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I invented Roomba and assure you, robots won’t take over the world

nautil.us

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Re: I invented Roomba and assure you, robots won’t take over the world

#21

Post by Barrin92 »

BowBun wrote: post #8

There is no point made here that robots won't take over the world, he just belabors the point that it is hard to make robots replicate exactly what humans do. Automation will eat everything, it's just a matter of time. Even his problem of 'visually identifying weeds and uprooting them' does not come across as a massive problem, but one that can probably be solved with enough time and demand. Platitudes like these giv…

The fact aside that you just brought up another platitude, actual data suggests that this is wrong. Automation is slow, has been getting slower as is clearly visible in labour productivity and employment statistics and there's really no indication of a large change in that trend.

Billions of dollars are invested annually in technologies with marginal productivity improvements, and it looks like there are more and more diminishing returns.

If there was any indication that automation would 'eat everything', unemployment would be high (corona-pandemic aside), and labour productivity would be growing fast, none of which is happening.

Robert Gordon gives an expansive, evidence-based account of the development of American economic development in The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War, and there's virtually no evidence for the grandiose claims made by the tech industry that we're living in some sort of era of rapid change. That for the most part ended in the late 70s.

Re: I invented Roomba and assure you, robots won’t take over the world

#22

Post by mechagodzilla »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #20

I've been trying to make Buckbee's Law happen for a while: "The more a robot looks like a robot the less useful it is." Take fast food as an example: what's really going to change things are automated systems that reduce the number of people needed to run the place. Look at things like touchscreen ordering systems that cut the number of people talking to you. That's not a "robot" but it is automation of a sort.

These aren't really much of an improvement in efficiency though - self-checkout kiosks for stores have been around since at least the early 2000s, and they're still much slower than minimum-wage cashiers with a little experience (maybe Amazon will finally change this, but the tech my local grocery has is definitely as bad as the kiosk I worked alongside in 2003). It takes me much longer to order using a kiosk at a McDonald's than it takes me to tell a cashier what I want. I remember using a touch-screen kiosk at a Subway back in 2005, and my local subway 15 years later still doesn't have them. This ultra rise in productivity just isn't actually happening despite what conversations on hacker news (and before that, digg, and before that, slashdot) keep insisting on.

Re: I invented Roomba and assure you, robots won’t take over the world

#23

Post by simplyaccont »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #19

Roomba is a very old concept, missing almost everything that makes modern robots interesting. No vision; not much memory; no model of the environment; no knowledge of physics. Just a tuned mechanism and simple algorithm to wander around an barely pick up some dirt. Don't get me wrong; its terribly useful. I own a knockoff. But not a model of what robots could be, today. Think of facial-recognition drones delivering v…

Actually Roombas for a while already have vision and model/map their environment.

Re: I invented Roomba and assure you, robots won’t take over the world

#24

Post by JoeAltmaier »

simplyaccont wrote: post #23
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #19

Roomba is a very old concept, missing almost everything that makes modern robots interesting. No vision; not much memory; no model of the environment; no knowledge of physics. Just a tuned mechanism and simple algorithm to wander around an barely pick up some dirt. Don't get me wrong; its terribly useful. I own a knockoff. But not a model of what robots could be, today. Think of facial-recognition drones delivering v…

Actually Roombas for a while already have vision and model/map their environment.

Ok. But they have tiny little processors (5?) that each do a tiny little task with a smidgen of RAM. Is the 'vision' feature real, or just a light intensity detector? Can you get a picture out of it? I'm dubious.

As for the model/map, how does it sense location? Dead reckoning? Not a very significant feature if it can't find itself on the map, nor use the map to choose a route. Which I doubt (from videos of the Roomba in action)

Re: I invented Roomba and assure you, robots won’t take over the world

#25

Post by magusdei »

gwern wrote: post #3

If I want to know what robotics will look like and the future of deep reinforcement learning, I'd rather ask Covariant.ai than a guy whose expertise is little vacuums whose AI is "while true, spin in a circle and go forward at random".

Yeesh, gwern. Usually I enjoy your comments, but this one seems a bit unfair. Of course if you want to know the long-term future of robotics, you should look to sci-fi authors and research prototypes. But if you want to know the short-term future (I think the article provides an illustrative example of the different factors and complications that make it so difficult to go from a research prototype to an actual consumer product (a process which seems to take about 20 years on average). As usual, the lackadaisical improvement of battery technology is one of the central bottlenecks.

Of course, if your main interest is industrial robotics, where DRL approaches are more likely to become mainstream in the near-term, insights related to consumer products might not be as relevant. But note that industrial improvements, while important, will be mostly invisible to consumers except in terms of prices, unemployment and increased customization options for products.

Even then, the article can provide some perspective. Our processes (whether assembly lines or household vacuuming) are already highly optimized for a particular way of doing things, and researchers in particular tend to underestimate the amount of effort it takes to change systems to accommodate a slightly different method. So any new system not only has to be competitive with the existing one in just about every parameter, it has to justify the often huge costs of small alterations to the process. Thus, even in industry, getting to mainstream adoption of RL will likely take quite a while.

Re: I invented Roomba and assure you, robots won’t take over the world

#26

Post by lm28469 »

BowBun wrote: post #8

There is no point made here that robots won't take over the world, he just belabors the point that it is hard to make robots replicate exactly what humans do. Automation will eat everything, it's just a matter of time. Even his problem of 'visually identifying weeds and uprooting them' does not come across as a massive problem, but one that can probably be solved with enough time and demand. Platitudes like these giv…

> Automation will eat everything, it's just a matter of time

Yes and no, people are predicting that for 70 years, if not more. It seems that once you automated all the easy things it gets exponentially harder and more expensive to pursue automation.

> does not come across as a massive problem

Sounds like Musk telling you "self driving cars will be there in 6 months" every 6 months since 2013. Nothing is as easy as you think it is, even more so if you have 0 experience in the domain.

And then you have to solve all the societal issues. If everything truly gets automated at some point, who will benefit from it? how do you remunerate all the people who used to have low skill jobs? &c.

"Automation, which is both the most advanced sector of modern industry and the epitome of its practice, obliges the commodity system to resolve the following contradiction: The technological developments that objectively tend to eliminate work must at the same time preserve labor as a commodity, because labor is the only creator of commodities. The only way to prevent automation (or any other less extreme method of increasing labor productivity) from reducing society’s total necessary labor time is to create new jobs. To this end the reserve army of the unemployed is enlisted into the tertiary or “service” sector, reinforcing the troops responsible for distributing and glorifying the latest commodities; and in this it is serving a real need, in the sense that increasingly extensive campaigns are necessary to convince people to buy increasingly unnecessary commodities."

- Guy Debord, 1967

Re: I invented Roomba and assure you, robots won’t take over the world

#27

Post by mojomark »

Barrin92 wrote: post #21
BowBun wrote: post #8

There is no point made here that robots won't take over the world, he just belabors the point that it is hard to make robots replicate exactly what humans do. Automation will eat everything, it's just a matter of time. Even his problem of 'visually identifying weeds and uprooting them' does not come across as a massive problem, but one that can probably be solved with enough time and demand. Platitudes like these giv…

The fact aside that you just brought up another platitude, actual data suggests that this is wrong. Automation is slow, has been getting slower as is clearly visible in labour productivity and employment statistics and there's really no indication of a large change in that trend. Billions of dollars are invested annually in technologies with marginal productivity improvements, and it looks like there are more and mor…

Automation will not eat everything in time, but from my work on unmanned shipping, I'm pretty sure that autonomy + automation will.

Automation - handles deterministic situations.

Autonomy - handles uncertain situations.

In my industry (ship design, construction and operation), based on what I'm seeing and have seen evolve over the past 20 years, it feels likely that this paradigm shift to a majority of ships being autonomous will probably happen in the next 50 years. This is my gut feel, not a scientific conclusion, so take that for what it's worth. I also don't see why other industries will be any different. For my money, reinforcement learning (in some form) appears to be the key enabler.

Re: I invented Roomba and assure you, robots won’t take over the world

#29

Post by petra »

Barrin92 wrote: post #21
BowBun wrote: post #8

There is no point made here that robots won't take over the world, he just belabors the point that it is hard to make robots replicate exactly what humans do. Automation will eat everything, it's just a matter of time. Even his problem of 'visually identifying weeds and uprooting them' does not come across as a massive problem, but one that can probably be solved with enough time and demand. Platitudes like these giv…

The fact aside that you just brought up another platitude, actual data suggests that this is wrong. Automation is slow, has been getting slower as is clearly visible in labour productivity and employment statistics and there's really no indication of a large change in that trend. Billions of dollars are invested annually in technologies with marginal productivity improvements, and it looks like there are more and mor…

I'm not sure productivity is measured correctly.

In general it's measured something like increase in $/employee.

But let's say you're a commercial printer. The industry is moving to new printers that print double the amount, per employee hour.

If prices stayed the same, you'd see double productivity.

But because every company has the new, fastest machine , prices greatly reduce, and stop reflecting the fact that a single employee can now do 2x the work.

Re: I invented Roomba and assure you, robots won’t take over the world

#30

Post by qchris »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #24
simplyaccont wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually Roombas for a while already have vision and model/map their environment.

Ok. But they have tiny little processors (5?) that each do a tiny little task with a smidgen of RAM. Is the 'vision' feature real, or just a light intensity detector? Can you get a picture out of it? I'm dubious. As for the model/map, how does it sense location? Dead reckoning? Not a very significant feature if it can't find itself on the map, nor use the map to choose a route. Which I doubt (from videos of the Roomb…

It depends on the model, but I think that your impression of Roomba, either through experience or the technology that the author of this article presented is really out-of-date. Even on past models, they have Visual Simultaneous Location and Mapping (VSLAM) tech that is far, far beyond dead reckoning. The even more recent version (not sure if there's been a release since) also has persistent maps, so it actually can find itself on the map and choose routes[2]. I'm not sure what exactly the processors are, but considering the supply-chain investments that've gone into mobile processor development for smartphones, I think it's likely unfair to characterize them as "tiny little processors".

Disclosure: I did an internship at iRobot a few years ago, although the overwhelming majority of my work wasn't related to Roomba products.

[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/home-robots/iro... [2] https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/home-robots/new...

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