Re: What is the state of Robotics Currently.

Curt Welch wrote:
I want an overpriced android that can learn to do those things and and not
fail.

Around the turn of the 19th to 20th century the new thing was electric
appliances that were run by motors. Motors were expensive, so
people who were lucky could afford one motor which powered all their
appliances. They had to multitask the motor attaching/detaching
it from each appliance and running them one at a time to get
assistance with their work.

Bad engineering, good economics while motors were so expensive.
Economics drove down the price and people got more convenient
appliances and people could get assistance on more work more
easily or even in parallel. They no longer had to wait for one motor.

Around the turn of the 20th to 21st century the new thing was
electronic
appliances that were run by embedded processors. Processors had
been expensive, so people who were lucky had been able to afford one
processor and if it was powerful enough it could multi-task and do more

than one computing job at a time. But around the 21st century
processors
became cheap and powerful enough that people owned dozens of them
in their laptop, cell phone, ipods, and automobiles. They no longer
had to wait for one processor.

The machines got smarter and began doing most things previously
defined as AI, having conversations, monintoring conversations,
looking up answers on the Internet, searching databases, solving
math and logic proglems, playing games, doing new research,
precision positioning, group activity planning etc. and most of
this became possible when collections of computers were interconnected.

Cheap specialized machines optimized for a specific task will always
be around but there is value in having a humanoid shaped machine with human
like learning skills. The value is that they can operate, and live in, a
world built for humans. They would be able to use all the tools designed
for humans to use - like driving a car or pushing a lawn mower, or walking
up and down stairs, coking meals in a kitchen, clean up a house, build
things with normal human tools.

Is Santa Claus brining you one?

Before we can create a general purpose learning android we have to solve
AI.

All of the problems except economic and engineering ones have been
solved. AI has been more advanced than most hobbiests realize for a
long time.

I tend to be optimistic about how long that's going to take (I've
recently made another 10 year bet on the subject), but it's possible it
will still take another 50 or 100 years to duplicate human level learning
skills.

You are not taking into account the fact that human learning skills
are not a fixed quantity. Average human skills are dropping about as
fast as computer capabilities are rising.

Even so a million dollar humaniod robot is closer to a goldfish than
to a minimum wage human worker in practical functionality today.

This is the technology that's holding robotics back and no one
really knows how long it's going to take to solve.

Decent vision, voice, reflexes, navigation, planning, and general
purpose learning and reasoning are out of the range of computing
toys today but we are pretty close. They are way out of the range
of most toy robot.

Consider that if a neuron can be simulated with 100 instructions
per second a thousand dollar laptop can simulate 10^7
interconnected neurons and 10^4 of them interconnected could
do much of what a person does with a couple pounds of grey
matter. Now once you figure out how to get that ten million
dollars worth of computers and megawatt power supply
inside the head of that humanoid android that you want to
replace your minimum wage servant you have solved an
important remaining problem. Then you just have a few
other engineering problems to get those other manufacturing
costs and maintanence costs down below those of a jumbo
jet.

All we can do is make
some wild guesses. (and work hard to solve it).

I heard that a lot fourty years ago before better and better
solutions to most problems were demonstrated.

Of course, remember that people argued that controled
heavier than air flying machines were simply impossible
for years after the Wright Brothers demonstrated it,
and people still argue whether space flight is possible,
or whether old AI problems are solvable. But this
sort of thing creates more new problems than the
number of old problems that it solves.

The real problems are neither AI nor econcomics. They
sort themselves out. The real problems are social just
as was predicted fifty years ago.

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