I’m surprised more people aren’t aware of how rapidly robotics are currently developing. The same LLM AI that is capturing public attention with generative art and ChatGPT is equally revolutionizing robots.
Here’s an illustration of it. This is the closest I’ve seen yet of a mass-market-priced and extremely capable robot that could sell in tens of millions around the world. This looks close to the type of robot you could bring to many workplaces and get to do a wide range of unskilled work. How long before we see fast food places fully staffed by robots like these? At the current rate of development that seems only 2 or 3 years away.
There is no such thing as unskilled work. That is pure classist bullshit.
there is labor that can* be done with extremely little skill. Think vacuuming a large flat room with nothing valuable on it, that task could be done (more or less) with a robotic vacuum. Entire jobs might not be fully replaced but labor demands can be greatly reduced.
*not necessarily done well, but done to minimum standards
You know what it means, god dammit. There’s jobs anyone can fake with a week of training and there’s jobs that need six years of school to not kill people.
The strange thing about fast food places is that there’s no “train of food” where you just have to order in a screen and a robotic line makes your food. I’d say it’s one of the first places that could do that.
We’ve seen a few robot restaurants open in the past few years. I wonder how they’re getting on. I remember at least one was a failure because it needed humans to supervise everything.
Food is just unpredictable. What shape is lettuce?
Word on the street is that robots that can chop and sautee carefully provided ingredients themselves are probably coming, but that’s more evolution than revolution. The big space to watch is AIs taking your order in a more human way.
What’s the use case, though? There really isn’t much benefit to humanoid form robots outside of looking good to human aesthetics. Much of what robotics and automation would be good for don’t actually require humanoid forms.
Navigating human environments. Imagine a team of these robots toting moving boxes down the stairs of a third floor apartment and loading them into a truck.
Assuming it actually works good. Right now they’re probably going to get a limb caught irrecoverably on a doorknob.
Shit I want one but it needs to be programed to cook and clean.
And I’ll call it Rosey…
No way! That name of my robot. I called it first.
Fine, then I’ll just call mine Rosie.
I need to wait for the after market attachments, and preferably less pinch points.
Lol yeah, but what are going do with yours?
Fuck it, then perhaps have it mow the grass. Its probably going to need a job too, 16k is a lot.
Cheaper then having kids with mowing the grass in mind.
Curious as to why the person that downvoted this, did so?
My theory would be that some western people are very disquieted to see China take the lead in various technological fields. When I post in r/futurology on Reddit I constantly observe this in China related comments and discussion.
It’s disappointing that politics and xenophobia are even a factor in such discussions. As a society, we were always going to make humanoid robots, the question was if we would be ready for them by the time they arrive? Unfortunately, I don’t think we are ready and we’ll likely use them for profit. But that doesn’t take away from the benefits that they can provide. If we can have these assist the sick and elderly, that would be wonderful for society. I just don’t see the downside of this article being posted, at the very least it opens up the floor to discussion.
