• @papertowels
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    130 days ago

    The hardware part isn’t the difficult stuff, well it might be difficult but not research difficult, the control software is.

    That’s exactly the “ai” aspect of this, which is why I’ve been saying it’s a harder problem. Your control software has to account for so much because the real world has many unforeseen environmental issues.

    Solving everyday problems using proven methods? Try getting VC funding for that.

    Fwiw, one of my friends works at John Deere helping with automation by working on depth estimation via stereo cameras, I believe for picking fruit. That’s about as “automate menial labor” as you can get, imo. The work is being done, it’s just hard.

    Going for AGI is the big stuff. Impressing people is the big stuff. Dazzling people with hype is the big stuff.

    I think you’ve introduced some circular thinking in here - spot and atlas bots from boston dynamics do dazzle people. In fact I’d argue that with all the recent glue memes, people are disillusioned with agi.

    At the end of the day, manipulating things in the real world is simply harder than manipulating purely digital things.

    Once we’ve established that, then it makes sense why digital image generation is tackled first before many physical things. As a particularly relevant example, you’ll notice that there’s no robot physically painting (not printing!) the images generated by image generation, because it’s that much harder.

    Ultimately, however, I don’t think society is ready for robots that do our menial labor. We need some form of UBI, otherwise the robots will in fact just be terking our jerbs.

    • @barsoap@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      130 days ago

      John Deere

      Illinois

      boston dynamics

      Massachusetts.

      …I mean they may recruit in the valley and have offices there but they’re not part of the business/VC culture there. And neither seeks trillions of dollars to sink into silicon.

      Ultimately, however, I don’t think society is ready for robots that do our menial labor. We need some form of UBI, otherwise the robots will in fact just be terking our jerbs.

      UBI is going to come one way or the other, question being whether we will have to fight neofeudal lords first.

      And it won’t be Musk or any of the valley guys ketamine and executing on evil plans doesn’t mix, it might not even be American, it might be… wait, yes. A Nestle+Siemens merger buying up Boston Dynamics and other companies having actually useful products. Nestle has evilness nailed down, Siemens is a big investment bank (with attached household appliance factory) and still miffed that laws forbid them from bribing foreign officials, and the rest provide the tech.

      The Chinese are another possibility, as in they have the capacity, though I can’t quite see tankies actually going for the abolishment of work.

      As a particularly relevant example, you’ll notice that there’s no robot physically painting (not printing!) the images generated by image generation, because it’s that much harder.

      I don’t think it’s that hard. The robot would be a slightly more involved plotter or a standard 6-axis arm, to train the model you don’t need to hook it up to the robot you could hook it up to a painting program, we’re quite good at simulating oil paint, including brush angle and rotation and everything, graphics tablets can detect those things and programs have been making use of it for quite a while. Might not go the whole way but far enough to only need fine-tuning once you hook up the robot.

      • @papertowels
        link
        129 days ago

        Regardless of where folks are located, I haven’t seen anything that suggests that affecting things in the physical realm is of equal difficulty to the digital realm, so it still makes sense to me that purely digital improvements are made faster.

        Re: robot painter

        I actually found this video which is fascinating, although the pieces it seems to make are… currently mediocre. Idk if you’ve found any videos on machines leveraging brush angle/rotation - using “techniques” like these are actually what interests me about this space and why I differentiated it from “printing”

        • @barsoap@lemm.ee
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          fedilink
          329 days ago

          The robot seems to use angle at least a bit, I have no idea how oil actually works so don’t ask me to judge its proficiency. All I know is that my tablet has angle and rotation and I’m not using it because sculpting doesn’t. Never went beyond pencil when it comes to 2d and realised that an outline is not a planar cut through an object not while practising drawing but while writing a shader.