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There has been a lot of hype news in robotics + AI lately, as the AI updates just continue to come at a blinding pace. From Tesla/XAI we have the Optimus robot, which I can't tell if this is a major breakthrough or just another marketing splash driven by Elon.
On the other side of the fence, you have Nvidia releasing an open foundational model for robotics and partnering with Disney of all companies to make a droid robot.
You also have Google's I/O, which I haven't had the energy to look into.
With the speed of AI updates and the wars of hype, it's always hard to tell who is actually advancing the frontier. But it does seem that in particular robotics are advancing quite rapidly compared to even a couple of years ago. Personally I think that while automating white collar work is useful and such, AI entering into robotics will be the real game changer. If we can begin to massively automate building things like housing, roads, and mass manufactured goods, all of the sudden we get into an explosive growth curve.
Of course, this is where AGI doomer fears do become more salient, so that's something to watch out for.
Either way, another day, another AI discourse. What do you think of this current crop of news?
It’s true that robotics is getting renewed attention, but this seems to be more the result of increased investment rather than any foundational sea change in knowledge or theory. The fixation on a bipedal and human-ish one is also just that, a fixation, and still leads to some difficulty even moving around consistently - see for example the robot marathon and of course claims that the Tesla robots have been somewhat relying on human controllers last I heard. No new paradigms yet there.
There continues to be progress on the LLM front but this is actually, maybe contrary to the impression you are getting, slowing. I wouldn’t call it a plateau at all but there’s a real sense of struggle out there. Most of the focus in the last six months has been tool use of various kinds, rather than fundamental improvements, though there are some theoretical ideas kicking around that might prove fruitful. On the contrary the major research labs have started to see some diminishing returns. Meta notably can’t even catch fully up to the front players and most of the team quit in frustration. Anthropic has been stuck in a bit of a rut with 3.7 only a mixed improvement over 3.5 and in some ways a regression. OpenAI has had trouble getting the so-called “version 5” off the ground that’s an impressive enough improvement to deserve the name. Google is catching up and adding some neat things. Context windows are going up. “Agent” systems are being experimented with more. Video generation is showing some sparks of brilliance but the compute required is pretty steep. Deepfake video and voice, even real time stuff, is the biggest issue right now, more than any AGI crap.
The fixation on humanoids is understandable: a humanoid robot is a drop-in replacement for a human worker. When I use a food delivery service I often select a courier robot. It's a cute box on six wheels that drives to my apartment block entrance. But the delivery company can use them because I live in a sizable neighborhood between a railroad and a stroad that is both flat and full of restaurants.
A wheeled box can't cross the stroad because it can't use an underpass. A wheeled box can't cross the railroad either because there's an overpass. A wheeled box can't get to my front door as there are a few insurmountable obstacles even in the apartment complex: the first door leading to the lobby has an anti-hobo lock that you need three fingers to open, the second door has an intercom and is quite heavy, then there's a small flight of stairs leading to the elevator (there's a ramp, but you have to unlock and lower it), the robot then has to call the elevator and ring my doorbell.
In a country like the US that has ADA-compliant everything it's probably easier to build a useful delivery robot that can get around on wheels with a single button-pressing finger, but this is still quite limiting. You can't put a hundred of them into a warehouse or a sweatshop without rebuilding it to be robot-accessible. Everything in our lives is designed for human bodies, it's a very obvious target for the robotics industry.
I can honestly say this is the first time seeing that word ever used. But then again, I don't think I've ever really made a distinction between a "street" and a "road" before, let alone thought of something in between.
Anti-car people made it up even though there was already a word for it (arterial road or arterial highway).
To be fair, IMO it isn't a totally useless word. There is value in differentiating between a generic "urban arterial" road and an "urban arterial" that specifically favors long-distance travel while giving nothing but lip service to local access and pedestrians, where a limited-access road that doesn't even try to accommodate local access and pedestrians would be safer. Compare US 130 in Pennsauken, NJ (awful unfixable grandfathered design), with NJ 70 in Cherry Hill, NJ (much better).
t. civil engineer (roadway, not traffic, so not really an expert on this topic)
The actual fix for US 130 was the construction of I-295. What remains is only residual problems. As US 130, it was intended for long-distance travel; all mainline US system roads were.
(Fun fact: at one point late in the construction of I-295, it was possible to take US 130 North to I-295 North and end up back where you started; getting caught in such a loop gave me serious hatred for US 130)
By no means has US 130 been fixed. The buildings are so close to the traveled way, and the lanes are so narrow (because, many decades ago, it was converted from two lanes with a shoulder in each direction to three lanes with no shoulder in each direction), that those buildings regularly get hit by errant cars. And there are so many driveways, and the state govt.'s right of way is so narrow (especially after space has been reserved for sidewalk), that even putting up guide rail to prevent these crashes is impossible.
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