[HN Gopher] Robots Must Be Ephemeralized
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Robots Must Be Ephemeralized
Author : sebg
Score : 93 points
Date : 2021-09-21 14:54 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.evjang.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.evjang.com)
| lostdog wrote:
| We used to say that AI development should be "embodied," because
| only the real world was complex and structured enough to train up
| an intelligence. Funny how the tables have turned!
|
| My experience matches the author's exactly. You must check your
| robot against the real world to ensure it works, but simulation
| is the only feasible way to train and evaluate your system at
| scale.
|
| The challenge is that simulators are kinda sorta almost good
| enough, but no actually they're not, and you need to solve a
| bunch of problems around the sim2real gap. The problems range
| from doable (colors look different under certain lighting
| conditions), to hard (simulating how other robots and people
| react to you), to still impossible (the feeling when a USB C plug
| has snapped into place). Each day we close the gap a little bit,
| but there is still a ways to go.
| ericjang wrote:
| I still think that AI development should be embodied, and am
| willing to entertain the possibility that you don't need
| simulation at scale to train it (e.g. some clever unsupervised
| learning algorithm).
|
| Evaluating a system that can do millions of things is simply
| impossible in reality, and that alone necessitates some kind of
| software-based evaluation metric. I agree that there is a ways
| to go - but I think trying to make simulation more like reality
| is a safer bet than having a low ceiling on iteration speed in
| real.
| hinkley wrote:
| I think it's the siren song of thinking there were going to be
| more ways for a practical AI to cheat, and it turns out all the
| corner cases actually matter. Everyone had their fingers
| crossed that 'the world' was mostly accidental complexity
| instead of intrinsic. And to be fair I'm not sure that you
| historically had a choice in this. If you were doing AI
| research in the 80's or 90's there just weren't enough compute
| cycles available to model anything complex. Either you believed
| the gap was narrow and you found another field to work in, or
| you hoped that it was wide and that you were going to discover
| just how wide it was.
|
| Every mammal has a model of the universe in their head that
| they work against. Mirror neurons expand that to modelling
| other mammals. I don't know how you can reason about an
| environment if you don't have a useful model of it first and
| foremost.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| "...but the writing is on the wall: software is coming for
| hardware, and this trend will only accelerate."
|
| I wonder if this is perhaps one of those cyclical things.
| Software comes for hardware. Then we all remember how much good
| hardware simplifies software and multiplies capability, so
| hardware becomes very important again, etc.
| hristov wrote:
| What the author meant here is software is coming for mechanical
| hardware, like gears and motors. I.e., with more advanced
| software you will be able to use cheaper gears and motors. As
| far as electronic hardware, forget about it. You will need more
| and more of it. His vision of replacing super high precision in
| gears and motors with sensors and image recognition will
| require a lot of sensors and some pretty hefty processors for
| image recognition.
| hinkley wrote:
| High precision hardware means that you can mathematically
| prove the correctness of motion within a very narrow margin
| of error.
|
| I think there what you are really trading though is precision
| in the mechanical components for precision - and speed - in
| the sensors. If I can detect the slop I can correct for it.
| If I can't (or don't) then success is dictated by the input,
| not the output. If you can't detect the slop fast enough you
| have to slow down to avoid slamming into something fragile or
| immovable.
|
| The human brain has a motor cortex, uses proprioception as
| the primary feedback, but touch and sight are used as sanity
| checks. In my experience with physical talents, you're
| training your proprioception as much as anything. Probably
| because it's faster than touch (and has fewer consequences),
| and cheaper than sight (you can't focus on anything else if
| you are watching your hands).
| xxpor wrote:
| The line is getting more blurry as time goes on anyway. There's
| some _extremely_ flexible hardware out there these days, where
| most the ongoing development is writing software /firmware for
| the hardware. That software then programs the HW to do what you
| want, and so you get the speed benefits of HW with a lot of the
| flexibility of SW.
| bitwize wrote:
| Some of the speed benefits. Programmable HW can't match an
| ASIC in speed yet, but it can significantly outperform a
| general purpose microprocessor at the same task, provided the
| task is sufficiently narrow.
| amelius wrote:
| > software is coming for hardware
|
| No, look at Apple and NVidia. It's hardware eating software.
| jmugan wrote:
| This is why I get so excited about increasingly realistic
| simulators, like Microsoft Flight Simulator
| https://medium.com/@jmugan/microsoft-flight-simulator-2020-i...
|
| Edited to say that was a blog post I wrote
| 01100011 wrote:
| Take a look at Nvidia's Isaac Simulator:
| https://developer.nvidia.com/isaac-sim
|
| It's exactly what the article is talking about. BMW used it to
| help automate a factory: https://www.nvidia.com/en-
| us/autonomous-machines/embedded-sy...
| jmugan wrote:
| Wow, that is incredible. Very cool.
| s_gourichon wrote:
| One word of the title is not obvious. Here's how it is defined in
| the text:
|
| > Ephemeralization, a term coined by R. Buckminster Fuller in
| 1938, is the ability of technological advancement to do "more and
| more with less and less until eventually you can do everything
| with nothing,"
|
| > Consistent with this theme, I believe the solution to scaling
| up generalist robotics is to push as much of the iteration loop
| into software as possible, so that the researcher is freed from
| the sheer slowness of having to iterate in the real world.
|
| ...
|
| > The most obvious way to ephemeralize robot learning in software
| is to make simulations that resemble reality as closely as
| possible.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| This kind of comment seems to just support not reading the
| articles. Is this encouraged on HN?
| mattnewton wrote:
| I think it lets me know if the article is worth my time. I
| usually glance at the comment sections first because small
| titles often aren't enough to understand what the article is
| about.
| sbierwagen wrote:
| Supporting this, I would say I'm reading the first couple
| comments on a submission far more often than reading the
| submission itself. It's not even close, probably three or
| four times more.
| Zababa wrote:
| It's also a way to create discussion around a specific part
| of the article.
| jsnell wrote:
| Yeah, I must admit that from the title I thought this was going
| to be an argument that we should factory reset all robots daily
| just to ensure they never become conscious, or start drifting
| from their default settings in other ways. "Mindwipe them all,
| it's the only way to be sure."
| iknowstuff wrote:
| "Robots Must Be Westworlded"
| Animats wrote:
| Well, if all you have is machine learning, you're going to need a
| lot of trials. Hence the need for repeatable simulations.
|
| From the article:
|
| _" Alternatively, one could follow the Tesla Autopilot approach
| and deploy their research code in "shadow mode" across a fleet of
| robots in the real world, where the model only makes predictions
| but does not make control decisions."_
|
| Does Tesla really do that? Has anyone decoded what they're
| uploading? How much upload bandwidth does each car use? Or is
| this just hype?
| ankeshanand wrote:
| Yep, Karpathy has mentioned this multiple times in their AI
| talks.
| olau wrote:
| My understanding is that each car can run a shadow model, and
| then they have a data collection thing running that uploads
| interesting video clips, where one of the possible conditions
| is "something different than what we predicted happened". Those
| clips may then get analyzed, labeled and used for training.
|
| Some Tesla owners seem to think that the cars are learning from
| all the weird situations they encounter, and I think that's
| just plain wrong. But some of them, yes.
| wrnr wrote:
| I think this is a much more interesting angle to the metaverse
| than virtual reality and 3D glasses. Simulation can also help
| with personalised manufacturing and designing sustainable
| cyclical industry.
| bitwize wrote:
| Having worked in robotics, I can absolutely vouch for the
| usefulness of simulation. It's not a 100% solution by any
| stretch, but it will absolutely help you smoke out the stupid,
| low hanging bugs, freeing you to concentrate on the messy shit
| that happens in the real world. When I was in the field,
| simulated tests were a critical part of our CI infrastructure,
| and warnings would be sent out if something failed in simulation.
| I even jokingly proposed a coat of arms for our software team
| featuring an "AUV naiant" blazon and the motto "Fungitur
| Simulatoris" -- dog latin for "it works in the simulator"
| (literally "he/she/it performs for the liar").
| [deleted]
| DonHopkins wrote:
| "Department of Research Simulation"
| sheepybloke wrote:
| This reminds me a lot of digital twin and digital ghost[1]. Once
| you get strong models of those systems then the sky is the limit
| in terms of training. I could see there being a trend in the
| future to model and design systems to easily capture and create
| models of different hardware for companies to help with training
| development in simulations. [1]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_twin
| Flocular wrote:
| The take away from this for me is that we probably live in a
| simulated world that is training some robots. Sooo, who's the
| robot here?
| jeffwask wrote:
| I've known adventures, seen places you people will never see,
| I've been Offworld and back... frontiers! I've stood on the back
| deck of a blinker bound for the Plutition Camps with sweat in my
| eyes watching stars fight on the shoulder of Orion... I've felt
| wind in my hair, riding test boats off the black galaxies and
| seen an attack fleet burn like a match and disappear. I've seen
| it, felt it..
| omnicognate wrote:
| I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on
| fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in
| the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be
| lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
| fouc wrote:
| I find it disconcerting that these two quotes allude to
| attack ships, or warfare of some sort. Of all the interesting
| things that were seen that could've been mentioned, and war
| was included.
| omnicognate wrote:
| They're different versions of the same quote. One was the
| original version in the script and the other was what
| Rutger Hauer actually said in the movie.
|
| The memories are about war because the android speaking
| them was a combat model, so his entire life had been spent
| fighting in wars.
| jeffwask wrote:
| I think Blade Runner is very accurate in it's vision of how
| humans will interact with robots.
| the_af wrote:
| The character saying those things was designed with a
| 4-year lifespan to do nothing but fight in wars. This is
| his moment of character development: he was a tool of
| warfare, but he found beauty in those moments, proving he
| was capable of something else besides killing.
|
| It's a major point of the movie.
|
| Note that in a sense, it mirrors many developments in
| automation in the real world. Military drones and whatnot.
| Borrible wrote:
| Ecce homo!
| Kiro wrote:
| I'm curious why you chose to quote an early draft of the
| monologue.
| jeffwask wrote:
| Mandela Effect
| georgeecollins wrote:
| Maybe the OP was googling a script. The difference between
| the two versions here is a draft of the script vs the
| improvised lines.
|
| https://gointothestory.blcklst.com/blade-runner-dialogue-
| ana...
|
| Blade Runner is an excellent example of the power of
| collaboration. Hampton Fancher's script Ridley Scott's
| direction, Vangellis, Mobius, Syd Mead. Rutger Hauer
| developed his character more in ways that are famous, and
| Edward James Olmos invented cityspeak.
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