Boston Dynamics
4 HN mentions · mentioned in 3 months, 2023–2024
1:21 · 11M views · Jan 18, 2023
Boston Dynamics shows its humanoid robot Atlas picking up and manipulating objects, and altering the obstacle course to reach its goal. The clip demonstrates locomotion, sensing and athletic manipulation.
Cited as a benchmark for how capable robots already are when HN debates AI, humanoids and automation.
4 comments from Hacker News
You’re conflating what I’m saying about human-styled robots, and the reality of humanoid robots. We’ve been making bipedal, two armed, dexterous robots for a while now, to varying levels of success. They don’t tend to obsess over the slick human look though, since it makes wobbly unbalanced machines, like the one in this video. Compare to Boston dynamics atlas [0], whose balance and dexterity is almost a bit scary. Is that run a result after many failed runs, yes. Is this video from Figure the result after many failed runs, I would also assume yes. I am much more impressed by what Atlas does though. [0] this video
If you stuck an AGI inside a Boston Dynamics robot and trained it on a trade I suspect it could replace much of that trade. this video Not an easy problem, but the assumption is that AGI makes solving such problems tractable. Japan has been working on healthcare robots for decades. I think the key word is that the robots "could" replace 95% of economically valuable work, not that they will. Using an example from today: we can and have replaced fast food order takers with kiosks, but there are still a lot of people employed as fast food order takers because that's what customers prefer.
> : the human body is a much more adapted tool to unknown situations than robots are. Here on Earth, that is true. Everywhere else however, our body is confined to a bulky, heavy, unwieldy space suit, and has exactly as much range of movement as the air supply allows. And the thing is: We can make better robots. There is clear progress in terms of their capabilities. Not so long ago, [this][1] would only have been possible as CGI, today, it is technical reality. This rapid path to improvement, simply doesn't exist for biological systems. [1]: this video
We already have robots that can walk better than the average human[1], and that's without the generality of GPT-4 [1] this video