Gemini Robotics

When I see pro-AI promoters giving weird analogies that do not fit, I get a feeling that they are either management class(aka MBA types) or are not serious professionals.

One key point we must first understand, coding is NOT software engineering or even programming! Writing code is the last bit, a minimal fraction of the job description(unless you are actually indie dev or working for consulting firms). The core tasks include actually untangling the numerous vague requirements, understanding the domain, figuring out best approaches, performing various tests and checks, validating ideas, figuring out a cost effective solution, preparing rough architecture, deciding on an actual set of tech, align a hoard of people that everyone is on the same page, then start coding.

My IDE can already read my mind by auto-suggestion since many years and patterns/frameworks exist to reduce the amount of code I need to write. The issue is that, with these AI model, I just need to abuse my fingers slightly less. The other core duties are not yet solved and remains same archaic procedural everywhere in any/all serious roles.

And speaking of consulting firms, they are also clever and often has several implementations of same stuff, which they can modify a bit and sell for big money.

So in the end, people who jump into the pit because they are afraid of the juju mask are the prime target of the juju mask, for the rest of us, life goes on with minor bumps when the MBA comes to the desk and asks if it is possible to layoff few people to jack up the stock price this quarter yet… while subscribing to that new agenting engineer product suite for double the fees of what the laid off people actually costed, because their best friend in the golf club said the price will eventually become reasonable but the benefits are immediate.

> The physical safety of robots and the people around them is a longstanding, foundational concern in the science of robotics. That's why roboticists have classic safety measures such as avoiding collisions, limiting the magnitude of contact forces, and ensuring the dynamic stability of mobile robots.

Uhhh, I mean that's nice, but how about: "That's why we will never sell our products to military, police, or other openly violent groups, and will ensure that our robots will always respond instantly to commands like, 'stop, you're hurting me', which they understand in every documented human language on earth, and with which they will comply regardless of who gave the previous command that caused violent behavior."

Who is building the robot cohort that is immune - down to the firmware level - to state coercion and military industry influence?

You see this with high level languages now. Memory management much less assembly are things of a bygone era.

No worries. You know the hard part: dealing with hardware. ML/AI/Comp Vis can be learned fairly quickly if you don't need to dig very deep into algorithms by yourself, but use some higher level libs like scikit-learn, pytorch, etc.

The math, well, basic signal processing means you know some algebra and differential calculus. Which is enough, unless, again, you don't want to prove theorems or invent new algos.

Let me bring some perspective. In 1998, CMU was showing a self-driving car "driving on its own" [1]

27 years later, 99.99% of trips are driven by humans.

Real-world robotics takes multiple decades to pan out. These demos are just that: demos. What you are seeing will not remotely impact your life before the 2050's, if ever.

What you should be worried about, however, is you (not your job) becoming irrelevant if you don't learn to write firmware using state-of-the-art AI tooling.

At the minimum: learn to work with Cursor (or equivalent). Make sure you work at a company that uses state-of-the-art AI tooling.

If you want to go further: learn to code (e.g. in python). Take undergrad/grad level courses in math, statistics and fundamentals of deep learning.

And FFS, chill.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KMAAmkz9go