Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6

Or it could turn out to look like satayoma (Japanese peasant forests) or it could be more similar to the crop rotation that was traditionally practiced in many parts of Central Africa where roots were important.

In Russia before the Soviets forced "modern scientific agriculture" on peasants to modernize, they practiced things like contour farming (where they interplanted rows of crops against the contours of the land to slow water down) and maslins (where they intermixed multiple varieties of wheat and barleys in the same patch). Now contour farming are an active area of research for their ability to prevent topsoil loss and build soil health while maslins provide superior yield stability and use little to no pesticides.

That's not even getting into the over 40-120,000 varieties of rice we've documented. Most of which are hyper adapted to a very specific location—often even a single village.

My point is there is no one way to take care of a plot of land. It's all relative to a number of factors beyond just the abiotic characteristics of the land itself. Your goals and intentions matter and you will always find localized unique adaptations.

Hyundai now owns Boston Dynamics and is pushing to get the robots into their factories.

Depending on what the rate of breaking dishes is, this would be a massive improvement on me, a human being, since I break a really important dish I needed to use like ~2x per month on average.

I'm all for the task reasoning and the multi-view recognition, based on relevant points. I'm very uncomfortable with the loose world "understanding".

The fault model I see is that e.g., this "visual understanding" will get things mostly right: enough to build and even deliver products. However, these are only probabilistic guarantees based on training sets, and those are unlikely to survive contact with a complex interactive world, particularly since robots are often repurposed as tasks change.

So it's a kind of moral-product-hazard: it delivers initial results but delays risk to later, so product developers will have incentives to build and leave users holding the bag. (Indeed: users are responsible for integration risks anyway.)

It hacks our assumptions: we think that you can take an MVP and productize it, but in this case, you'll never backfit the model to conform to the physics in a reliable way. I doubt there's any way to harness Gemini to depend on a physics model, so we'll end up with mostly-working sunk investments out in the market - slop robots so cheap that tight ones can't survive.