From the Article

>The reason for building a humanoid machine, Mr Jackson maintains, is to perform tasks that involve human interaction. With a bit of development Ameca might, for example, make a good companion for an elderly person—keeping an eye on them, telling them their favourite programme is about to appear on television and never getting bored with having to make repeated reminders to the forgetful. To that end, Engineered Arts aims to teach its robots to play board games, like chess. But only well enough so that they remain fallible, and can be beaten.
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>To interact successfully with people, Mr Jackson asserts, a robot needs a face. “The human face is the highest bandwidth communications tool we have,” he observes. “You can say more with an expression than you can with your voice.” Hence Ameca’s face, formed from an electronically animated latex skin, is very expressive.

The following submission statement was provided by /u/Gari_305:

From the Article

>The reason for building a humanoid machine, Mr Jackson maintains, is to perform tasks that involve human interaction. With a bit of development Ameca might, for example, make a good companion for an elderly person—keeping an eye on them, telling them their favourite programme is about to appear on television and never getting bored with having to make repeated reminders to the forgetful. To that end, Engineered Arts aims to teach its robots to play board games, like chess. But only well enough so that they remain fallible, and can be beaten.
>
>To interact successfully with people, Mr Jackson asserts, a robot needs a face. “The human face is the highest bandwidth communications tool we have,” he observes. “You can say more with an expression than you can with your voice.” Hence Ameca’s face, formed from an electronically animated latex skin, is very expressive.

Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/ypp8d3/humanoid_robots_are_getting_close_to_reality/ivk0zh6/

An AGI can be reduced in intelligence via reducing its ability to think far so it can have lots of information but will never be able to string up the information to become insightful understanding.

However, with it still having a lot of information, it will be able to know what to do in common scenarios (eg. When see X, do Y, with Y in a list listed according to priority, doing the first option first if all the ingredients are available) and know what to not do.

I honestly think old people of all people would be the least likely to be willing to trust a robot with taking care of them.

Furthermore if these engineers have kids they’d also know how many ‘no’s’ you have to go through for an already intelligent being to learn something common-sense such as not climbing too high.

These bots are a long ways off in my opinion

Getting close to reality just like fusion and self driving cars right? I think this is going to be like fusion and FSD cars in the sense that we’ll need AGI to create practical humanoid robots.

Funny because the old people I know who need help at home can’t afford it. It’s very hard and expensive to get someone for home care. A robot would help so many

What makes you think a robot would be cheaper than a human? Ever heard of subscription services?

Imagine this:

Need vacuuming ability? $5 a month.

Help you shower/clean yourself? $100 a month.

Mow the lawn? $20 a month.

We don’t know what the pricing model would look like, but you also don’t have to worry about a robot stealing or doing shady shit.

We just hired someone for my elderly parents so trust me I just went through this entire ordeal. It fucking sucks

Pricing models? You have a massive amount of existing hardware products with these business models already. Look a cars and phones. You really think robots will come with an all inclusive price?

You can however have robots make mistakes. i.e. accidentally set a fire while cooking. Forget to turn off the tap.

I’ve been through it as well, that’s why you hire good companies. Oh and if you have stuff that’s valuable, don’t keep it at your parents house then because you are letting strangers in.

I think the only thing we agree on is that these bots are a long way off, I don’t care to debate the imaginary pricing models that don’t exist for the hardware that doesn’t exist.

Not everyone can afford to hire a company. I’m from the ghetto, you get what you can afford and it is what it is. Hiring a company is just laughable, people are scouring churches and their local network for what little they can afford.

Either way, these have the POTENTIAL to help a lot of old people. We’ll probably blow ourselves up before they take off anyway

I just want one to mow my lawn & clean my house.

People make 50-150,000K a year. A robot costs are initial cost, energy costs, and repair costs. I would doubt a largely plastic domestic robot would cost more than the yearly wage of a person to build.

Depends how much you value the IP behind the AI. Tesla's self driving feature (which is hella broken and doesnt get turned on just because you pay) is >10k.

So far Boston Dynamics has burned >2b for about 20 working robots which is about 100m a peice so far. They are also hella broken.

Dont let your dreams be memes.

Can't compare preproduction costs to mass production lines. As scale and time progress costs approach material input costs. The number of patents and technology involved will keep things expensive for the first decade max. Newer models will push down older ones. It'll likely get to the point that people will be dumping obsolete robots in the recycling bin.

I’m not talking about hiring a company though, my point is that a company will need to maintains these bots just like modern cars. Are you assuming these will be open sourced or in a build your own PC kind of way? Because if that’s the case there is no logic in your belief these will ever exist let alone help old people.

I’m from the ghettos in my city too, not there anymore but penny pinching was definitely a thing growing up. It’s not the affordability I’m getting at, what I have issues with your logic of thinking these will be for everyone especially old people with fixed incomes or on government benefits.

Why not ? Technology gets cheaper as it matures. There’s zero reason to believe with enough time it won’t trickle down to everyday consumer affordability like every other piece of modern technology

They will have to be maintained, but some things can run a while without issue. Fuck, I still see 98 civics doing just fine with just oil changes lol

You need to think way longer term

You need to compare apples with apples. Cars have a benefit of transportation that many people need.

'98 civics will run but they are massively outdated in terms of safety and technology. You get into an accident with 20+ year old designed and rusted metal frame, you're going to be in a world of hurt.

Designs most certainly have changed massively as well. Furthermore the poorest still don't have cars and need public transit and as I mentioned before the elderly class are on fixed or government benefits. Where would they get the money to fund even a modestly cheap robot?

Also, despite cars being 'cheaper' if hedge to inflation, the upkeep costs sure have not. i.e. insurance, tires, heck even gasoline have all gotten more expensive.

To prove a point. I bought a top of the line desktop in 2000, it cost me $1.2K. To buy the same today would cost me $3K.

Longer term, I honestly think humanoid robots and robotics in general will stay at factories and businesses. To make a robot that can do all the tasks a human can with the intuition and intelligence is currently impossible. I get your are optimistic, but currently you are basing your beliefs on hopium and not facts.

Well youre missing a whole lot of externalities in your thesis, like assuming it will be mostly plastic, which is not feasible if oil production plummets due to global warming, or if we all die because they dont stop massive oil demand.

If the time horizon is 30 years until mass production, then titanium may be cheaper than plastic if we can effectively mine the moon by then. If it's 10 years, then the AI probably isnt ready yet.

We would also need reliable hydraulics that arent dependent on fossil fuels, and those parts cant be plastic anyways. If you want mass production of robots ASAP then we need to produce a lot more oil and that will probably kill us js.

Hopium lol. The fact that I have an 85” TV in my room, an item that was once $20,000 in 2012 solidifies my stance. What I have now is a much more advanced product for 5x less.

I don’t care to change your mind, keep your beliefs. Nobody is talking about what is CURRENTLY possible. In 50-100 years things will be drastically different saying we haven’t blown ourselves back to the Stone Age

You are a really funny guy. Keep up your jokes and you just might get somewhere in comedy.

Keep up that hopium, you definitely run on it.

P.S. there are still $20,000 TVs and TV’s are “much more advanced”? With what…wifi and more pixels? LOL.

Huge weight reductions, thinner, more pixels, less electricity, network connectivity and the list goes on

Enjoyed our convo till you decided to be a dick, have a good evening

Then so too is the end of my sexual relationships with human women.

I'm pretty old. By the time I'm proper old enough to need a robot - another 20 years or so - I'll embrace it with open arms. As would just about every one of my friends.

I think Ameca has the more impressive face right now.

Cant they learn those “no’s” from having access to the internet and studying it super fast like in the matrix movie?

They’re AI robots, they’re far faster than we are so they can just learn by programs

You either watched too many movies or have not studied A.I. before. The ones you are referring to are fictional, not only that they are semi-sentient.

Current A.I. is no where near that level of capability, and likely won’t before the near future.

The way current A.I. Models function is by having humans hand feed them massive amounts of categorized data to help it ‘learn’ and output results based on that data.

It’s why you can’t have a conversation with Alexa or Siri, you can only tell it to do things and it can only perform tasks it’s been programmed to do.

If home care AI were created to supplement health care, wouldnt there be a way to subsidize their availability? State or federal levels. Creating tech service workforce specifically to build and maintain, but also to allow greater availability through an application system. I want to live in THAT world. 💙