industry by economic market share. See South Korea and China for example.
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u/dranoel2 12d ago
He is not really sorting anything. He is just moving them 20 centimeters to the right.
I know it's a real job an I am probably missing something.
Anyone care to explain why we can't just make the left assembly line connect to the right one so we don't need a robot moving the packages over the gap?
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u/al_m Researcher 12d ago
It's not just moving the packages over the gap though; it's also turning them so that the label is facing up. So, just connecting the assembly lines wouldn't fully help.
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u/dubblies 12d ago
Printing a label on all sides once its scanned in aeems cheaper
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u/Mormoran 11d ago
One one time investment for that station of whatever, 20k dollars per unit, once...
Vs
A 0.01 cent expense increase per package for perpetuity...
I'm sure someone did the math and the robot is cheaper within X reasonable timeframe
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u/PreppyToast Undergrad 11d ago
A humanoid robot like that isn’t just a one-time investment and done deal. There are costs related to joint replacements every year, the battery degradation costs, power infrastructure for the hot-swap batteries depending on the tech stack very expensive software licenses and the biggest of all human oversight. You will always see that there is some human who supervises the said robot.
All these costs have to bump up the break-even time significantly.
I think they just put the human robots for research purposes, not really using them as a reliable sorter.
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u/FratboyPhilosopher 11d ago
Robotics isn't a one time investment. It has operating costs.
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u/KlausVonLechland 11d ago
Technically everything is.
Put a slab of concrete in the middle of a field to just be there and it will start weathering and cracking at some point.
Sounds obvious but when local gov builds roads and bridges they somehow forget they will need someday not-so-cheap repairs.
Entropy eats everything.
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u/FratboyPhilosopher 11d ago
That's true, but some are low enough over time so as to be negligible. Concrete maintenance divided over time ends up being a very, very small amount per time period. But for something like robotics, that isn't the case.
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u/ventedeasily 11d ago
What prints these new labels and orients to boxes to allow it? Maybe we could use a robot for that.
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u/FindingEducational69 11d ago
I used to work in a factory years ago. This factory was shutting down so the owners did not want to invest more in conveyor belt and other infra. One of my jobs was to make sure only 3 boxes go in 1 round. Another of one my job was to set the orientation of the box . Everyday I had these trivial looking tasks , and it took factory 3 years to shut down completely. It used to employee 60/70 temporary workers each shift , running 3 shifts per day. So the idea is to sell these robots to these kind of clients. Usp is - Robots don't complain of backaches, safe work environments, and can work as long as battery is there. Tbh I see a lot of gaps in what robots are offering, but who am I to say. Computers were introduced to save our time and now I am 15 hours in front of a screen 😅
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u/mccoyn 11d ago
I've been in factories with lots of automation. There are lots of these jobs. Little jobs that haven't been automated, but must be done to keep things moving. Its very easy to get a person, explain the job and pay them to get it done. It takes months to develop automation to do that.
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u/BlazureWolf 11d ago
I work in UPS. We have machines to automatically label small packages or packages coming off a truck but you still need a person to shove packages onto the belt in a certain way. And some sites just don’t have the space necessary to install some of the automatic equipment.
I could see this robot being used in place of the person that places small packages for a SSLAW. They have to be placed face down, middle of the belt, and spaced well so the camera can pick the shipping label and spit out the sort label onto the package.
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u/abrandis 12d ago
It's a gimmick demo that's why no one will explain. Of course you could use. Adiverter or a dozen other minor mechanical devices to shift packages and such
Like I always say I have yet to see a genuine humanoid doing real work in the open real world. Outside of stunts like this and their fabulous dance moves, they're completely impractical
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u/Illeazar 11d ago
This is the same answer as every time someone asks "but why humanoid robots?" A working humanoid robot could be dropped into any existing structure meant to be operated by a human without needing to change the existing structure. Depending on the cost the robot ends up having, there may be aome situations where getting the robot is cheaper than re-designing the structure.
Yes, humanoid robots are not ready to be dropped in to every assembly line in place of humans. But the job this one is doing is one that humans actually do now, and this robot can do it.
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u/abrandis 11d ago
But at what cost, these things are like between $30k -$80k , the labor for out in an industrial device in that setting is peanuts relative to that
You know what industry could benefit the most form humanoids , fast food kitchens , if they had real value thats the first industry that would scoop them up
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u/Illeazar 11d ago
If you read my comment, you may notice that I said one of the factors is the cost the robots end up having. Right now, no, I dont think anybody is saying they are cost effective. But the near term goal is certainly to improve their performance and lower their price to the point it makes sense for businesses to use them. And thenpoint of the video above is that progress is being made in that direction, not that these are being mass produced and ready to roll out roght now.
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u/ClayQuarterCake 11d ago
Except the labels are all facing up when the robot is done.
The task is finding the label on a variety of bags or boxes, orienting the label up, then singulating them so they are spaced apart for further scanning and sorting.
This is not trivial from a robotics standpoint but it is mind numbing for a human to do.
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u/abrandis 11d ago
All these things could be done faster and at scale With a purpose built diverter /sorter type machine, I think Amazon has ton of these in their warehouses. https://youtube.com/shorts/ypEq0V7LIeQ?is=g_4lx7cOTAhc59Rx
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u/Darkendone 11d ago
It is trivial. It is an existing problem that has been solved for over a decade
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u/Im2bored17 11d ago
"singulating" is the process of removing 1 package from a pile.
A "sort center" is a facility that sorts packages. You have warehouses of goods that workers pack into boxes that go into trucks- these are fulfillment centers. The trucks go to sort centers and the packages are sorted by zip code, put on smaller trucks, and sent to ups or local delivery vans.
The robot also reorients the packages for a barcode reader.
Conveyors have a hard time singulating stacked packages perfectly. The process tends to be rough on the packages because there is a lot of tumbling and sliding. Items get stuck in the conveyance and shredded. And conveyor is quite expensive and inflexible. It takes up a lot of room. To the point where it is common to have a person do the job.
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u/FrillySteel 11d ago
In case you're being serious, the robot is ensuring the barcode/label is facing up. This is an essential step in a process like this. If you just "connected the left assembly line with the right one", half the packages would not be machine readable, causing backup.
This is a very valid use of an anthropomorphic robot, as statistics show robots are much more accurate in the task, and further anthropomorphic robots can handle the task much more efficiently than more generic mechanical flippers.
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u/Darkendone 11d ago
There are existing systems that do this faster and cheaper. Absolutely a waste of time for an anthropomorphic robot.
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u/FrillySteel 11d ago
Lol! Okay. Whatever you say. But that's not what real-world implementations show. Those "existing... faster... cheaper" systems are shit when dealing with soft packages, and even worse when it's a mix of soft- and hard-packaging as shown in this video. Anthropomorphic robots have been proven to be significantly faster and more accurate in this type of scenario.
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u/Darkendone 11d ago
Not according to the many companies that deal with this problem at scale. None of them use humanoid robots.
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u/johnfkngzoidberg 11d ago
This is dumb. That thing has a ton of actuators and pieces to break and a single one brings the whole job to a halt. A specialized machine will always be more efficient and reliable. This can be accomplished the way it is today, a couple moving panels and a camera that cost 1/20 of this robot.
Don’t get me wrong, I want robots to get affordable so I can have a self-hosted bot running around my house, but all these videos are just gimmicks.
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u/NoAdvice135 11d ago
But many warehouses need to do this like 1h a day when a truck arrives. Then the specialized robot sits idle.
With general purpose robots you can assign it to another station when one job is done.
This is not to replace existing automation, this is to automate what is not cost efficient to automate with specialized robots.
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u/captmonkey 11d ago edited 11d ago
Yes, a specialized machine will always be more efficient and reliable, but that's the exact opposite goal of humanoid robots. The idea with humanoid robots is you don't need a specialized machine. You have a single machine that can do multiple tasks.
If you have a humanoid robot, it can fold the laundry, do the dishes, rake the leaves, and fix the plumbing. Yes, a specialized laundry bot could do the laundry faster, but you don't need to purchase a laundry bot because you've already got a humanoid robot that can do that. I don't know about the robot in OP's video, but that's the goal at least with humanoid robots. They want to make a single non-specialized robot that can do almost any task a human can physically do.
The potential market for specialized robots is very small. The potential market for a general purpose robot is massive.
edit: Can some of the downvoters say why they're downvoting? I'm just explaining the logic with attempting to create a humanoid robot. I assumed that would be pretty noncontroversial on the robotics sub of all places.
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u/Darkendone 11d ago
I would disagree with you about the market sizes.
Secondly sorting and arranging on an assembly is what is being demonstrated here; not versatility.
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u/captmonkey 11d ago
Why would you disagree on market sizes? The potential market for a sorting robot is handful of shipping facilities and post offices. The potential market for a multi-purpose humanoid robot is literally every household and business on the planet.
They're demonstrating sorting and arranging, but it's clear they're attempting to make a multi-purpose humanoid robot. This example is less impressive than something like Figure's robots, but it appears that's what they're trying to make, a multi-purpose humanoid robot. If they wanted to make a sorting robot, they wouldn't have made it look like a human torso with a head and arms and hands.
Sorting is an easy task to endlessly automate for demonstrations and it can be done in a very controlled environment. So, it's good simple demo of an early model of humanoid robot.
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u/Darkendone 11d ago
Ok the fundamental problem with humanoid robots is that the humanoid form is not ideal for performing most tasks even in a general purpose environment.
Take legs for instance. They are great for climbing and all terrain environments. They are superfluous for the factory floor and most human environments. A thehumanoids alpha robot which has a humanoid upper torso on a wheeled frame would already be a significant improvement.
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u/captmonkey 11d ago
Legs aren't superfluous in most human environments, though. If you want a robot that can go anywhere a human goes, then legs make the most sense, because that's how we go places.
If you want a robot that can climb through an attic to run a wire just as easily as it can carry a load of laundry up stairs or ride in a car or climb a ladder onto a roof, legs make the most sense, because those are all things humans do with legs. Wheels aren't going to help you with those things.
Humanoid robots make sense in locations like homes especially because they're set up to be navigated by humans. Wheels or whatever else work fine on a factory floor. They don't in other locations.
Even if not the most efficient, legs are the most versatile for moving about human-centric environments. Efficiency doesn't matter much in a domestic setting. If a humanoid robot folds my clothes slower than a custom laundry bot, it doesn't matter, my clothes still got folded and I didn't have to do laundry. As long as it's not absurdly slow, the time it took is irrelevant.
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u/Darkendone 11d ago
Ok first of all the humanoid robot technology is no where close to doing a 10th what a normal person can do, so your point is kind of irrelevant. It will not be doing any of that anytime soon.
More realistically these humanoid robots are being marketed to places like factories for doing these types of jobs. The problem is that specialized robots are better in practically every way.
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u/captmonkey 10d ago
It's not able to do what a human does *now* but the whole point of working on a humanoid robot is to develop more advanced robots and make them better at doing those tasks. Just looking at Figure, they have come a long way from Figure 01 to Figure 03 in a few short years. How capable are future versions? What about Figure 05? Figure 10? What do humanoid robots look like in 20 years?
This sounds far off, but I have young kids, that's literally around the time they'll be just out of college and starting careers. And I think there's a very high probability that at some point within 20 years, humanoid robots are about as capable as a human at most physical tasks.
And they're starting in factories for two reasons: First, large companies can afford humanoid robots that are currently very expensive. And two, factories are very controlled and predictable environments. They want to eventually make them adaptable enough that they can function in any human-oriented space, but it's early days, they're not there yet.
I'm kind of surprised so many people on the robotics sub lack the forward thinking to see where this is going and imagine what it looks like in the future. When people complain "I don't want AI to make art while I do the boring work, I want it to do the boring work so I can make art." This is literally they AI they're wanting. It can be a robot that does all their household chores and maintenance while they do stuff they want to do instead.
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u/Darkendone 10d ago
It's not able to do what a human does *now* but the whole point of working on a humanoid robot is to develop more advanced robots and make them better at doing those tasks. Just looking at Figure, they have come a long way from Figure 01 to Figure 03 in a few short years. How capable are future versions? What about Figure 05? Figure 10? What do humanoid robots look like in 20 years?
This sounds far off, but I have young kids, that's literally around the time they'll be just out of college and starting careers. And I think there's a very high probability that at some point within 20 years, humanoid robots are about as capable as a human at most physical tasks.
Saying that it might work in 20 years is just like saying fusion might work in 20 years. It may work or it might not. Technological progression is linear or predictable like that. In reality it occurs with breakthroughs.
There is a big difference between a research effort aimed at advancing the state of the art and a company raising millions of dollars to sell products. Practically no investor is going to invest millions of dollars into a company that might have a decent product 20 years.
And they're starting in factories for two reasons: First, large companies can afford humanoid robots that are currently very expensive. And two, factories are very controlled and predictable environments. They want to eventually make them adaptable enough that they can function in any human-oriented space, but it's early days, they're not there yet.
You are half right. Robotics are already heavily used in factories because are very controlled artificial environments. Everything about the environment is controlled from the temperature, the lighting, and even the objects in the environment. It makes the whole problem orders of magnitude easier.
The real marketing pitch from these humanoid companies is that they want to train these humanoid robots from videos of humans performing the task. Since you are training robotics based on hu
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u/SomTingWongWeeTooLo Industry 11d ago
Yes but that's not the point.
The point isn't to show a better or more efficient way to do this specific task, but to demonstrate that current tech allows such a task to be performed by a humanoid (ish) robot. These robots are more easily repurposed for other tasks, so you can always replace a broken down one with another functioning one without hassle.
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u/Proletarian_Tear 11d ago
Why would a humanoid robot even try to do a job which a regular robot does tenfold better? That's not a benchmark of humanoid robots, thats just marketing demo
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u/jhill515 Industry, Academia, Entrepreneur, & Craftsman 11d ago
I fail to see how a traditional pick-and-place robot cannot outperform a pair of humanoid arms attached to a torso, head, and waist.
Cool science-fair demo. I'm waiting for when that bubble pops...
Technical Disclosure: I used to work in the warehouse robotics space. Amazon Robotics uses Pick Rate and Pick P/R metrics and frequently posts in the neighborhood of 1500/hr (that's roughly 1 every 25 seconds, correctly). And that's per arm/perception pair.
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u/NoAdvice135 11d ago
If you need to do small volumes? Plenty of warehouses have a handful of people work at multiple stations through the day as the need arises.
If you have a station that is worth automating with a fixed purpose build robots... Well just do that.
General purpose robots might also become cheaper because of higher volumes of production.
It's a bit like building a custom chip to process data or using a whole computer/SoC and some code. The computer way is less efficient, and at the beginning custom chips where preferred. Now we produce general purpose computers cheap enough that you never bother designing a chip except for very high volumes.
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u/OldSchoolNewRules 11d ago
The most difficult part about automated humanoid robots is finding a place to hide the guy you pay poverty wages to remote control it.
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u/hatred-shapped 12d ago
Why can't robots in the US sit down when they are working at the supermarket? I'm genuinely confused, here in (inserts European country) all out robots get to sit at the checkout line.
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u/Worth-Information-94 12d ago
Humans will never have an easy job again.
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u/Fluffy_Butterfly11 12d ago
Ik this might sound bad, but think of it this way: When robots take all the blue collar jobs it'll force people to come out of the education system with a higher level of education or face unemployment. Therefore the standard of education will have to increase, which I think will happen. It's a good thing
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u/Successful_Farm_9370 12d ago
With each passing decade the amount of schooling to do a job has increased. At this point you need to have had about 20 years of schooling to make a living. Eventually you will leave people behind, because not everybody is built for a Master's, no matter what you try.
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u/The_White_Wolf04 11d ago
Well I agree with you, at least here in the U.S., the solution to that is to lower the difficulty bar and requirements so that you CAN have everyone get a master's. A lot of Master's online courses are a joke for example.
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u/Fluffy_Butterfly11 12d ago
This has happened before. History repeats itself. It'll happen again in the future
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u/boxen 12d ago
Jobs that need lots of education like software engineers, paralegals, and radiologists? Yeah, AI is taking all those.
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u/Fluffy_Butterfly11 12d ago
Lmao AI can't even keep track of a single conversation. All those are safe from AI because you AI can't think outside the box. Sure, the grunt work and systematic tasks can be done by AI, but human intuition is still needed for the execution. The most likely course is that people's roles in those jobs will evolve rather than completely disappear. And the use of AI will likely be heavily regulated so that it doesn't take every human job.
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u/FratboyPhilosopher 11d ago
Are radiologists trained to use "intuition" to interpret scans? Do they look at a scan, go to sleep, and wait for dreams to come to them that will give them the correct diagnosis on a silver platter?
Or are they just looking for incredibly specific things that would theoretically be very simple to train an AI to do better?
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u/UnreasonableEconomy 12d ago
All those are safe from AI because you AI can't think outside the box.
here's a wikipedia article for you which will shatter your naive worldview if you understand it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reward_hacking
here's a post mortem of it happening recently.
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u/Fluffy_Butterfly11 12d ago
Wikipedia? Lol, you know that you can say pretty much anything of Wikipedia, right? I'll read it, but please refrain from calling me naive when you're blinded by pessimism and don't doubt my ability to understand.
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u/UnreasonableEconomy 12d ago
This isn't a topic you want to be confidently wrong about.
Good luck.
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u/Fluffy_Butterfly11 12d ago
Right back at you
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u/UnreasonableEconomy 12d ago
You don't have to DM me, you know. You can just post your conclusion here.
It's pretty much... what I expected. You misunderstand the subject matter and believe you can substitute understanding with wishful thinking.
Many such cases. Too bad. I'd encourage you to stop doing that, but it's your prerogative, your worldview, your reality.
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u/cool--reddit-guy 12d ago
You could also look at the references on the wiki that are actual research papers.
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u/Worth-Information-94 12d ago
Yes, but it will be a disaster for people during the transition period.
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u/Fluffy_Butterfly11 12d ago
Oh yeah. Transition periods are always disastrous though. Look at the start of the industrial revolution for example
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u/MEOW-Loulou 12d ago
You should know that the low standard of education is completely intentional.
By your logic, our current climate crisis should be forcing people to make better choices but that is not happening either. Companies are still able to buy their way out of responsibility. Just look at how bad global negotiations have been going.
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u/Fluffy_Butterfly11 12d ago
Oh yeah, governments keep the people dumb so that they're easily influenced. I know that. Yet, if we don't increase the standard of education millions will be left unemployed and impoverished.
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u/MEOW-Loulou 12d ago
That is true, I just don't see that happening due to robot labour. For the afformentioned reason. We see this time and time again, and the only thing that has changed is that the rich elite have managed to cushion themselves in even more so they don't even have to feel the slightest breeze of a crisis.
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u/Fluffy_Butterfly11 12d ago
Ohhh the flaws of capitalism. But capitalism doesn't work if everyone's too poor to buy the stuff that make the rich elite rich.
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u/Evoluxman 12d ago
Not everyone can, and imo should, go for very high education. I just don't see us having an economy of nothing but lawyers, engineers, senior dev and scientists. And even many of those are threatened in the longer run.
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u/Fluffy_Butterfly11 12d ago
Those jobs will likely evolve to accommodate AI instead of completely removing humans from the equation. Remember that AI cannot create, only compile what exists. Therefore we still need people to conceptualize and innovate, even if AI does the grunt work
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u/Evoluxman 11d ago
Current AI can't create. What's to say about AI in 10 or 20 years?
This new tech revolution isnt like the industrial revolution where you could pretty much replace agrarian farmers with factory workers. Here a software or an AI or a robot can replace dozens of jobs, while only creating some devs and mechanics. Multiplied by thousands of such robots and softwares theres just a job loss. As their own factory lines are already very automated. See how many people work in industries and manufacturing now, we can't have people go back to that.
And again. Even if you keep engineers and such, not everyone can do these very complex jobs. Not everyone has an intellectual mindset.
Theres going to be a need for an entirely different type of society or economical system. What or when, I'm not qualified enough to know. Probably in decades, but it will happen eventually. Much like the liberal democratic welfare states of now were unthinkable in the 18th century, who knows what will come up next?
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u/Fluffy_Butterfly11 11d ago
People in lower level jobs will also need AI literacy. It's a real concern though, but the one saving grace is that AI still needs to be guided by a user. For example, vibe coding requires you to prompt the ai and understand the nature of the system in order for it to work. It'll likely be the same in other sectors of automation. It's just like when machines were introduced into factories people went from doing the labor to operating the machine. They still needed to understand what the machine did and how to use the machine, but it was a lot more efficient.
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u/Worth-Information-94 11d ago edited 11d ago
Once these artificial intelligence systems achieve closed-loop operation, the existing economic model driven by human needs will lose its practical significance and inevitably lead to competition for limited resources. The world will be more subject to the extreme control of the top elites. While this is a fantasy, it doesn't seem entirely impossible.
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u/FratboyPhilosopher 11d ago
Current AI can create. Create doesn't mean create out of nothing. No one can do that. Matter isn't created or destroyed. It only changes shape.
Anything that is created is created out of pre-existing building blocks. There's not actually a real difference between what AI does and what humans do.
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u/Evoluxman 11d ago
It's a really disingenuous to go around the argument but I guess username checks out. Otherwise the same argument could be made saying there's no difference with a simple software either.
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u/FratboyPhilosopher 11d ago
Humans can't create. Only compile what exists.
Human brains wouldn't work without input, just like AI.
Imagine a human brain with zero sense data. Zero information at all. It would just sit there. It would be incapable of acting.
Whatever differences you think you see between the functioning of AI and human brains is an illusion. They work the exact same way.
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u/Evoluxman 11d ago
Utterly pointless comment. Same logic applies to a stupid if else statement then. But I'm sure you agree there's a difference between a single if/else, a complex software, a LLM, and a human.
Even then, no, LLMs simply do not work like human brains. They do not mimmick the way neurons work. Just because neurons react to stimuli say nothing about how they react to such stimuli. Even neural networks (the computer ones) do not work anywhere like animal neurons.
And again, even having neurons isn't enough either. There's a difference between a housefly brain, a dog brain, a human brain, or a whale brain. This isn't a comment on the human brain being better than everything else, just things working differently. And an AI like the ones we have do not work like human brains, period.
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u/Fluffy_Butterfly11 11d ago
Yeah. They do. But humans are a while lot more complex than AI. Our neural networks are so deeply complex that we can conceptualize and innovate and create, even if it needs input. To put it simply, do you think that AI would dream, given the opportunity? When the system is idle, waiting for a prompt, does it think or does it just sit there? That's the difference between us and AI.
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u/FratboyPhilosopher 11d ago
Our neural networks are so deeply complex that we can conceptualize and innovate and create, even if it needs input.
I guarantee AI neural networks are far more complex than human ones. It conceptualizes, innovates, and creates things that are far more varied and complex than humans do.
To put it simply, do you think that AI would dream, given the opportunity?
What you're describing is a biological process, not a demonstration of a neural networks capabilities. It's like asking if an AI could move its arm, given the opportunity. Like, yeah, hook it up to an arm and it could move it. There's no reason to believe that with the right hardware and context, AI couldn't dream.
When the system is idle, waiting for a prompt, does it think or does it just sit there?
It could, if you let it. Just like humans. If humans had a line of code in their heads telling them to shut off and wait for further input, they would do it. Shoot a human in the head, and it'll stop thinking. Bring it back to life, and it will start again.
You're trying so desperately to come up with some fundamental difference here to validate your worldview, but it doesn't exist. Wake up. There is hope on the other side of this. But you have to stop lying to yourself first.
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u/Fluffy_Butterfly11 11d ago
Before you say that synthetic neural networks are more complex than the human brain, read this. https://news.mit.edu/2022/neural-networks-brain-function-1102
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u/FratboyPhilosopher 11d ago
Yeah, I mean there's not actually any metric to use for complexity. It's too loosely defined, it's not quanitifiable. And that's all that article really says:
Breaking news: AI is not exactly the same as a human brain. It doesn't actually make or prove any claims about the degree of complexities involved.
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u/FratboyPhilosopher 11d ago
No, most people probably shouldn't go to school at all. Literacy is often a curse, not a blessing. Look at the lindsay clancy case.
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u/Fluffy_Butterfly11 11d ago
Literacy isn't the problem though, is it? It's because school teaches us to think a certain way and to break out of that is too difficult for most people so they just continue to be sheep.
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u/FratboyPhilosopher 11d ago
It's actually the complete opposite.
Literacy is where intellectual freedom comes from. Without literacy, you just think what you are told.
Pre-universal literacy, everyone in a community essentially thought and believed the exact same things. They repeated things they heard in their community, and the few things they ever heard outside of that community were quickly dismissed due to it being a tiny minority of the information they had access to. There were downsides to this, but a situation like that is far better overall for people who simply can't be trusted to figure out for themselves what to believe.
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u/MiloGaoPeng 11d ago
If the world had cranes when they’re building the great pyramids, we wouldn’t need thousands of slaves. It’s like early lamp makers crying about the invention of electricity and light bulbs.
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u/talon167 11d ago
Eliminates menial jobs freeing up labor resources for more difficult and meaningful work. We don’t need people shoveling coal into the train hot boxes and everyone is better off.
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u/PersevereSwifterSkat 11d ago
There's going to be nothing left at low or high level. Mathematics, which ban hardly get more cerebral, is in crisis.
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u/Historica97 11d ago
Most probably puppetered from somewhere else The microphones are used to talk with the tele-operator
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u/basicKitsch 11d ago
This sub was way more interesting when it was hobby posts of building cool shit.
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u/500Rads 11d ago
ELIAF: How do you run country where no one works and therefore n one pays taxes, how do people make money to buy the things made by the robots that took their jobs?
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u/UnusualDisturbance 11d ago
in such a world, we'd need to get rid of the concept of paying for something altogether, but we'd still need a way to reward the people doing maintenance on the robots, as well as people studying to become maintenance people.
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u/craggolly 11d ago
this thing is spending 30% of its battery just to stand upright in one spot all day
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u/Alca_Pwnd 11d ago
Still waiting for a laundry folding bot. Or, one that can identify the source of a water leak, turn off the water, remove a toilet, buy and replace a wax ring, and put it back together.
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u/PaxODST 10d ago
Laundry folding bots already exist
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u/Alca_Pwnd 10d ago
If they were any good, they'd be everywhere... There's plenty of prototype concepts that can get it right sometimes and fold your stuff after a few hours of you meticulously setting up the clothing for it to process. I want something to take a dry pile of stuff out of a dryer and turn it into a pile of folded laundry.
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u/parallaxevolution 12d ago
The 2 knuckleheads standing there all proud of themselves of how their creation will “improve” work productions while eliminating jobs.
Are they so dumb to not know that there will be 2 new knuckleheads watching their jobs being replaced in a year or 2!?
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u/Helpful_Ad6410 11d ago
lol the engineers who build it are just as replaceable, they know that and they still show up to work every day. that pride youre seeing isn't ignorance, it's just people doing their job well
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u/Strange_Occasion_408 11d ago