[HN Gopher] The Global Project to Make a General Robotic Brain
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The Global Project to Make a General Robotic Brain
Author : T-A
Score : 55 points
Date : 2024-01-13 13:29 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org)
| random3 wrote:
| IEEE Spectrum has a fancy new look, clean nice, maybe fonts
| adjusted for people that don't like to wear their glasses.
| Overall good.
|
| However, the link highlighting with a red underline looks like a
| MS Word document with lots of typos or like my literature tests
| in primary school.
| lallysingh wrote:
| I do wonder about automation in training. Build 50 robots and
| have them execute in parallel, then reconcile. Or train in a VR
| system.
| jamilton wrote:
| My layman understanding is 1. big, practical size robotic arms
| are expensive and 2. also very slow, making real training
| expensive and time consuming. And 3, simulations aren't high-
| fidelity enough to be fully sufficient for training, but they
| definitely can help.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Tbf, this is Google we're talking about. They routinely pay a
| single developer more per year than a few of these would cost
| to produce. They could make hundreds without a second
| thought.
| huppeldepup wrote:
| I'd like you to view this demo from 1974 that showcases the then
| current state of research in AI. Then reflect that the research
| presented in the link is 50 years later.
|
| https://youtu.be/03p2CADwGF8?t=1668
| neom wrote:
| I wasn't aware of this, but from wikip:
|
| "In 1973, professor Sir James Lighthill was asked by the UK
| Parliament to evaluate the state of AI research in the United
| Kingdom. His report, now called the Lighthill report,
| criticized the utter failure of AI to achieve its "grandiose
| objectives". He concluded that nothing being done in AI could
| not be done in other sciences. He specifically mentioned the
| problem of "combinatorial explosion" or "intractability", which
| implied that many of AI's most successful algorithms would
| grind to a halt on real world problems and were only suitable
| for solving "toy" versions.
|
| The report was contested in a debate broadcast in the BBC
| "Controversy" series in 1973. The debate "The general purpose
| robot is a mirage" from the Royal Institution was Lighthill
| versus the team of Donald Michie, John McCarthy and Richard
| Gregory. McCarthy later wrote that "the combinatorial explosion
| problem has been recognized in AI from the beginning".
|
| The report led to the complete dismantling of AI research in
| the UK. AI research continued in only a few universities
| (Edinburgh, Essex and Sussex). Research would not revive on a
| large scale until 1983, when Alvey (a research project of the
| British Government) began to fund AI again from a war chest of
| PS350 million in response to the Japanese Fifth Generation
| Project (see below). Alvey had a number of UK-only requirements
| which did not sit well internationally, especially with US
| partners, and lost Phase 2 funding."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter
|
| Seems this is the report if anyone is curious to read it:
| https://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/events/lighthill1973/lighthill.pdf
| T-A wrote:
| Pretty much the only "AI" in that demo is edge detection
| (against a uniform background) and pattern recognition (by
| direct comparison with a handful of simple geometric shapes).
| Other than that, the robot seems to be following a hand-coded
| set of instructions to assemble the provided parts.
|
| The current state of research, as described in the article, is
| a neural network which recognizes which hardware it's currently
| controlling and uses it to autonomously perform tasks assigned
| using natural language. So it seems to me that there has been
| some progress.
| roenxi wrote:
| As far as I can tell, all the AI stuff happening at the moment
| seems to be matrix multiplication. Someone wrote up the
| equations behind transformers the other day and it was a half-
| page of maths.
|
| I skimmed the video and I think the point you're making is not
| much has changed? The important variable is FLOPS/$, which is
| nothing like 1974 and still increasing exponentially. The
| researchers have known what to do for decades; it is only a
| question of being able to actually do it.
| foobarian wrote:
| It seems like a repeat of Deep Blue when the "clever
| algorithm" approach was embarrassed by Hsu's (also very
| clever in many ways) throwing a lot of brute force at the
| problem.
| sjfjsjdjwvwvc wrote:
| While this is pretty cool I believe generalist robots will not
| have a fraction of the skills an average human has , at least not
| within a realistically foreseeable timeframe, let's say within
| this century.
|
| IMO a much more desirable route would be to build a number of
| specialist robots that do all the things humans really don't want
| to do. Even that seems really hard to do - at least I haven't
| seen a robot that is able to vacuum a house really well. I saw
| some versions at friends places but they were more like gimmicks
| - took really long to setup, basically nothing was allowed to be
| on the floor, generic rectangular room setup required and they
| didn't last more than two years or so. I think all of them went
| back to vacuuming themselves or employing a human to do it (the
| second option is vastly more efficient than the robot and much
| cheaper too) Maybe I am missing something, but a really
| versatile, robust, and cheap vacuuming robot would be an actual
| improvement to life quality for a lot of people. The research is
| very interesting though of course and much better this than no
| research in that direction at all.
| pixl97 wrote:
| So most the specialist problems we've had that were not
| 'generalist hard' we've already mostly solved with machines
| that we don't consider complex robots.
|
| It shape of the robot isn't the issue, the problem space of
| reality is. A roomba can suck stuff off a floor, it has a much
| harder time dealing with (or even identifying) a sock that
| needs moved out of the way first. To do that for all the
| different objects that could show up in front of you, you need
| a general purpose AI.
| dsign wrote:
| > While this is pretty cool I believe generalist robots will
| not have a fraction of the skills an average human has , at
| least not within a realistically foreseeable timeframe, let's
| say within this century.
|
| I'm pretty sure they will be flipping burgers by the 2040s, if
| not before, and doing everything else needed to efficiently
| make a (big) percentage of people jobless in first-world
| economies. Though, not in parts of the world where electricity
| regularly in the wire is still rare...because those problems
| don't solve themselves in a few short decades.
|
| Now, we both are cynics and should go for a beer together. Who
| knows, maybe we will come up with a more catastrophic and
| highly probable scenario that combines your outlook with
| mine...
| sjfjsjdjwvwvc wrote:
| Oh yea, I would love to be wrong- and if I can't change my
| mind about something then I am as good as dead.
|
| I believe we will sooner solve the electricity problem with
| renewables though.
|
| Agree that a vast majority of the jobs will be automated
| fairly soon - just not those pesky jobs that really need to
| be done and no one wants to do - like cooking, cleaning,
| childcare, taking care of sick people. Sure we will have some
| more nifty appliances that make it easier maybe, but I want
| (most of) that stuff fully automated, at least the cleaning
| part!
|
| Anyway a beer sounds good right about now and we will just
| have to wait and see how it plays out I guess
| lostdog wrote:
| The problem is that even a specialist vacuuming robot needs to
| be more of a generalist than you realize.
|
| For example, take the "nothing was allowed to be on the floor"
| restriction. To relax this restriction, the robot needs to know
| what it can and cannot do for something it sees in the floor.
| List everything that could be on the floor (I'll wait). The
| robot needs to recognize all of these things, and know the
| correct behavior for each.
|
| You could still do this! You'd need to label a ton of items and
| hardcode a bunch of behaviors. After all this R&D your robot
| vacuum would need to cost $5k-$10k, and you'd wish you'd worked
| on a higher priced product like a robotic forklift instead.
| Still, it's feasible to build this.
|
| However, manipulation is a few orders of magnitude more complex
| than navigation. You have to recognize many objects, their
| precise poses, and many aspects of the objects. Think about
| opening a can with a can opener. The robot needs to recognize a
| few parts on the can opener, and how it fits on the can. Then
| you've got to hardcode behaviors for attaching the opener and
| then turning the knob until done, and removing the lid. Doable,
| but very very hard.
|
| This is feasible, and you can build a can opening robot, but
| after 9 months of R&D, that's all your specialized robot will
| be able to do, and oops, there's 40 more tasks it needs to
| accomplish to cook a dinner. The only way to build this product
| is to tackle all the tasks at once, and that's why this
| research is so important. Everything you want a robot to do
| needs O(dozens) of individual tasks, and when each task takes
| O(year) to build it's impossible to finish.
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