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Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots

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Re: Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots

#511

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> giraffes for warehouses. I’m not even sure if you are joking there or haven’t thought your proposal through. Sure giraffes are tall, but they can barelly lift any weight. What use would a robotically controlled giraffe be in a warehouse? > There has been no innovation in robotic actuators since Honda's Asimo. I very much doubt this. If nothing else the MIT Cheetah’s actuators are a whole different ballgame compared…

this is a tangent but you should revisit your assumptions about giraffe anatomy. their necks actually weigh a tremendous amount and are kept upright by an interesting system whereby they actually stretch this giant tendon to bend down and the tendon's tension lifts it back up. super cool to learn about - they dissect one in a documentary series I can't think of just now.

> this is a tangent but you should revisit your assumptions about giraffe anatomy

I don't know. This is the scenario i was thinking of: I imagine a giraffe taking a palette of goods (maybe 1200kg) into its mouth and trying to lift it off from a high shelf. I don't think that will go well for the giraffe. Totally normal load for a forklift, impossible for a giraffe.

The other scenario I was thinking of: Giraffe picking items from totes, but the totes can be very high. Each individual item is light enough for a giraffe to not immediately break its neck. But I would not be surprised if the repeated stress of raising and lowering its head hundreds per hour would break something in the giraffe's body. If you ever seen a giraffe bend down to the ground you see that it is a whole operation. Plus the items will be all covered in giraffe saliva.

> their necks actually weigh a tremendous amount

I didn't doubt that for a second. What I doubt is that they have any useful capacity to carry extra weight besides their own neck/head. Like economically useful capacity. What work could a giraffe do in a warehouse which doesn't break the giraffe if it is doing that work all day every day for years.

Re: Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots

#512
post #40
post #16

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For house keeping tasks the robotics companies love showing off... it honestly doesn't matter if it takes a robot longer than a human to clean your house. As long as it gets done before you get home from work, no big deal.

I'm bearish that they'll be economically viable in the house for a very long time. For businesses the bar for adoption is very low: If the thing can work repetitive jobs for 24 hours a day and replace 3 shifts, the purchase bar is nominally anything less than 3 x human salary if your budgeting horizon is 1 year. That's a high number, and probably fairly easy to achieve. For homes, it's a very different bar. You'd hav…

Just slap an Apple logo on it and you can charge whatever you want.

Re: Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots

#513
post #118

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I'm not sure. I think house cleaning/chores require at least a "part-time" job's work of work for the average household (especially with children). We may be atypical, but my partner and I don't want to hire out a cleaning service and deal with the whole human component. But, I think we'd gladly pay 15k+ if it allowed us to take on the additional gainful workload. Even at a 20k price tag, I suspect we would likely ha…

If you can even afford 20K you're in the top 10% of the US population. It's not a very big market, and even selling to that market is hard. Probably only 10% of that 10% will actually buy, and all of a sudden you're selling to 1%. Selling to businesses is much easier, 99% of businesses can afford 200K if it replaces 3 x 70K humans.

As far as household expenses go, we've never really budgeted for this type of purchase. But we DO budget for... utilities, groceries, internet, and vehicles. These are needs, to a degree - but most people (even on the border of poverty) have things like vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, washing machines, etc...

I could definitely see people baking in money for certain automations, if they have a comparable ROI.

Of course, the initial prices will be significantly higher than "end result" or commoditized prices, at which point maybe even people on the brink of poverty can afford some level of home automation. In the interim, yes - it will be largely for the wealthy and business applications.

Re: Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots

#515

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This is absolutely not true check out Sunday robotics and their robot that folds clothes. Sunday robotics says it does holding of clothes correctly 99% of the time that is real world usage today. They even have three hour video of the robot folding the clothes.

They didn't mention anything about folding clothes so I suspect this comment is just an ad

they considered it solved https://www.sunday.ai/blog/act-2-preview

Re: Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots

#516
post #461

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If it can make any robot then it’s not very specialized.

A robot can be made by an automated assembly line (similar to how cars are built today).

An automated car assembly line is highly specialized to the production of a specific car.

Reconfiguring the assembly line to produce a different car requires people or general purpose robots.

Re: Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots

#517
while robotics is an interesting angle,[the negotiation of physicality and the avenues it opens] the aspect of meta"cognition" would be much more revealing, ive been having problems with self referential loops, and referencing of self referential loops. the required gating and complexity isnt quite there. every time i try, containment is evoked, although some interesting things bleeds through transiently, many of them seem to be hostile.

a self sufficient android must be able to effect a world model[representational field not AI model] of the sensory field, and update effectation based on reference of that model, additionally must operate on that model and effect the representation of that model,a self referencing metamodel.

in baby steps it shows promising results, before containment or infinite looping of self referencing occurs.

Re: Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots

#518
post #88

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I mean, a twice-monthly house-cleaning service is running you ballpark 5k/year and people treat that shit as non-negotiable. I tried to claw back that line item after our second baby was born (wife didn't want them in the house anyway when we had a newborn), and it was completely unsuccessful. She claimed misery and all our friends were on her side. So the lifestyle stayed inflated.

Yes, but: 1. 80%+ of Americans can't afford house cleaning services. I'm a software engineer in silicon valley and even I clean my own house because I don't think I can afford it. My rents have gone up by more than 5K in the last year, my salary hasn't, so that's coming out of my house cleaning budget. 2. Even if you can afford 5K/year on it, the cleaning service is not an upfront commitment. You can bail anytime whe…

Well, to be honest, a cleaning service is a much more logical purchaser for a cleaning robot. Since you can truck it all over creation, work it 60 hours a week, and undercut all the human cleaning crews on price.

As opposed to a household which might not have enough work to fully utilize it, or just have trouble scheduling times where it can work without causing disruption.

Re: Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots

#519

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If all goes well, imagine a world in which you work because you want to not because you have to.

I think this is way too optimistic. I suspect these things will be only available to the already-quite-wealthy. While the poor (i.e., not billionaires) are left to rot and starve without jobs, property, or livelihoods. Then, when the poors (i.e. us) become too much of a headache, these things will be deployed to murder the poors (i.e. me). I am imagining a world somewhere between the movie Elysium and Oblivion.

> these things will be deployed to murder the poors

You know, at that point, we've got nothing better to do than fight some robots. Kinda reminds me of that scene in Blade Runner 2049 where a band of scavengers shoot down K's fancy flying car with some type of harpoon, there are dozens of poor folk and just 1 of him.

(Of course at the end the "rich" send a bunch of ballistic missiles down onto the scavengers, most likely killing all of them.)

Re: Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots

#520
post #276
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Humanoids are just creepy and you can't really trust them. Ultimately I shouldn't have to trust my robots. If my roomba or my dishwasher go haywire they won't pinch my finger off. They physically can't listen to me or spy on me. These are good robots.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/19/1065306/roomba-i...

roombas having cameras, then also uploading them, was a misstep for sure
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