Why don't we have better robots yet?

I'm a robotics researcher and I think something that's missing in this video is that the sensing problem, that is: simply getting information about the world, is enormous and current sensing technology is far short of what is needed to truly operate in the real world. The sheer amount of data that animals are able to take in, process, and synthesize is enormous and (in my opinion) this ability to draw from many different sources of information to build a model of the self and the world is what would enable the next breakthrough in the field. I also want to push back on the assertion that we don't already have robots everywhere. I would argue that everything from self-driving cars to automated factories and even elevators fit the description of "a physical device operating independently based on sensory input." To me, that's a robot.

"Robot, will you wash the dishes?" "I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that."

Well the misconception is probably that robots are often seen as humanoid robots, but once you take a step back from that then each modern car is a robot etc.

Elevators will eventually be sentient and conscious, questioning the meaning of life after an existential crisis

I clink therefore I am. 🤖

I want a robot that answers all my colleagues' questions only in passive-aggressive tone.

"Why is it not everyone agrees with me?" Me too Sabine, me too.

When your legs fall asleep you realize how much any movement relies on feedback

What is my purpose? You pass butter.

"Honey, the helper's legs are squeaking again, we need to schedule an oiling." "Honey the helper is frozen in the living room, did you pay the subscription?"

I have a household robot vacuum, far simpler than a general robot. And it works pretty great... Except for all the things it just can't make sense of. Like my house has a "circle" in it; the kitchen, dining room, hall, living room, all connect in a big circle, and the AI in the robot just has a mental meltdown. It just can't comprehend that these are 4 separate rooms separated by doors, and then gets lost whenever it encounters a "wall" which is actually a door that it can't understand why it's there, because it's convinced it's all a single room. And nothing I've been able to do manages to convince it that it's 4 rooms. I used to try and fiddle with it's map in the software to try and force it to understand that there are 4 rooms separated by doors, and I can do that, and the robot stops getting lost... For about a week until it decides it's human overlord is clearly mistaken and this has been one room all along, and then proceeds to edit it's own map back to the dysfunctional state. But what about navigation around furniture? Is it good at that? It's actually fantastic at navigating around furniture... once I modified or replaced all the furniture in the house to be robot friendly. Was that worth doing? Hell yeah, screw vacuuming every day, best household improvement since Central Air Conditioning. Is my robot vacuum going to be taking over the world anytime soon? lol, I have to babysit this thing so much.

The troubling thought is: AI won't need robots to "put the plug back in".. ..when it manipulates the military to stop you from pulling it. It does not need the badge of "conciousness" to still be an existential threat to you (Not Sabine, specifically, but the generic "you")

Drones don't need to understand cupboards to 'unalive' people.

Thanks Sabine for pointing this out. It is a topic that is taxing my mind as i write a novel about a Synthetic Consciousness. One way to train an SC to use a robotic body would be to implant sensors in a human and record maps how a human navigates and exploits the real world in real time. At the same time a SC could create a comprehensive map of language use. Maps themselves are interesting artefacts. They can be characterised as massive multidomain data sets. Massive is the biggest problem in this description because it implies large storage and computational spaces and illuminates the bandwidth problem of a truely independent Robotic Sythetic Consciousness

On Large Language Models, we may be on the down slope from a maximum. They are training them by taking text from the internet. Their output is being put on the internet. The new input will thus contains some of its own output. This feedback process will lead to an instability in the system. The same thing may be happening to image and video creation. Three arms and 7 or 8 fingers on each hand will be "considered normal" by the AI because it saw that in images taken from the internet.

4:15 I think it's mostly R&D cost that needs to be covered, not labour. Making a copy of that hand will not take that much labour at all.

Hi, two points here: First, I´m sure you are totally right, that consciousness needs physically and sensorically confrontation with an environment. So LLMs won´t get it regardless of their intelligence, and the sensoric system of robotic is still a bit primitive in comparison to biological organisms, so it might take some time for the first conscious robot too. Second, I would like to add a third issue here, that´s energy supply. Since the muscles of robots are electric engines they need batteries (both quite heavy), and since your bunch of videos about that topic shows, they are heavy and have low energy density. Even a simple mowing robot needs to charge constantly, so I think that limits the outlook on a super-mighty "terminator"- robot or a super-helpfull houshold-robot soon. The suit of "iron-man" is supplied by a kind of micro fusion reactor, no?

The biggest reason is every robotics developer providing good dexterity has to fund all of their own R&D and production out of pocket because governments would rather weaponize them than use them to save lives and prevent injuries.

Sabine, please make more of these! Robotics and AI are two of my favorite science topics, alongside astronomy and quantum stuff. I am excited to see what machine learning can do, for example, with predictive medicine, materials science, and protein folding. Even Facebook's algorithms are pretty accurate about done very personal things that I don't talk about on Facebook (or any social media) just by analyzing my behaviors and signals and comparing them with a billion other people. My biggest fear about AI is the Stop Button Problem. In short, imagine that we build a safety switch that can disable a system. A sufficiently advanced AI will do whatever it can to make you not want to hit that switch. If it has misaligned goals, it may hide them in order to avoid getting deactivated, spilling its ability to complete whatever that goal was.

Is there any value data to training robots on people using VR headsets?