Why don't we have better robots yet?

"Robot, will you wash the dishes?" "I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that."

I want a robot that answers all my colleagues' questions only in passive-aggressive tone.

I'm a robotics researcher and I think something that's missing in this video is that the sensing problem, that is: simply getting information about the world, is enormous and current sensing technology is far short of what is needed to truly operate in the real world. The sheer amount of data that animals are able to take in, process, and synthesize is enormous and (in my opinion) this ability to draw from many different sources of information to build a model of the self and the world is what would enable the next breakthrough in the field. I also want to push back on the assertion that we don't already have robots everywhere. I would argue that everything from self-driving cars to automated factories and even elevators fit the description of "a physical device operating independently based on sensory input." To me, that's a robot.

"Honey, the helper's legs are squeaking again, we need to schedule an oiling." "Honey the helper is frozen in the living room, did you pay the subscription?"

I clink therefore I am. 🤖

Rob Sanner of the University of Maryland had solved many of these problems back in the early 1990s, but apparently not enough people have read his MIT doctoral thesis. One can design the neural network layers and approximation functions so as to give it space to adapt. Then there are adaptive control strategies to be able to provide learning. Kevin Wise of Boeing and Eugene Lavretsky of Caltech pioneered this area, as well as Anthony J. Calise and his students at Georgia Tech. A lot of the firms out there aren't leveraging this research, which is the real problem.

I work in robotics. I've worked with picking robots (hands/arms) and autonomous mobile robots (move around by themselves). This is fairly accurate.

Drones don't need to understand cupboards to 'unalive' people.

What is my purpose? You pass butter.

Elevators will eventually be sentient and conscious, questioning the meaning of life after an existential crisis

Congratulations Robot Sabine on a well done video

Thanks Sabine for pointing this out. It is a topic that is taxing my mind as i write a novel about a Synthetic Consciousness. One way to train an SC to use a robotic body would be to implant sensors in a human and record maps how a human navigates and exploits the real world in real time. At the same time a SC could create a comprehensive map of language use. Maps themselves are interesting artefacts. They can be characterised as massive multidomain data sets. Massive is the biggest problem in this description because it implies large storage and computational spaces and illuminates the bandwidth problem of a truely independent Robotic Sythetic Consciousness

Hi, two points here: First, I´m sure you are totally right, that consciousness needs physically and sensorically confrontation with an environment. So LLMs won´t get it regardless of their intelligence, and the sensoric system of robotic is still a bit primitive in comparison to biological organisms, so it might take some time for the first conscious robot too. Second, I would like to add a third issue here, that´s energy supply. Since the muscles of robots are electric engines they need batteries (both quite heavy), and since your bunch of videos about that topic shows, they are heavy and have low energy density. Even a simple mowing robot needs to charge constantly, so I think that limits the outlook on a super-mighty "terminator"- robot or a super-helpfull houshold-robot soon. The suit of "iron-man" is supplied by a kind of micro fusion reactor, no?

"LLMs have no reason to become conscious" - well put!

Robots will never understand that the coffee machine that they were supposed to operate that morning is not there because their owner was really really drunk last night.

The thing about the intelligence explosion, is that it doesn't really rely so heavily on robotics, at first. There's plenty of existing data, to train an "AGI" like intelligence, to be as good as the human engineers that built it, at the same task. We're already nearly there. And that's all we require, an AI good enough at being an AI engineer. Unlike with robots, that require collecting data in the real world, an engineer level AI can write code, test it, make changes, and so on, all in software. So once we have something good enough, it won't be long until we end up with something far better. Then that super AI might be able to solve many of the other problems we have, including how to more rapidly iterate on and improve robotics.

I have a household robot vacuum, far simpler than a general robot. And it works pretty great... Except for all the things it just can't make sense of. Like my house has a "circle" in it; the kitchen, dining room, hall, living room, all connect in a big circle, and the AI in the robot just has a mental meltdown. It just can't comprehend that these are 4 separate rooms separated by doors, and then gets lost whenever it encounters a "wall" which is actually a door that it can't understand why it's there, because it's convinced it's all a single room. And nothing I've been able to do manages to convince it that it's 4 rooms. I used to try and fiddle with it's map in the software to try and force it to understand that there are 4 rooms separated by doors, and I can do that, and the robot stops getting lost... For about a week until it decides it's human overlord is clearly mistaken and this has been one room all along, and then proceeds to edit it's own map back to the dysfunctional state. But what about navigation around furniture? Is it good at that? It's actually fantastic at navigating around furniture... once I modified or replaced all the furniture in the house to be robot friendly. Was that worth doing? Hell yeah, screw vacuuming every day, best household improvement since Central Air Conditioning. Is my robot vacuum going to be taking over the world anytime soon? lol, I have to babysit this thing so much.

What pisses me off is when people say "Didn't you see Terminator?" I'm going to start answering with "no" at this point.

It’s like in the 2004 stepford movie, their house was decorated while they slept. The robots just have to learn to build themselves then we’re off to the races. Mbe I watch too many movies tho lol

"I find humans hardly to understand" me too. Thanks for sharing your knowledge. Greetings from Argentina.