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South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots

arstechnica.com

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Re: South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots

#101

Post by numpad0 »

ElFitz wrote: post #54
dolebirchwood wrote: post #12

Why humanoid? Surely there must be a superior physical form factor than one mimicking human anatomy. Is it just supposed to be more psychologically acceptable?

> Why humanoid? Surely there must be a superior physical form factor than one mimicking human anatomy. There probably (certainly) is. But if you want to build a multi-purpose platform, you’ll soon be faced with a dumb challenge: nearly all interfaces (door knobs, taps, electric switches, cutlery, sponges, every single button out there, pillow cases, wrenches, hammers, signs…) are made for humans. Placed at human hand…

Those require a hand on a stick. The stick isn't so interesting. Humanoid robots are the stick part, and actually not THAT interesting.

Re: South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots

#103

Post by ben_w »

red75prime wrote: post #88
gavinsyancey wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Autonomous (non-teleoperated) humanoid robots that can do useful work in an unfamiliar environment do not exist. And nobody's close enough to making them to understand if they're possible with our current level of technology, let alone how.

If there's no unknown unknowns in the brain, it's most likely possible. As the universal approximation theorem and empirical results of scaling SGD+RL suggest. Whether it will be economically viable remains to be seen. The human cerebellum has a peculiar structure and 80% of the brain's neurons after all.

The parameter count equivalent of a human brain is not yet known, but if it was one per synapse then a full human brain replica would need about 1.5e14.

We also don't yet know how to be as efficient with training examples as any living creatures' brain, and we only partially make up for this by training on so many examples it would take you a million or so years to do the same, so we'd still stuggle with something proportionally smaller-brained such as a cat.

That said, remote controlled androids are going to be economically disruptive, as they make every (unlicensed) job open to outsourcing from an office in a low wage country.

Re: South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots

#104

Post by numpad0 »

HerbManic wrote: post #50
Schiendelman wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humanoid robots that can do manual labor are going to be make or break for wealthy economies in the next two decades. Aging populations need help, and most successful nations do not have enough young people to do half the work they need done.

This is the path that Japan tried to go down and it hasn't worked out yet, but we have also solved a lot more of the technical issues since they began. going to be interesting to see if we pull it off this time.

The current humanoid hype don't have much substances or key technologies in it, and incumbent industrial robotics companies like FANUC are already in the process of rolling the techniques created for humanoids into their robots. I personally think this is going to be just series of incremental gains for big welding bots, and nursery equipment becoming mildly robotic, like Aperture Science wall panels, than humanoids walking into retirement homes and doing dishes in the future.

Re: South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots

#105

Post by bitwize »

HerbManic wrote: post #50
Schiendelman wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humanoid robots that can do manual labor are going to be make or break for wealthy economies in the next two decades. Aging populations need help, and most successful nations do not have enough young people to do half the work they need done.

This is the path that Japan tried to go down and it hasn't worked out yet, but we have also solved a lot more of the technical issues since they began. going to be interesting to see if we pull it off this time.

Sounds like "That's a bold strategy, Cotton, let's see if it pays off for 'em."

Re: South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots

#106

Post by nl »

jdw64 wrote: post #71
fakedang wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe some of the earliest Intel fabs were in New Mexico (Shiprock and Rio Rancho). What combination of the above did New Mexico have? When New Mexico and Germany had fabs, South Korea was still a developing country ruled by a brutal dictatorship. What happened was simple - both Taiwan and South Korea and now China took concerted steps in investing into their semiconductors businesses. South Korea did this indire…

I'm not saying Asian culture is the main factor. Yes, it's true that authoritarian governance driven by dictatorial regimes and chaebol politics has played a strong role, but fundamentally, the long working hours are simply inherent to this business. You brought up the New Mexico story quite well, but that place is notorious for the exploitation of Navajo women's labor. In the first place, the factory was occupied an…

This is extrapolating from a single example of something that has worked and the conflating correlation with causation.

There are plenty of places with highly educated cheap workforces who work hard. Eastern European culture is almost identical down to the whole "tiger mom" stereotype.

And there are numerous counter examples: Ireland has a huge semiconductor industry: https://www.siliconrepublic.com/careers/semiconductor-compan...

The US is full of the "military-style 24/7 on-call readiness and brutal shift work" - at the high end silicon valley is built on this, and at the low end every single non-unionized factory is this.

TSMC has never built a fab outside Taiwan. Of course there will be problems.

Re: South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots

#107

Post by mikem170 »

red75prime wrote: post #93
Barrin92 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Aging populations need help, They're pretty good at helping themselves. Close to where I used to live in Bavaria we had a pilot project of communal living for the elderly in a community of about a hundred people that included people with quite severe conditions such as dementia. Medical and care personell routinely checked in but they were largely self sufficient and did a remarkably job of taking care of themselves…

The "help" goes beyond taking care of themselves. What about food, clothing, infrastructure maintenance, and so on? An inverted population pyramid requires massive increase in the productivity of the economically active part of the population.

Or a regression in the standard of living. Ideally to a comfortable sweet spot for people.

Re: South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots

#108

Post by [deleted] »

DennisP wrote: post #52
yalogin wrote: post #25

Why is the whole world jumping on to humanoid robots? What am I not seeing that requires this level of investment in it?

For the optimistic case, read this piece by RethinkX: https://www.rethinkx.com/blog/rethinkx/the-disruption-of-lab... (Fwiw, >20 years ago RethinkX correctly projected the exponential cost declines of solar and batteries, when everybody else was drawing straight lines.)

[deleted]

Re: South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots

#109

Post by yongjik »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #8
paulmist wrote: post #3

> “Semiconductors, physical AI, and AI data centers are the triple axis for a great leap forward.” Not the best wording... I wonder how serious this announcement is.

The speech was delivered in Korean so this is a choice by a translator. I don’t speak Korean but I asked an LLM and it says … the phrase used is "대도약" (daedoyak), which literally means "great leap forward" or "great jump forward." This is NOT "대약진" (daeyakjin), which would be the direct translation of China's "Great Leap Forward" (大跃进).

To expand a bit, even saying 대약진 _daeyakjin_ "great leap forward" wouldn't have turned many eyes, because _dae_ is just a common prefix ("great") and _yakjin_ is also a common word meaning "leap forward, push forward, improve". The word simply doesn't have the same connotation of the English phrase "Great Leap Forward", which is almost always used for the infamous Chinese movement.

If a Korean speaker wanted to talk about that Chinese movement, they'd use the full name, 대약진운동 (大跃进运动): the great leap forward movement.

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