Live data from Hacker News

Gemini Robotics

deepmind.google

251–260 of 588 posts

Re: Gemini Robotics

#251
post #239

I'm a firmware engineer that's been working in consumer electronics and I feel very bleak about my future I feel so left behind. I have extremely limited robotics and computer vision experience. I have no ML experience. The only math I know has to do with basic signal processing. When I see open roles at these companies I think the projects I'm going to work on in the future will be more and more irrelevant to societ…

It definitely adds value to the conversation - we're all human, we're all unsure about the future and our place in it.

I'm just scared about a future where humans (say the next generation, kids 1-5 years of age right now) lack in-depth knowledge of almost everything and it's mostly AI writing low-level code, so there are no more "human experts."

We've already seen this happening where Gen Z mostly interacts with the world using phones and struggle with older operating systems/desktops, just like older generations. AI is going to make that 10x worse going forward.

Re: Gemini Robotics

#252
post #239

I'm a firmware engineer that's been working in consumer electronics and I feel very bleak about my future I feel so left behind. I have extremely limited robotics and computer vision experience. I have no ML experience. The only math I know has to do with basic signal processing. When I see open roles at these companies I think the projects I'm going to work on in the future will be more and more irrelevant to societ…

At least robotics (and by extension, embedded development) is a growing field.

I'd be more worried being a junior front-end mobile or web dev.

Re: Gemini Robotics

#253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tactile input is a nice-to-have but unnecessary. A human can pilot a robot through image sensors alone.

I think this is correct, to an extent. But consider handling an egg while your arm is numb. It would be difficult. But perhaps a great benefit of tactile input is its simplicity. Instead of processing thousands of pixels, which are passive to interference from changing light conditions, one only has to process perhaps a few dozen tactile inputs.

Also tactile memory have a role if you try to handle an egg with a numb arm.

Re: Gemini Robotics

#254
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google had really great products, that almost everyone I knew used, then they scrapped them for new shiny thing that competed. The one that angers me most is Google Talk, it used to work with any XMPP client, until it did not, and now its long since dead. They made their own version of tinychat (hangouts) and then mostly killed that too. Obligatory overview of things Google has killed, because its easy to forget some…

You'd think they'd be better off spinning them off rather than killing them?

I think if they make a product, they should support it long-term (within reason of course). Hangouts was great, for example. It could do SMS, voice and video calls, and regular web-based text chat. It was everything you need from a messaging client, all in one app. It was so close to being a real iMessage/FaceTime competitor, but instead they killed it and launched Allo/Duo instead, which was an incredibly baffling decision.

Sure it could've used a bit of a facelift and some other tweaks, but they have a history of launching new, half-baked products instead of just maintaining the existing ones.

Re: Gemini Robotics

#255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a bit confused. Ex-Googler so maybe I'm just spoiled by access to non-public information? But I'm fairly sure there's plenty of public material of Google robots gripping. Is it a play on words? Like, "we don't need to see to grasp", but obviously that isn't what you meant. We just don't need to if we saw it previously, and it hadn't moved. EDIT: It does look like the video demonstrates this, including why you can…

I think the point GP is raising is that most of the robotic development in the past several decades has been on Motion Control and Perception through Visual Servoing. Those are realistically the 'natural' developments in the domain knowledge of Robotics/Computer Science. However, what GP (I think) is raising is the blind spot that robotics currently has on proprioception and tactile sensing at the end-effector as wel…

Ah, that's a really good point, thank you - makes me think of how little progress there's been in that domain, whether robots perceiving or tricking our perception.

For the inverse of the robot problem: younger me, spoiled by youth and thinking multitouch was the beginning of a drumbeat of steady revolution, distinctly thought we were a year or two out from having haptics that could "fake" the sensation of feeling a material.

I swear there was stuff to back this up...but I was probably just on a diet of unquestioning, and projecting, Apple blogs when the taptic engine was released, and they probably shared one-off research videos.

Re: Gemini Robotics

#257
post #239

I'm a firmware engineer that's been working in consumer electronics and I feel very bleak about my future I feel so left behind. I have extremely limited robotics and computer vision experience. I have no ML experience. The only math I know has to do with basic signal processing. When I see open roles at these companies I think the projects I'm going to work on in the future will be more and more irrelevant to societ…

Still have to architect, review, and debug AI code.

Re: Gemini Robotics

#258
post #239

I'm a firmware engineer that's been working in consumer electronics and I feel very bleak about my future I feel so left behind. I have extremely limited robotics and computer vision experience. I have no ML experience. The only math I know has to do with basic signal processing. When I see open roles at these companies I think the projects I'm going to work on in the future will be more and more irrelevant to societ…

I disagree, you are in a prime position to learn those technologies and have a greater breadth of opportunity. There is so much noise online, it’s all bullshit. Keep going!

Re: Gemini Robotics

#259
post #239

I'm a firmware engineer that's been working in consumer electronics and I feel very bleak about my future I feel so left behind. I have extremely limited robotics and computer vision experience. I have no ML experience. The only math I know has to do with basic signal processing. When I see open roles at these companies I think the projects I'm going to work on in the future will be more and more irrelevant to societ…

Even for AI engineers, the future is not necessarily bright. These approaches are so powerful and so general that the world is probably not going to need that many of them. I think where the real work will be is taking these models and creating real products out of them.

I think you are right, the value is in application. If you have a problem to solve with AI, you benefit from AI. If you don't, you don't.. like any software. The AI providers get $20/month, you can get anything out of AI. Users have a much higher upside than AI developers and providers.

Re: Gemini Robotics

#260

I read too much scifi, and almost none of it has updated on the current state of AI. For example spaceships swarming with low skill level crew members that swab the decks and replace air filters. Or depending on a single engineer to be the only one with the crucial knowledge to save the ship in an emergency. If scifi authors aren't keeping up it's hard to expect the rest of us to. But the macro and micro economic cha…

I found Vernor Vinge is spot on. I recommend focusing on recent work. E.g. the Bobiverse (https://www.goodreads.com/series/192752-bobiverse) by Denis E. Taylor is a super easy read that touches on that. He takes a shortcut in early books by capping the progress in US via turning the country into a theocracy and then a bad WWIII that wiped out most of the mankind. Note that I haven't read the latest books, but even the previous ones are full of automation and humans are "ephemerals" - they don't live long. I am recently reading Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of time series. It goes beyond AI and mind uploading, expanding into biotech, the next big deal. With the right understanding of proteins and DNA/RNA, hacking living things is way easier than creating robots, as they self-repair, replicate, feed themselves, recycle things effectively, create ecosystems. The only reason we are not doing it is because our understanding of these mechanisms is very shallow.
Post reply on HN