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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.
'Stroad' is a shibboleth, generally meaning "[I don't like] roads that have more than one lane and are generally unobstructed".
Not exactly. A freeway is not a stroad. An arterial without businesses or housing that serves to move people from place to place is also not a stroad.
Generally, a stroad is a high or medium-speed road with housing or commercial areas right on it.
Really, the reason they exist is cost. It's cheap to take a one-lane-bidirectional road that has a bunch of existing development on it, expand it out to 2, maybe put a center turning lane in it, and you have what is effectively a highway.
Strong Towns and the other anti-car people get extremely butthurt about "but muh suburban financial sustainability", but this is why this kind of construction exists in the first place. Same with the 4-way stop and the traffic light; it doesn't require a few million dollars per intersection like roundabouts do (it's the cheaper, more technologically-advanced option, though it of course does make other sacrifices).
Yes, it'll cost you more lives and property damage because someone didn't look both ways and got (them or their car) hit by another car going 50 mph, but human safety and human dignity (in this case, the dignity of not living in a million-dollar shoebox and it only taking 10 minutes to get to your destination rather than 60) are always two sides of the same coin.
This is only the case in the situation where the development isn't actually on the road or the lanes are super wide.
I'm not sure what your claim is, exactly. Are you saying that stop signs are technologically advanced? Or that you can have stop signs on a road where the speed limit is 50 (based on your next paragraph)? I certainly haven't seen that before.
Wide, high speed roads are a nuisance to live near (ask me how I know), so I don't know that it's a big increase in dignity to make every road a 45MPH arterial.
I'm not sure what you are getting at with your 10 minute vs 60 minute journey hypothetical. The places where it takes 10 minutes to make a trip and the places where it takes 60 minutes to drive an equivalent distance are not the same, and this goes back to the land usage in the first part. You can't expand the roads endlessly, because there's stuff on the side of the road, and to make things worse, that stuff on the side of the road is why people travel in the first place, and with wider roads those places are forced further apart except in totally rural areas.
You can't take e.g. San Francisco and replace every two lane road with a six lane road to fix the traffic without running out of land or building double decker freeways in the middle of the city.
In general, my preferred mode of living is a medium town with quiet, shaded streets in town so that people can walk and bike around and kids can play in the street without getting oneshotted by a driver scroooolling tiktoks at 50 MPH. This is incompatible with wide roads with high speed limits, aka, stroads.
For everything else, there's the interstate.
Isn’t this a solved problem in a more local sense? You just put a housing development off the main road with deliberately curved and winding streets which has the natural effect of slowing down car speeds and limiting through traffic as long as the entry points were sensibly chosen. No need to be a mid sized town, this can be dropped into bigger city outskirts.
That helps, and those aren't stroads, but it's convenient for a variety of reasons to mingle residential and commercial developments (as has been done for nine thousand years from Chatalhoyuk until WWII).
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