[HN Gopher] Toyota Research claims breakthrough in teaching robo...
___________________________________________________________________
Toyota Research claims breakthrough in teaching robots new
behaviors
Author : geox
Score : 162 points
Date : 2023-09-20 16:30 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.tri.global)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.tri.global)
| BillSaysThis wrote:
| This seems pretty cool. But I'm not clear how someone can be a
| (full-time) professor at MIT and also be a (full-time) vice
| president at TRI. I've seen this kind of two-job situation before
| but never understood how it's practical, unless the person works
| 70+ hours a week.
| epolanski wrote:
| You probably still 40 hours week or less, but you're so expert
| in those fields that your 10 hours of work cannot be replaced
| by somebody else working full time.
|
| In software engineering terms, you would gladly pay a full good
| salary and give a good role to John Carmack to work on your
| projects 6/7 days per month anyway, because he's John Carmack.
| colordrops wrote:
| I'm pretty ignorant of state of the art robotics and had assumed
| for years that approaches like this were used, e.g. by Boston
| Dynamics. Surprising to see that it's a new thing.
| jononomo wrote:
| Has Boston Dynamics ever done anything other than produce a
| viral video approximately every 5 years? Mr Beast produces a
| viral video twice a month.
| belter wrote:
| "Visuomotor Policy Learning via Action Diffusion" -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37581866
| galaxytachyon wrote:
| Ok here it is. An LLM with physical senses. They mentioned sense
| of touch and I think that is a big deal. You can teach me all you
| want about a new color with all the text description available
| and it would be worse than just show me that new color.
|
| In the same way, letting an AI actually touch and interact with
| the world would do wonders in grounding it and making sure it
| understand concepts beyond just the words or the bytes it was fed
| during training. GPT4 can already understand images and text, it
| should not be long until it takes care of videos and we can say
| AI has vision. This robot from toyota would have touch. We need
| hearing and smelling and then maybe we will get something
| resembling a true AGI.
| xwdv wrote:
| Why imitate human senses? AI should be able to reach out and
| touch radio waves, and interpret their meanings, much how we
| interpret the meaning behind gusts of wind.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| We can do both, but clearly the senses that mammals have are
| well adapted for existence on Earth.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _reach out and touch radio waves_
|
| At the point we're describing "touching" massless particles,
| we might as well say that's what our retinas do. In terms of
| novel senses, some kind of gravitometric sense would be neat.
| LIGO-on-a-chip and all.
| nradov wrote:
| There's no reason to expect that such advances will get us
| closer to a true AGI. I mean it's not impossible, but there's
| no coherent theory or technical roadmap. Just a lot of hope and
| hand waving.
|
| I do think that this is an impressive accomplishment and will
| lead to valuable commercial products regardless of the AGI
| issues.
| mxkopy wrote:
| "True AGI" is often used in a way that means "human-like
| intelligence, but faster, more consistent and of greater
| depth". In that case, knowing that embodied agents are the
| way forward is quite trivial. We've known for a long time
| that the development of a human brain is a function of its
| sensory inputs - why would this be any different for an
| artificial intelligence, especially if designed to
| mimic/interface with a human one?
| nradov wrote:
| That's not the right question to ask. You can construct all
| sorts of hypotheticals or alternative answers but all of
| that is meaningless until someone actually builds it.
| criddell wrote:
| > true AGI
|
| What is that? Most humans have general intelligence, but do
| other apes? Do dogs? A quick google search suggests that the
| answer is yes.
|
| If that's the case, then this approach may indeed yield an
| AGI but maybe it's not going to be much better than a golden
| retriever. Truly excellent at some things, intensely loyal (I
| hope), but goofy at most other things.
|
| Or maybe just as dogs will never understand calculus, maybe
| our future AGI will understand things that we will not be
| able to. It seems to me that there's a good chance that AGI
| (and intelligence in general) is a spectrum.
| m_fayer wrote:
| There's a wonderful novella by Ed Chiang called "the
| lifecycle of software objects" that addresses your thoughts
| exactly. Highly recommended.
| nradov wrote:
| Intelligence in general seems to be a spectrum for animals.
| Future AGI may be on an entirely different spectrum which
| isn't directly comparable. We won't know until someone
| actually builds one and we have a chance to evaluate it.
| [deleted]
| consumer451 wrote:
| > Ok here it is. An LLM with physical senses.
|
| See: Pieter Abbeel & Jitendra Malik
|
| https://www.therobotbrains.ai/copy-of-jitendra-malik
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Toyota hinting at AGI in 2 years time? Yes, I'm skeptical.
|
| "Siri, make me a sandwich"
|
| "You're out of bread, would you like me to bake some bread and
| then make your sandwich?"
|
| isn't going to happen by 2025.
| 3seashells wrote:
| [flagged]
| reaperman wrote:
| I can honestly see this by 2030. Just not reliable or safe
| enough for a consumer product.
|
| There will be a gap between "can be done reliably in testing"
| (probably doable by 2030 even in a randomly chosen house that's
| not part of the test set) and "safe enough for consumers,
| children, and pets to not get injured by the movements of a
| robot who is strong enough to lift and carry a 40lb bag of
| flour or 40lb laundry basket".
|
| That safety gap for "co-working" robots will be _very_
| difficult to close enough for the CPSC to be satisfied and also
| avoid expensive class-action or individual lawsuits.
| anticensor wrote:
| You forgot the sudo: https://xkcd.com/149
| moffkalast wrote:
| RemindMe! 2 years
|
| Ah wait, this isn't Reddit. Well anyhow we'll see I suppose. My
| money would be more on unfreezing and reheating bread instead,
| dough rising takes too long for practical sandwich creation.
| hammock wrote:
| We already have robots that make sandwiches. And robots that
| make bread. And robots that order sandwiches and bread. And
| robots that deliver sandwiches and bread.
|
| So maybe it's not one robot, but 3-4 robots that interface with
| each other.
| [deleted]
| teeray wrote:
| > Our research in robotics is aimed at amplifying people rather
| than replacing them
|
| Noble, but the reality is that once the genie is out of the
| bottle it will be used by many MBAs to replace people.
| numpad0 wrote:
| This rather sound like an inside facing expectations adjustment
| implying "don't fire assembly workers yet", with Toyota
| eagerness I'd imagine you'll be either fired on spot for
| blatantly lying or forced to make it happen by end of the
| quarter if you'd even suggest that.
| distortionfield wrote:
| This is FUS. Replacing people with machines is the story of the
| entire Industrial Revolution, and yet we haven't ever had
| widespread unemployment as a result. Quite the opposite.
| motoboi wrote:
| It won't replace people, it will displace them.
| [deleted]
| reidjs wrote:
| Controversial, but we can look at this as a good thing. If your
| entire job is simple enough for a robot to do that job
| shouldn't be filled by a human. However, the human should
| receive a decent standard of living, regardless of their
| employment, which may be politically impossible.
| endisneigh wrote:
| > However, the human should receive a decent standard of
| living, regardless of their employment, which may be
| politically impossible.
|
| Not gonna happen.
| xwdv wrote:
| And not even for political reasons.
| LostLocalMan wrote:
| > However, the human should receive a decent standard of
| living, regardless of their employment, which may be
| politically impossible
|
| They'll get pie in the sky when they die
| Alupis wrote:
| > which may be politically impossible
|
| Try economically impossible for starters.
|
| Do some napkin math on how much an individual needs to live
| each month, and then multiply that by how many people you
| need to support nation-wide. The dollar amounts are
| staggering, and make our current annual budget (all of it!)
| look like mere child's play.
|
| We're talking hundreds of billions of dollars every month.
| It's simply not possible.
| alexb_ wrote:
| Let's assume the poverty line of $20,000 a year for a
| household of two people. For approximately 300,000,000
| Americans, that would make $3,000,000,000/year. That is
| less than half of our current annual budget (all of it!).
| It's a staggering amount, but I don't see why you would
| exaggerate like this.
|
| I'm actually pretty sure if you raised the income tax rate
| for the top 0.1% and closed corporate tax loopholes, you
| could get that level of money.
| [deleted]
| Alupis wrote:
| The poverty line?
| alexb_ wrote:
| https://www.healthcare.gov/glossary/federal-poverty-
| level-fp...
| Alupis wrote:
| So you are saying we're going to doom an entire
| population to poverty, provided courtesy of the
| government?
|
| I know you're trying to make a point, but let's be
| realistic. That's never going to fly... and it's wrong to
| even think people are going to be ok submitting to
| technology and the government overlords for a life filed
| with poverty.
| 14 wrote:
| Not possible with a capitalistic system in place but
| definitely possible. We would still have the same resources
| being produced possibly more if robots are more efficient
| at the jobs. But of course robots will initially be used to
| rake in more cash for their owners. Later we will get Star
| Trek way of life where things hold less value because we
| will easily produce more then we need and stop trying to
| sell everything.
| kube-system wrote:
| > robots will initially be used to rake in more cash for
| their owners.
|
| And as long as regulators maintain a competitive
| marketplace, the plummeting in costs to operate a
| business will result in lower prices. Labor is the
| largest cost for most businesses, and businesses that
| take advantage of new automation typically use it to
| undercut their competitors prices.
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| 1.3% of US workforce is employed in farms. 1.3% grows the
| food for the rest of the 98.7% of the population. Add a
| couple of percents for transport and distribution and you
| probably have around 5% needed for food (maybe less if it
| excludes meat and processing).
|
| It's simply very possible.
|
| https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-
| statistic...
| kube-system wrote:
| You're only adding up half of the equation. On the other
| half, your nation's productivity has skyrocketed due to
| plummeting labor costs.
|
| Lets say that robots cut US 'labor' costs in half -- from
| about 10 trillion to 5 trillion. Add in a 5 trillion dollar
| tax on robot labor and you've got about 14,700 per capita
| to spend. And costs for businesses don't change.
| Alupis wrote:
| So we replace full time employment with $14.5k annually?
| And people are supposed to survive on that, and celebrate
| the ushering in of tech?
|
| Someone working an entry level fast food job earned
| vastly more than that per year.
|
| Let's redo your math using realistic numbers and then we
| can see what's possible or not.
| kube-system wrote:
| The per capita number was just for scale. I didn't mean
| that you'd distribute it on a per capita basis. Obviously
| you'd want to use a mechanism distribute it to people who
| need it.
| Alupis wrote:
| > I didn't mean that you'd distribute it on a per capita
| basis
|
| You have to, otherwise you assemble a perverse incentive
| to not be productive or work. We want _less_ of that as
| it is, not more.
|
| Working doesn't just mean "working for the man", it can
| be anything productive that results in income. Such as
| making and selling paintings, music, whatever.
|
| However, there cannot be a reality where _choosing_ to
| not work rewards you with as much or more than those who
| actually work. We also cannot have a system where people
| choose to peruse fruitless endeavors simply because they
| enjoy them, and then still get government payments. Yet,
| the system you propose will be just that - "I need it
| more because I'm poor - I'm poor because I choose not to
| work".
|
| The money used to pay these people is complex, but it is
| not "free" and is largely supported by the working class.
| We cannot build incentives for the working class to stop
| working and subsist entirely off government payments
| (which come from the rest of the working class, leading
| to a downward spiral for any such program in terms of
| costs to the nation).
|
| So realistically, the numbers for some sort of UBI are
| far, far greater than most people admit in these debates
| (as all-things government tend to be).
|
| Additionally, if the tax equals the original labor, then
| there is now a negative incentive for businesses to adopt
| technology and replace employees as well. Employees are
| more flexible than a robot, for instance, so if costs are
| equal the human is the better value from the perspective
| of most businesses (some excluded such as maybe
| manufacturing).
| kube-system wrote:
| No, the labor participation rate in the US is less than
| 2/3 already, because people like children, retirees, and
| the disabled exist. Distributing money to people who
| would lose jobs to automation would never be a per-capita
| exercise, anywhere.
| Alupis wrote:
| You miss the point. The system you propose builds an
| incentive for _more_ people to not work, not less.
|
| Your system falls apart if more and more people decide
| not doing anything at all is a worthy trade off for a
| reduction in annual salary.
| kube-system wrote:
| Yes, in today's labor market it would.
|
| But that's not the scenario that is being entertained
| here.
|
| We're talking about a hypothetical future world in which
| robots with AGI are capable of performing basic labor.
| Incentivize a human all you want, they will _never_ be
| able to compete in a labor pool where their competition
| has no rights and will work 24 /7.
|
| That being said, a handout is not the best way to use
| that money anyway. What it should be used for are
| stronger safety nets and public services, along the lines
| of what already exists in western nations.
| tspike wrote:
| To be a bit flippant, the last thing our species needs is
| amplification- we are plenty loud, thanks.
| 3seashells wrote:
| [flagged]
| anticensor wrote:
| Business administrators are needed, even in a worker-owned
| socialist business, even if just to enforce the worker
| decisions.
| stuckinhell wrote:
| This seems like world changing technology, I can't believe these
| robots can learn complex motions just by watching a teacher.
| modeless wrote:
| They don't learn by watching. That would be another
| breakthrough entirely. They learn only by physically completing
| the task under the complete control of a puppeteer. Still very
| cool though.
| lbussell wrote:
| If I had to guess, we're less than 5 years away from seeing real-
| life C-3PO.
| edgarvaldes wrote:
| Considering that C-3PO waas verbally very competent, but
| somewhat clumsy, I agree. Even the "old" Boston Dynamic robots
| are more agile than 3PO.
| jononomo wrote:
| If I had to guess, we're over 50 years away from seeing a real-
| life C-3PO -- hopefully before I die. I think self-driving cars
| are even further away than that, however.
| nradov wrote:
| As long as you don't mind the extension cord.
| modeless wrote:
| I'll step over an extension cord all day long if it's
| powering a robot that does the laundry and the dishes and the
| house cleaning for me.
| seanr88 wrote:
| I would disagree. All of what we are seeing from this latest
| surge in AI is essentially jumped up predictive text. To get to
| C-3P0 there is a whole additional layer of Intelligence needed.
| C-3P0 can make plans and execute those plans. This latest wave
| cannot reason about the world, it does not know or understand
| the world it just assembles words (and here motions) in a way
| that we value. It is not planning anything.
| modeless wrote:
| That's the easy part. Making high level plans is trivial
| compared to the fine motor control and dexterity and sensing
| necessary to do things like turn a T-shirt inside out or
| install a fitted sheet or crack an egg or whatever. If you
| give me a robot with all the fine motor skills necessary for
| all the steps to cook a meal but no planning capability
| whatsoever, I'll have that robot cooking your dinner within a
| year.
| moffkalast wrote:
| I think you're giving C3PO too much credit for the bumbling
| idiot he usually is when on screen. Well aside from
| calculating the odds of successfully navigating an asteroid
| field, but I'm sure GPT 4 will let you know what that is just
| as easily, as well as translating any language into any other
| language which is supposedly 3PO's whole schtick.
|
| Also:
|
| > can make plans and execute those plans
|
| https://github.com/antony0596/auto-gpt
|
| > cannot reason about the world, it does not know or
| understand the world it just assembles words
|
| They can reason a surprising amount given that they only work
| with text. With vision/actuation encoding there's potential
| for far more. Remember, it doesn't have to be smart or
| conscious as long as it gets the job done with cold hard
| statistics while just appearing as such. A submarine does not
| swim but crosses the ocean just the same.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| > as well as translating any language into any other
| language which is supposedly 3PO's whole schtick.
|
| To be pedantic, language is only half the job, as a
| protocol droid it's C3POs job to understand _social_
| protocols, ie etiquette, and knowing what one culture might
| misunderstand about another and smooth over any faux pas, a
| task that requires considerable empathy and attention to
| subtle emotional cues.
|
| i'm very curious to know what it would take to turn a
| language model designed to respond to prompts, and create
| something that can proactively interrupt a situation - to
| realize when it has something to contribute, and keeping
| its virtual mouth shut otherwise.
| epolanski wrote:
| C3PO is a translator droid that is basically stupid at
| everything else (other than math or facts listing, as he's a
| robot).
|
| So yes, I think he seems a reasonable target.
| kristopolous wrote:
| This sounds like LoRA but for robotics, am I teaching this right?
| rcarr wrote:
| This is getting pretty close to how I think we get to the general
| purpose humanoid robot. This is how I see it playing out:
|
| - You have your Boston Dynamics style humanoid robot at the job
| site, lets say it's a bricklayer for the purposes of this
| example.
|
| - You have a human somewhere offsite in an open room with an
| omnidirectional treadmill floor, and cameras and depth sensors
| positioned all around the room. They're wearing a Hollywood style
| motion capture suit and have a VR headset on so they can see what
| the humanoid robot sees through their cameras.
|
| - The human then acts as they would on site, walking up to the
| pile of bricks, picking them up, placing them etc. The robot
| moves in real time on the job site, mimicking whatever action the
| human performs. I don't know if you'll need props to do this
| properly or if the muscle memory from years on the job will be
| enough for the humans to get the motions right.
|
| - You log all the data. You then have someone watch through the
| video stream, labelling each action that is being performed.
|
| - You run it all through a machine learning algorithm, until you
| get to the point where you can just send the architectural plan
| to the robot and essentially say "Build this wall for me".
| Lemmi wrote:
| In short term perhaps but not long-term.
|
| I believe they will send out a team to digitize the job site.
|
| The team will then create a digital twin.
|
| The architect will map everything into this twin.
|
| The computer system will simulate the build steps.
|
| Robots will be brought onto the job site and get a finetuned
| model (if necessary) and will build it automatically.
| mortureb wrote:
| No, long term we somehow get something magical like LLMs that
| swoop in and magically pull off these tasks.
| eastbound wrote:
| None of that. We get LLM on the jobsite and it tells worker
| how it's done.
|
| Often nothing as cheap as humans in terms of energy
| consumption. I doubt LLMs will beat that energy
| consumption.
| [deleted]
| ramesh31 wrote:
| Yes, it's called reinforcement learning.
| 0xbeefcab wrote:
| The first 3/4 points were all almost exactly from the 2008
| movie Sleep Dealer to the point where I thought you were
| referencing that
| rcarr wrote:
| Never heard of it before, any good?
| [deleted]
| tshaddox wrote:
| And yet, as far as I know we don't even have mature
| implementations of this even for machines with much courser
| movement whose movement are controlled by a loose physical
| mapping to the human operator's movements. Things like
| excavators with dual joystick controls.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| This is precisely how Comma and Tesla do self driving.
| [deleted]
| irtefa wrote:
| The prospect of robots able to manipulate liquids, cloth and
| other tricky materials shows how dexterous they're becoming.
| Major milestone. Exciting stuff!
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Wake me up when a robot is the one teaching the other robots. The
| bottleneck in requiring human instructors makes this basically a
| no-go for me.
| dpeckett wrote:
| In the linked TRI video they hint they are working on building
| generic dexterity models. If that proves possible, maybe
| oneshot/fewshot learning of dexterous behaviors isn't
| farfetched.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Once a robot is trained, it's training dataset can be copied to
| other pretty quickly? So that's 'one robot teaching another'.
| giardini wrote:
| I don't see any breakthrough here. I think it's simple marketing:
| "We're among the first using a variant of LLMs to enhance robotic
| behaviors."
|
| The first pancake sequence starts with the pancake half off the
| baking surface and in danger of falling to the floor. So the
| device _pushes_ the pancake back onto the baking surface. Good
| enuf if the pancake is "stiff" (already cooked and rigid). So
| hope you like your pancakes well-done!
|
| And the pancake-flipper doesn't _flip_ the pancake - it slides
| the spatula under the pancake and then, just like a robot,
| rotates the spatula until the pancake drops. In any case,
| fuggeddabout "eggs over easy".
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Pretty fumble-fingered robots they were using. All you needed for
| industry up til now.
|
| Now the can learn, quickly, perhaps a more dexterous robot with
| flexible digits etc will become the norm.
| jonplackett wrote:
| OK, so those nice safe real world jobs? AI is after them too
| now...
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _those nice safe real world jobs?_
|
| "American manufacturers use far fewer robots than their
| competitors, in particular in Taiwan, South Korea and China"
| [1]. And specialized manufacturing is in a permanent skills
| shortage. More automation may boost employment and wages for
| blue-collar workers. Particularly if such kit enables new
| entrants to challenge incumbents.
|
| [1] https://www.wsj.com/economy/american-labors-real-problem-
| it-...
| fhd2 wrote:
| Might just take a while for it to be economical for lots of
| jobs. The amount of humans is increasing, the amount of natural
| resources, different story.
| valine wrote:
| There's no real dignity in work that can easily be done by a
| robot. A lot of these jobs make people miserable anyway, maybe
| we shouldn't be fighting so hard to keep them.
| GedHawk wrote:
| All Labor has Dignity
| valine wrote:
| Does it? If I pay you to move rocks back and forth in a
| field does that work have dignity?
|
| Making someone work a job that could be done cheaper and
| faster by a robot doesn't benefit anyone. You're destroying
| economic value and wasting the worker's time.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Yes, in the same way as a work-out in the gym has dignity
| and value. In the gym you're just moving some metal
| chunks up and down, but that work has tremendous physical
| and mental effects on the person doing it.
| valine wrote:
| Unless you're a professional athlete no one is going to
| pay you to work out. It has no value for society.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| What are you talking about? Society? The benefit is to
| the person working or working out.
| thephyber wrote:
| This seems like a perception thing. Like the person
| moving rocks might be extremely grateful just to have a
| job. The mentally disabled, ex-cons, and other people who
| have been overlooked for work for many years all likely
| experience a sense of dignity in being paid to work.
| Perhaps they even delude themselves into thinking moving
| rocks is somehow useful or necessary.
|
| I always found it weird that outsiders need to dictate
| what dignity is, since it is an internal state/feeling
| about own actions.
|
| I'm not against automating high toil (the definition from
| the Google SRE book) jobs. But people will find dignity
| in their hobbies if they can't find it at work. If they
| can't find dignity there, they have been failed by
| society.
| topkai22 wrote:
| Well over 50% of workers report being satisfied with
| their job. Automation eliminating jobs people are
| satisfied or happy with is almost certainly a loss the
| workers, even if it is an improvement overall.
|
| I say this as someone who knows he has been directly
| responsible for eliminating dozens of jobs through
| automation. Not all the people affected had lives were
| improved by the job elimination, even if I truly believe
| our solution made far more peoples lives better and was a
| win overall.
|
| --- Edits for typos
| macintux wrote:
| We're back to the recurring question: what economics model
| will work without workers?
| belter wrote:
| None. There will be an economy of Robot consumers and Robot
| producers.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _what economics model will work without workers?_
|
| Without _labour_? None. Without human workers? All of them.
| That said, everything we label the humanities has plenty of
| runway apart from automation.
| edgarvaldes wrote:
| Capitalism without human workers? How?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Capitalism without human workers?_
|
| Humans only own and consume while robots (functionally,
| the capital of this economy) provide the labour. Everyone
| is a founder, but instead of co-founders and employees,
| you just command a team of AIs and robots. You're still
| trying to innovate and provide a product, as are others
| to you. But nobody is selling labour _per se_.
| jprete wrote:
| Leaving aside the convenient assumption that AI will take
| every job except CEO...this sounds insanely competitive
| and most people don't have it in them to do this.
| p1esk wrote:
| _Everyone is a founder_
|
| Surely you mean the top 1%, who have the capital to
| invest into robots?
| h0l0cube wrote:
| AGI will claim the novelty of 'innovation' from humans
| too
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _AGI will claim the novelty of 'innovation' from humans
| too_
|
| One, sure, we can expand the hypothetical envelope to
| infinity. That wasn't the question.
|
| Two, I'm not sure. Human preferences need not be
| rational. Given the choice, many would choose the flawed
| work of a human versus the synthesized product of an AGI.
|
| Three, if we have an AGI that can do everything humans
| can do we've rendered the question irrelevant. There is
| no "economy" anymore because everything can be centrally
| measured, produced and dispatched. By the AGI. (Or it can
| destroy us.) Either way, we return to production and
| consumption of non-AI work products being purely
| voluntary.
| bulbosaur123 wrote:
| [flagged]
| jimbokun wrote:
| I don't think that's the issue.
|
| The issue is training humans fast enough to stay one step
| ahead of the robots and the LLMs.
| randomdata wrote:
| > A lot of these jobs make people miserable anyway
|
| A lot of these jobs also make people happy, though. That is
| why the loss of manufacturing in particular was such a blow
| to Americans. People love manufacturing - to the point that
| having small-scale manufacturing facilities in one's garage
| so that one can keep on manufacturing things on the weekend
| is a dream of many.
| willio58 wrote:
| "There's no real dignity in working to make a living." FTFY
|
| /s But seriously, while I think humans will always find some
| meaning in work, there will come a day when that work is no
| longer required. Or at the very least, work will look so
| different that it will be unrecognizable to us currently. I
| think "work" will look more and more like "art" in the year
| 4000 for example.
|
| The idea of a person sacrificing some of their time to enrich
| the person at the top of a company already sounds bad, but we
| all accept it must happen so we can afford to live. But when
| robots and AI takes over labor in a significant way, what
| will be left for those humans that remain? And let's say we
| converge on something like a universal basic income to fix
| this, where will humans find meaning?
| jononomo wrote:
| Thinking about the year 4000 isn't interesting. Thinking
| about the year 2100 is interesting.
| p1esk wrote:
| Thinking about the year GPT-5 is released is interesting
| (likely 2024).
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| I was a huge supporter of UBI for a while, but now I think
| money is going to become kind of meaningless at some point
| (the more we print the less it's worth, and UBI policies
| would struggle to keep up with the inflation they drive)
|
| I'm leaning more towards socialized housing, food, health
| care, and public transporation now, at least for the
| basics.
|
| Everyone should be able to at least meet their minimal
| basic needs without depending on their economic relevance
| (which isn't a given for many people over the next 100
| years). People who want more than the essentials (a house
| with larger bedrooms, equipment for their hobbies, travel
| accommodations) can find paid work in positions that still
| require a human touch.
|
| And if there aren't enough jobs available for everyone who
| wants one, then start reducing the standard work week from
| 40 hours, until everyone who wants can find work.
| eachro wrote:
| As far as I understand, getting robots to do reasonable things
| when faced with out of distribution experiences is super hard.
| How do they manage this?
| NalNezumi wrote:
| Cool to see Russ Tedrakes recent work! His online course
| Underactuated Robotics is a very good course to get a grasp on
| the complexities faced in robotics.
|
| It's exciting to see someone with a bit more deeper knowledge
| than "Flex tape slap LLM on robotics" featured here, which is
| majority of Robot Learning work upvoted on HN.
|
| There's more to it than just language learning to be solved
| before we can have proper embodied agents in the chaotic real
| world.
| treespace8 wrote:
| This looks impressive. Much more than even the Boston Dynamics
| demonstrations.
|
| Flipping a pancake is extremely difficult because each pancake is
| different. I know that these videos must be cherry-picked but to
| be able to train a Robot to do this just by demonstrating feels
| like a massive leap.
| sashank_1509 wrote:
| Flipping a pancake was done in 2010. What looks impressive for
| humans is easy for robots and vice versa:
| https://youtu.be/W_gxLKSsSIE?si=HDyNXe1Ys_eFXiVU Another case
| in point: robot juggling was done in 1990s and to date we do
| not have a robot that can open any door reliably like a human.
| Kind of like Moravecs Paradox
| LostLocalMan wrote:
| To be fair it is far more complex for a robot to grip a
| spatula and use that spatula on a griddle than to use dynamic
| motion to flip a pancake in a pan.
| GlenTheMachine wrote:
| Ehhh.
|
| Solving any one problem with robotic manipulation isn't all
| that hard. It takes a lot of trial and error, but in
| general if the task is constrained you can solve it
| reliably. The trick is to solve *new* tasks without
| resorting to all that fine tuning every time. Which is what
| Russ is claiming here. He's training an LLM with a corpus
| of one-off policies for solving specific manipulation
| tasks, and claiming to get robust _ad hoc_ policies from it
| for previously unsolved tasks.
|
| If this actually works, it's pretty important. But that's
| the core claim: that he can solve _ad hoc_ tasks without
| training or hand tuning.
| irtefa wrote:
| Yes! In layman's terms: is the most efficient way to train
| these robots by showing them billions of videos of how it's
| done?
| GlenTheMachine wrote:
| Almost certainly not. Because the sense of touch is an
| important part of the problem and that data isn't present in
| videos.
| hinkley wrote:
| Not just touch but proprioception. Robots in human
| environments will have to be better at proprioception than
| 98% of humans. If I bump into you it's typically anything
| from annoying to a meetcute. I'm a pretty big guy, but if
| you had to chose me to step on your foot or somebody else,
| it's probably me you want, because I will shift my weight
| off your foot before you even know what happened (tai chi)
| because you will barely notice.
|
| If instead your choice is your high school bully or a
| robot, well for now pick the bully. Because that robot
| isn't even being vicious and will hurt more.
| martin_henk wrote:
| Google kuffner
| neom wrote:
| Website isn't loading for me, but found the video on the Toyota
| research youtube:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-CGSQAO5-Q
| electrondood wrote:
| [flagged]
| dang wrote:
| " _Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents._ "
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| DoesntMatter22 wrote:
| Twitter still is the public townsquare. Nobody does
| announcements or breaking news on threads or IG.
| [deleted]
| JamesBarney wrote:
| Standard of living increases are made 1 job loss at a time. It
| sucks, we should supports people's transitions, but I don't
| think we should hold back progress.
| anuvrat1 wrote:
| For anyone interested, here[0] is the YouTube channel of Russ
| Tedrake, which has: - 6.4210 (2023) Robotics
| Manipulation - 6.8210 (2023) Underactuated Robotics
|
| [0](https://www.youtube.com/@underactuated5171)
| reportingsjr wrote:
| This sounds similar to some of the work that google has done,
| such as PaLM-E: https://blog.research.google/2023/03/palm-e-
| embodied-multimo...
|
| Very exciting times in robotics!
| modeless wrote:
| This looks way better than PaLM-E because the robots they're
| using are more capable and the tasks much more complex. And
| they're doing the behaviors at the same speed a human does them
| while puppeteering the robot. The PaLM-E demonstrations were
| all shown in sped-up videos because they are agonizingly slow
| in reality.
| Fleusal wrote:
| [flagged]
| zwieback wrote:
| Dr. Ruth might have some ideas what other skills robots should
| learn.
| UberFly wrote:
| That shot of it spreading goop on bread was amusing. This video
| feels like an Onion production to me for some reason.
| [deleted]
| nico wrote:
| I wonder if giving cars a sense of touch is what will ultimately
| be the key to enable full autonomous driving
|
| Are there any cars out there that have something like a sense of
| touch and with it can sense the road or things that they crash
| into?
| jpadkins wrote:
| I think cars already have a sense of touch with the road with
| traction control sensors.
|
| For everything else isn't touch too late, especially at high
| speeds? the point is to avoid the crash.
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