Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 223 posts

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

#161

Post by zipy124 »

whatever1 wrote: post #4

I wonder how Germany missed the semi manufacturing train? They had literally everything: universities, manufacturing culture, expertise and supporting supply chains, cash. I forgot, they also had ASML, freaking next door!

Not just ASML, but Zeiss the optics company is German and optics are one of the most important parts of lithography.

Regardless there are fabs in Germany, I know of at least 7, most located in Dresden. They mostly focus on older larger nodes, since for the German auto/industrial sectors that is all that is required. It's a much bigger industry than other European nations, especially like the UK which only really has one main fab in Newport.

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

#163

Post by wqaatwt »

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.

We certainly don’t need to replicate humans or overly anthropomorphise robots. Just like cars didn’t need to imitate mechanical horses.

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

#164

Post by gavinsyancey »

mkl wrote: post #97
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.

Most initial work for them would be in familiar, well-controlled environments - replacing humans in existing factories. I think whether they'd be cost effective for that will remain unknown even after a few years in service though.

Factory work that can be straightforwardly automated by robots generally already is, by special-purpose factory robots. The remaining tasks are generally:

* Tasks where poorly-paid humans are cheaper than expensive factory robots. Humanoid robots are more complex / fiddly so will be more expensive than existing factory robots. No help here.

* Tasks where human dexterity has an advantage over state-of-the-art robot actuators (e.g. sewing fabric panels into garments). Better robotics could help here, but the advancement needed is better actuators, not AI and a humanoid form-factor. And if you solve this you'd be better off putting your new end-effector on an existing 6dof platform.

* Supervising robotic equipment and handling exceptions. But then you get to "handling poorly-specified unfamiliar tasks in the physical world" which is not currently a solved problem and there's no guarantee just throwing more compute at it will be sufficient to solve this. So far all humanoid robot demos have either been either known tasks in a tightly-controlled environment, teleportation, or so poorly-functioning as to be obviously not fit for purpose.

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

#165

Post by gavinsyancey »

p1esk wrote: post #94
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.

We’re experiencing gpt-2 moment in robotics now. This means in about 2-3 years they will do useful work (cooking, repairs, cleaning, etc).

So far all humanoid robot demos have either been either known tasks in a tightly-controlled environment, teleportation, or so poorly-functioning as to be obviously not fit for purpose. It's possible throwing more compute at the problem will work and they'll be useful in a few years. Or maybe we're actually experiencing a Markov-chain / ELIZA moment and are multiple decades away from anything actually useful.

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

#166

Post by stouset »

Schiendelman wrote: post #40
GuB-42 wrote: post #17

The title sounds to me like: I am going to spend $1000 in groceries and dance lessons. That is, two very different things lumped together. Memory chips are like groceries, essential commodity parts, a no-nonsense investment. Humanoid robots are like dance lessons, it is cool, it is sexy, and it may pay off in the future, but the value is much less certain.

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.

I honestly think the opposite.

Successful nations haven’t had enough young people to care for the elderly because they’ve all been employed as knowledge workers. Knowledge work is going away rapidly. The only work that will be left are things that require actual human bodies (for now).

In short, jobs like elder care are suddenly going to have an enormous number of new job seekers, since it requires human presence and isn’t taxing physical labor.

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

#167

Post by [deleted] »

gavinsyancey wrote: post #164
mkl wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most initial work for them would be in familiar, well-controlled environments - replacing humans in existing factories. I think whether they'd be cost effective for that will remain unknown even after a few years in service though.

Factory work that can be straightforwardly automated by robots generally already is, by special-purpose factory robots. The remaining tasks are generally: * Tasks where poorly-paid humans are cheaper than expensive factory robots. Humanoid robots are more complex / fiddly so will be more expensive than existing factory robots. No help here. * Tasks where human dexterity has an advantage over state-of-the-art robot ac…

[deleted]

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

#168

Post by aenis »

timerol wrote: post #56
GuB-42 wrote: post #17

The title sounds to me like: I am going to spend $1000 in groceries and dance lessons. That is, two very different things lumped together. Memory chips are like groceries, essential commodity parts, a no-nonsense investment. Humanoid robots are like dance lessons, it is cool, it is sexy, and it may pay off in the future, but the value is much less certain.

$585B on new fabs, $357B on AI data centers, and $5.8B on humanoid robots. One of those numbers is not like the others

How can you spend more on a still early stage tech, well in the depths of R&D?

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

#169

Post by tonyhart7 »

kakacik wrote: post #131
rfw300 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germany’s austerity policy after 2008 may be one of the largest economic blunders in history. It would be one thing if they merely committed self-harm, but they also used their pull in the EU to drag the rest of the continent down with them. Reminded of Matt Yglesias’s excellent headline from 2010: Angela Merkel Lucky the Bar for “Worst German Leader” is Very High

One thing that I will never understand - how can german population not see through all that socialist bullshit she produced, promises undelivered, how much long term harm she generated across whole Europe (not just EU). Hard push for (now visibly) failed immigration at all costs, nuclear energy rollback (and she was nuclear physicist at least by her studies) and subsequent buying of foreign coal-based electricity, fr…

okay, that is going too far

she has its flaws but remember that people vote for her, so its not only her fault

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

#170

Post by imtringued »

pingou wrote: post #127
protocolture wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Humanoid robots will enter the market at a cost-capability of under $10/hour for their labor, on a trajectory to under $1/hour before 2035 and under $0.10/hour before 2045. I dont see it, unless this is an expectation that a robot will work for 50 years without maintenance at capex. Why doesnt a comparable tool, like an excavator, work with this math? Why arent they 100 times cheaper to run than 20 years ago? Excav…

Because supposedly they would repair themselves or be repaired by other robots, and energy would cost less and less, anything would cost less and less if work is increasingly done by robots than can be improved year after year.

But this logic applies to all machinery and technological progress. In the end it boils down to cheap energy and materials. The shape of the machine is actually irrelevant here.
Post reply on HN