It's all about controlling money that might go to more honest ventures.
Yes, humanity has engineers who are going to the moon, creating robots, investigating brain interfaces, improving public transport with buses and tunnels.
And there will always be monorail salesmen who try to soak up those investments, taking away from others.
What does everyone think about 1X's NEO? [0] They began from the idea of compliant robotics,[1] which seems to me to be a requirement for safe operation in proximity to humans.
Did Tesla make attendees sign a hefty liability waiver, since Optimus is not a compliant robot, or did they address the inherent problems some other way?
Surprising absolutely no one, I hope. Credibility seems difficult to generate for Tesla events. Maybe the secret sauce for Robotaxis is a human driver somewhere watching the cameras. Like driving Uber but from the comfort of home, and it's easy to hit the fridge or bathroom between rides.
Reminds me of a plot of device of the 90's movie Shooting Fish where they were scamming businesses selling an AGI computer but were actually controlling responses with a human in another room.
I mean, shoot me down here, but is it that bad of an idea?
If you're going to have an assistant or a taxi driver, and you start off at the base position of "AI is totally unreliable", then having a fully remote gig-worker remotely piloting your robot...
I mean, it doesn't seem like a massive stretch from what Uber does.
...and heck, having a 'remote robot body' is pretty cool tech.
I guess. As long as you don't use it to pretend its just AI for the meaningless purposes of generating hype about your AI that really isn't actually any good.
It seems like there's considerable demand for human labour "below the API" that you don't have to talk to. It's kind of sad but people seem to get comfortable with it very quickly.
yes, operating any kind of heavy machinery over a shaky wireless WAN with hundreds of milliseconds of latency and multiple percentage packet loss is, in fact, a bad idea
I mean, you definitely need people available to intervene even for a L4 or L5 autonomy, because they will get stuck (Tesla is not serious about robotaxis until they start staffing up a team to do that on a full-time basis). But actual driving? This link is way too high latency for that to be safe. The robot needs to be maintaining its own SA, and just calling the human when it doesn't know what to do.
It's amazing to me just how far people will move the goalposts for Elon's perpetual grift.
We've gone from "you'll be able to nap on your morning commute in your self driving car within 18 months" to "they will always need a human to intervene".
I was assuming that the robots at the Sphere also had some humans behind it if nothing more than to help "guide" the AI pieces. My assumption, at least.
That event was a huge disappointment. It's clear that Elon didn't consider it to be that important and didn't put any real effort into it.
There was nothing an investor could look at and get excited about, it was the same thing as he announced 5 years ago. Just now his self driving cars have been eclipsed by Waymo and cruise seems to have caught up to what they can do with their demos.
And why show the robots at all if they were just remote controlled by employees.
"This is awful! This is nothing like the Hell I visited two weeks ago!" Bill Gates responded. "I can't believe this! What happened to that other place, with the beautiful beaches, the beautiful women playing in the water!?"
"That was a demo," replied St. Peter.
also ED-209 from robocop, "You have 20 seconds to comply."
Maybe that's the realistic future of 'self-driving' cars. A teledriver-assisted automous car. It just moves the cab driver from behind the wheel to behind a screen somewhere else.
To be honest, the autonomous control of the robot seems like the easier part of the equation. (doing it safely in a room with guests, unguided... thats another matter). The physical limitations and packaging are a big challenge, and I dont think I saw Optimus lift anything remotely heavy.. just pull a beer tap.. a decision that probably speaks volumes about current limits of the technology.
To apply my first point to reality: put an Optimus in its current state/capability, on a commercial 0-turn lawn mower, plug Optimus into the mower's power takeoff, and have someone in another country remotely pilot the mower. That right there is worth every commercial lawn service having at least one on their crew TODAY.
The appeal of hot swapping an operator real time on the equipment you already own, whether it's a push lawn mower or a huge mining truck, provides enormous value right out of the gate. Especially in tasks where the Optimus can handle 90% of the task autonomously but needs to step aside or oversight for the last 10% of the job. Compare to a business model that requires purchase of all new very expensive and unique equipment.
I've worked in robotics for over 10 years, at state of the art labs and high quality startups.
There are really only two hard problems in robotics: Perception and Funding.
Perception, especially around a bunch of people, with depth, mapping, understanding traffic and gestures, all in real time etc etc will be a huge problem for these machines for a while.
Funding though? I doubt that's an issue right now.
I'm also a roboticist. Perception and funding are hard. But don't forget battery energy density, and the power-to-weight ratio and energy efficiency of actuators. Also very very hard, and Moore's law helps not at all.
Autonomous cars are in a nice niche since they store vast energy for actuation anyway, it's OK to be heavy, and the controls are relatively simple. They are limited by perception and decision making.
Humanoids are way more limited by energy storage and actuation. Animals are absurdly efficient.
That surprises me. I thought motion planning and motor control would be harder - old memories of Asimo falling helplessly trying to climb stairs, the clunkiness of a robot aligning itself perfectly with a drawer before executing a scripted-looking action to pull the handle, the obvious recorded sequence Atlas uses to get up from a fall. I know Boston Dynamics does impressive acrobatics, but it's all legs and no arms.
Are kinematics and planning solved now? I want to move into the field so I'm trying to learn.
I would imagine latency would be an issue if companies were considering teleoperation using staff in a country with cheaper labor. For example I work with people in India and China and they regularly complain about the several hundred ms of latency they get when using their American VDIs. That off the shelf lawn mower is going to be hard to control safely with all that delay, and there's also the risk of connection drops and the like. You would need a specialized mower with collision detection/etc. to handle this, and at this point you might as well discard the robot and just have a remotely operated mower instead.
However there are cases where this can work well, say in a factory handling dangerous chemicals with the teleoperator in an adjacent room. Or maybe it's doing some sort of task where delays and connectivity loss are acceptable.
Let's see, New York to Mumbai over the Earth's surface is maybe 12,500 km, assume a direct fiber optic cable where light travels noticeably slower than in a vacuum at 200,000 km per second... So a minimum of 62.5 ms one way with the best terrestrial equipment.
While one can play network games at 125 ping, it relies rather heavily on tricks that only work in a virtual environment. (Back in the '90s I used to play with 300 ping, no latency compensation, uphill both ways.)
Realistically it's in the several hundred range. I just did a ping using Vultr's Looking Glass from New Jersey to Mumbai and got around ~240ms on commercial fiber. For people working from home in India (with cable/DSL overhead + distance from the IX) connected to servers in LA I regularly see 300-400ms.
Also keep in mind in a VDI or teleoperation setting there's not only network latency but additional delay from the video encoding, compression/packetization, and decoding on the other side plus a bit of buffer. Honestly I think cloud gaming is a good test case for this - and in my experience that only works well when you have fiber and have the game server in the same city as you (basically <10ms).
Don't get me wrong I think this guy's idea is incredibly stupid. But, have you ever operated a mower? They're not fast. A few hundred ms of latency on a mower is no problem at all.
What stood out to me is that the speed of the movements makes it clear the autonomous balance control just isn't there. You can simulate this: try to move your upper body while standing up without changing the balance or stance of your legs and hips - unless you move slowly you can't do it, whereas if you put any force or momentum behind it you'll feel yourself straining pretty hard to stay upright.
When you see the bits and pieces of behind the scenes for Boston Dynamics it's clear that's where a lot of the magic actually is (and also if you look at how say, Atlas moves) - by necessity it looks much more "natural" because to get any power or speed behind the motions the whole robot needs to actively compensate the movements (obviously having enough power behind the drive system to actually do it is also critical).
I think it was fairly obvious from the show that the Optimus bots were remotely operated. Not like they tried to hide it at all. Just listen to the responses of the bots, they practically admitted that.
The cars, however, were almost certainly running the latest FSD (or some near future unreleased version).
But they did try to hide it. It's in some videos where one of them was trying not to admit they were remotely controlled and that "probably some AI is used"
It's all about controlling money that might go to more honest ventures.
Yes, humanity has engineers who are going to the moon, creating robots, investigating brain interfaces, improving public transport with buses and tunnels.
And there will always be monorail salesmen who try to soak up those investments, taking away from others.
What does everyone think about 1X's NEO? [0] They began from the idea of compliant robotics,[1] which seems to me to be a requirement for safe operation in proximity to humans.
Did Tesla make attendees sign a hefty liability waiver, since Optimus is not a compliant robot, or did they address the inherent problems some other way?
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUrLuUxv9gE (also remote controlled for now, while being trained)
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sb6LMPXRdVc
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_robotics
Surprising absolutely no one, I hope. Credibility seems difficult to generate for Tesla events. Maybe the secret sauce for Robotaxis is a human driver somewhere watching the cameras. Like driving Uber but from the comfort of home, and it's easy to hit the fridge or bathroom between rides.
Reminds me of a plot of device of the 90's movie Shooting Fish where they were scamming businesses selling an AGI computer but were actually controlling responses with a human in another room.
I mean, that's a classic for literally centuries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk
I mean, shoot me down here, but is it that bad of an idea?
If you're going to have an assistant or a taxi driver, and you start off at the base position of "AI is totally unreliable", then having a fully remote gig-worker remotely piloting your robot...
I mean, it doesn't seem like a massive stretch from what Uber does.
...and heck, having a 'remote robot body' is pretty cool tech.
I guess. As long as you don't use it to pretend its just AI for the meaningless purposes of generating hype about your AI that really isn't actually any good.
> Is it that bad of an idea?
Driving at 60mph with shaky internet connection? Absolutely.
Piloting a robot to fold laundry? Maybe not.
Allowing random people to pilot robots in your house with children around? Absolutely horrific.
It seems like there's considerable demand for human labour "below the API" that you don't have to talk to. It's kind of sad but people seem to get comfortable with it very quickly.
>but is it that bad of an idea?
yes, operating any kind of heavy machinery over a shaky wireless WAN with hundreds of milliseconds of latency and multiple percentage packet loss is, in fact, a bad idea
It's AI - Actually an Indian
As I I see the delivery robot do it’s job... a game being played by remote workers doing the Enders game.
The terrifying secret of all those European truck simulator games.
You may already know this but Heinlein wrote about waldos pretty early, incorporating it into several stories and books.
I mean, you definitely need people available to intervene even for a L4 or L5 autonomy, because they will get stuck (Tesla is not serious about robotaxis until they start staffing up a team to do that on a full-time basis). But actual driving? This link is way too high latency for that to be safe. The robot needs to be maintaining its own SA, and just calling the human when it doesn't know what to do.
It's amazing to me just how far people will move the goalposts for Elon's perpetual grift.
We've gone from "you'll be able to nap on your morning commute in your self driving car within 18 months" to "they will always need a human to intervene".
Incredible
I don’t think the person you’re replying to said anything about Elon Musk in this case
Not directly, but he and Tesla are unfortunately inextricably linked.
[dupe]
More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41815567
Artificial artificial intelligence.
Discussions
(112 points, 1 day ago, 108 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41831009
(89 points, 2 days ago, 92 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41815567
[dupe] of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41815567
I was assuming that the robots at the Sphere also had some humans behind it if nothing more than to help "guide" the AI pieces. My assumption, at least.
That event was a huge disappointment. It's clear that Elon didn't consider it to be that important and didn't put any real effort into it.
There was nothing an investor could look at and get excited about, it was the same thing as he announced 5 years ago. Just now his self driving cars have been eclipsed by Waymo and cruise seems to have caught up to what they can do with their demos.
And why show the robots at all if they were just remote controlled by employees.
https://archive.is/mds9I
Reminiscent of Nikola's semi truck demonstration...
...
"This is awful! This is nothing like the Hell I visited two weeks ago!" Bill Gates responded. "I can't believe this! What happened to that other place, with the beautiful beaches, the beautiful women playing in the water!?"
"That was a demo," replied St. Peter.
also ED-209 from robocop, "You have 20 seconds to comply."
Actually, I won't be surprised if it turns out that the 40 or so cybercabs were remote-controlled too.
Maybe that's the realistic future of 'self-driving' cars. A teledriver-assisted automous car. It just moves the cab driver from behind the wheel to behind a screen somewhere else.
they already have that, it's called human-in-the-loop (HITL) assist. They usually take over when a problem needs to be escalated to a human agent.
Mechanical Turk Robotaxis! The civilian version of drone pilots.
No shit.
[dead]
To be honest, the autonomous control of the robot seems like the easier part of the equation. (doing it safely in a room with guests, unguided... thats another matter). The physical limitations and packaging are a big challenge, and I dont think I saw Optimus lift anything remotely heavy.. just pull a beer tap.. a decision that probably speaks volumes about current limits of the technology.
To apply my first point to reality: put an Optimus in its current state/capability, on a commercial 0-turn lawn mower, plug Optimus into the mower's power takeoff, and have someone in another country remotely pilot the mower. That right there is worth every commercial lawn service having at least one on their crew TODAY.
The appeal of hot swapping an operator real time on the equipment you already own, whether it's a push lawn mower or a huge mining truck, provides enormous value right out of the gate. Especially in tasks where the Optimus can handle 90% of the task autonomously but needs to step aside or oversight for the last 10% of the job. Compare to a business model that requires purchase of all new very expensive and unique equipment.
I've worked in robotics for over 10 years, at state of the art labs and high quality startups.
There are really only two hard problems in robotics: Perception and Funding.
Perception, especially around a bunch of people, with depth, mapping, understanding traffic and gestures, all in real time etc etc will be a huge problem for these machines for a while.
Funding though? I doubt that's an issue right now.
I'm also a roboticist. Perception and funding are hard. But don't forget battery energy density, and the power-to-weight ratio and energy efficiency of actuators. Also very very hard, and Moore's law helps not at all.
Autonomous cars are in a nice niche since they store vast energy for actuation anyway, it's OK to be heavy, and the controls are relatively simple. They are limited by perception and decision making.
Humanoids are way more limited by energy storage and actuation. Animals are absurdly efficient.
That surprises me. I thought motion planning and motor control would be harder - old memories of Asimo falling helplessly trying to climb stairs, the clunkiness of a robot aligning itself perfectly with a drawer before executing a scripted-looking action to pull the handle, the obvious recorded sequence Atlas uses to get up from a fall. I know Boston Dynamics does impressive acrobatics, but it's all legs and no arms.
Are kinematics and planning solved now? I want to move into the field so I'm trying to learn.
I would imagine latency would be an issue if companies were considering teleoperation using staff in a country with cheaper labor. For example I work with people in India and China and they regularly complain about the several hundred ms of latency they get when using their American VDIs. That off the shelf lawn mower is going to be hard to control safely with all that delay, and there's also the risk of connection drops and the like. You would need a specialized mower with collision detection/etc. to handle this, and at this point you might as well discard the robot and just have a remotely operated mower instead.
However there are cases where this can work well, say in a factory handling dangerous chemicals with the teleoperator in an adjacent room. Or maybe it's doing some sort of task where delays and connectivity loss are acceptable.
Let's see, New York to Mumbai over the Earth's surface is maybe 12,500 km, assume a direct fiber optic cable where light travels noticeably slower than in a vacuum at 200,000 km per second... So a minimum of 62.5 ms one way with the best terrestrial equipment.
While one can play network games at 125 ping, it relies rather heavily on tricks that only work in a virtual environment. (Back in the '90s I used to play with 300 ping, no latency compensation, uphill both ways.)
Realistically it's in the several hundred range. I just did a ping using Vultr's Looking Glass from New Jersey to Mumbai and got around ~240ms on commercial fiber. For people working from home in India (with cable/DSL overhead + distance from the IX) connected to servers in LA I regularly see 300-400ms.
Also keep in mind in a VDI or teleoperation setting there's not only network latency but additional delay from the video encoding, compression/packetization, and decoding on the other side plus a bit of buffer. Honestly I think cloud gaming is a good test case for this - and in my experience that only works well when you have fiber and have the game server in the same city as you (basically <10ms).
Don't get me wrong I think this guy's idea is incredibly stupid. But, have you ever operated a mower? They're not fast. A few hundred ms of latency on a mower is no problem at all.
> To be honest, the autonomous control of the robot seems like the easier part of the equation.
I agree but it is frustrating watching Elon like Michael Copperfield but thinking it is real like a 4 year old.
I don't see a clear advantage of Tesla against other competitors if he will launch it in a couple of years.
What stood out to me is that the speed of the movements makes it clear the autonomous balance control just isn't there. You can simulate this: try to move your upper body while standing up without changing the balance or stance of your legs and hips - unless you move slowly you can't do it, whereas if you put any force or momentum behind it you'll feel yourself straining pretty hard to stay upright.
When you see the bits and pieces of behind the scenes for Boston Dynamics it's clear that's where a lot of the magic actually is (and also if you look at how say, Atlas moves) - by necessity it looks much more "natural" because to get any power or speed behind the motions the whole robot needs to actively compensate the movements (obviously having enough power behind the drive system to actually do it is also critical).
I think it was fairly obvious from the show that the Optimus bots were remotely operated. Not like they tried to hide it at all. Just listen to the responses of the bots, they practically admitted that.
The cars, however, were almost certainly running the latest FSD (or some near future unreleased version).
But they did try to hide it. It's in some videos where one of them was trying not to admit they were remotely controlled and that "probably some AI is used"
I read that "probably some AI is used" as that it's human controlled. If not, it should have been "completely AI controlled" or something similar.
I think "AI" did control their walking. Although calling that AI is probably a stretch.