(With apologies to podcast listeners; you really need to see the videos at these links!)
Plenty of people, after you show them something like the robot martial arts demo from the Spring Festival Gala in February, will give you the kind of robot reality check that goes something like, “These robots are just running a pre-recorded routine. It’s not like they could actually fight you.” While this child and this engineer might beg to differ, the critique is probably true, for those robots.
Indeed, today’s multi-purpose robots have many shortcomings. They have to work as a team to make a bed. They’re slow and imprecise when folding laundry. They make a mess in the kitchen. The refrigerator they bring you might arrive with scratches and dents. They need multiple battery changes to run a marathon faster than the human record-holder. Sometimes, they turn out to be remotely operated, falling on their backs when the operator takes off their headset.
But I don’t show those videos to say, “Robots are ready to take your job and nunchuck you in a back alley.” The robot reality check I’m offering is that, just a year earlier, humanoids could barely do any of those household chores, the robot marathon took more than twice as long, and the Spring Festival Gala robots looked like this.
The progress is unlikely to stop. The AIs driving the robot bodies are getting dramatically smarter, and are training in accelerated simulations that allow them to acquire centuries of practice in days or weeks. At the same time, robot bodies are becoming more dexterous and reliable, thanks to soaring investment.
The sparks don’t fly until these trends combine to yield robots that approach the utility of paid humans in different roles. But don’t assume robots need to be faster, better, and cheaper than their replacements to start earning their keep. Excelling at any one of those traits may be enough to make inroads.
For many tasks, a dramatically lower cost can forgive limitations in speed or precision. Security guards and traffic cops probably fall into this category.
For tasks where speed or precision is everything, more specialized robots may win out even if they cost more to employ than the best available humans. I think some kinds of surgery and field welding probably fall into this category.
And then there are the tasks humans can’t do at all, like vaulting down a rocky slope, or spinning in the air so quickly that they become effectively transparent. (I can see military applications for both kinds of bots, though more conventional drones would probably do a lot more for the money.)
And humans, while very talented at picking things up with their articulated limbs, struggle to hover above the ground while doing so, unlike this multi-jointed aerial robot — though sometimes what you really want in that situation are aerial tentacles.
I’m on record recently as being deeply uncertain about whether humanoid robots will actually matter, because I think AI capable of piloting those robots well enough to replace a lot of jobs might not be far from leapfrogging to more exotic technologies. I suggested nanotechnology as one possibility, but mere microtechnology might do for a lot of roles — think swarms of insect-like bots buzzing around and teaming up to get things done. When I try to picture such swarms doing the same household chores the humanoids were bad at in the above videos, I get something like that scene from Snow White, only even more horrifying.
But nothing like that is here yet! So for now, enjoy your nunchuck supremacy, laugh at the latest robo-foibles, and whistle while you work.
The analyses and opinions expressed on AI StopWatch reflect the views of the individual contributors and the sources they cover, and should not be taken as official positions of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.