Why humanoid robots won't replace human workers anytime soon
Why humanoid robots won't catch up to human workers any time soon
Despite flashy demos—Tesla's Optimus serving drinks, Unitree's synchronized dance routines, and a robot running 100 meters in 8.86 seconds—humanoid robots remain far from matching human workers. Experts point to the immense difficulty of physical manipulation: picking up a Coke can or making a peanut butter sandwich is still a monumental challenge. Teleoperation often powers the most impressive stunts, and even breakthroughs like Physical Intelligence's Humanoid Olympics success come with caveats: robots are slow, unreliable, and struggle to generalize. Long-horizon tasks and real-world deployment face economic and safety hurdles that will take years, likely decades, to overcome.
The really, really core unsolved problem in robotics that unlocks 90% plus of the value is manipulation.
- seydor
I dont get the investment in humanoids beyond trying to create some kind of stock market bubble again. Factories that have already heavily robotized their production, employ a minimal amount of humans to do niche work. It's going to be immensely difficult to replace that niche work with any kind of robot, let alone humanoids.
These humanoid robots (or generally limbed robots) could be useful for the two sectors that are craving for cheap workers, worldwide: agriculture and construction. Yet all the demos i see are fragile lightweight robots not made for rugged work. That makes me conclude that the whole sector is currently like the Metaverse.
- samlinnfer
I really want to see that robot door-opening, shirt-folding, orange-peeling and sandwich making competition. It would be like the housework championships. If your robot works it would sell like hotcakes right there.
edit: realised there's a part 2: https://generalrobots.substack.com/p/benjies-humanoid-olympi...
- vessenes
This is a recent essay on robotic workers that does not mention Figure’s 24+ hour livestream of a robot doing package management on a live assembly line.
The real reason it’s hard to assess where we’re at with industrial robots is that some of the people who’ve gone hardest at it are secretive, and also believe in power law scaling. So, the first 1,000 robots will only be used to build the next robot factory, which also will be used to build the next really big robot factory. When we see humanoid robots actually out in the wild for sale at retail, they are going to come very very quickly, at scale.
Figure and Boston Dynamics sold out next year’s production runs almost instantly sometime last year; I think it’s just incredibly hard to overestimate the impact humanoid robots are going to have on the global economy.
- jillesvangurp
They don't have to catch up, they just have to be good enough on a narrow set of tasks to be worth the trouble. Perfect is the enemy of good here. Everything I've seen suggests that the prototypes are already pretty good at simple tasks that involve recognizing, picking up, and putting things into/onto other things in some way.
All the dancing, jumping, running, etc. is nice for marketing but not actually that urgent for such tasks. Dexterity is nice. There are plenty of examples of humanoid robots doing pretty fiddly stuff like folding t-shirts and other things.
The rest is just optimization where these things gradually get faster, efficient, do more complex things, etc.
- hobofan
I think the article takes a completely wrong lense for viewing the Humanoid Robotic Games, and general progress that is being made right now (though admittedly, many robot companies make it challenging with their marketing as well). Most of the advances being demonstrated right now are about establishing a robotic _platform_. They don't necessarily individually have to be able to complete all tasks end to end, but pushing the boundary forward on one of them at a time as a step of progress.
The different challenges presented in the article are almost all orthogonal to each other. Some of them are hardware engineering challenges, some of them are software / AI challenges, and most of them ultimately economic challenges. They can all be solved in a mostly independent manner, meaning that they won't be decades away to be resolved, but more likely years.
I think robotics is in a space that very much falls into the "people overestimate the progress in one year but underestimate the progress over 5 years" category.
A lot of the problems to solve regarding effectiveness (not efficiency) of humanoid robots even as outlined in the article (manipulation = short term spatial planning; long term task planning) greatly benefit from the current advances in AI, and in my estimation are already solvable with better harnesses with the current generation of models.