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OpenAI disbands its robotics research team

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Re: OpenAI disbands its robotics research team

#121

Post by touisteur »

iandanforth wrote: post #76
modeless wrote: post #68

I think most people believe that the problem with robots is that we don't have the right software, and if we just knew how to program them then today's robots could be incredibly useful in everyday life. From that perspective, this move from OpenAI seems dumb. That belief is wrong. Today's robots can't be made useful in everyday life no matter how advanced the software. The hardware is too inflexible, too unreliable,…

You're demonstrably wrong. I can waldo any number of commercially available arms to do work humans do today. Surgeons waldo precise robots to conduct surgeries as a matter of course. Every piece of construction machinery operated by a human today is an incredibly useful robot lacking sufficiently capable software. "When the hardware is ready, the software will be comparatively easy to develop." I take it you've never…

I want to react to 'the long tail can and should be handled by humans' and I find this thinking counter-productive and dangerous.

Humans are excellent to handle the long-tail when they're already handling the rest. Take driving. We're already seeing cars with large cognitive assistance, taking more and more an active role in 'easy' tasks. Think Tesla's autopilot. You're supposed to be there and 'take over' in case the 'machine' fails to handle the 'long tail' or decides to give you the responsibility of whatever happens next (because you trained it to do so).

Driving is a very complex task, you need training, experience, anticipation and (very important) context. There's no easy way to scramble all the details necessary for a decision in a human brain in the time to take the decision 'correctly'. Similar problem for industrial automation where you call the 'long tail' person once in a while and that person probably doesn't have the expertise of reconstructing the context, after 3 turnover phases in your provider.

I think we're taking this problem the wrong way, and aiming for the lower fruits, and higher and higher, while handwaving the long tail and sending it over the fence to the human. We should be putting the human at the center of this, and extend their capabilities, reduce the repetitiveness, help, not take over.

The paper I like a lot on this is 'automation should be like Iron Man, not like Ultron'.

Re: OpenAI disbands its robotics research team

#122

Post by MathYouF »

touisteur wrote: post #121
iandanforth wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're demonstrably wrong. I can waldo any number of commercially available arms to do work humans do today. Surgeons waldo precise robots to conduct surgeries as a matter of course. Every piece of construction machinery operated by a human today is an incredibly useful robot lacking sufficiently capable software. "When the hardware is ready, the software will be comparatively easy to develop." I take it you've never…

I want to react to 'the long tail can and should be handled by humans' and I find this thinking counter-productive and dangerous. Humans are excellent to handle the long-tail when they're already handling the rest . Take driving. We're already seeing cars with large cognitive assistance, taking more and more an active role in 'easy' tasks. Think Tesla's autopilot. You're supposed to be there and 'take over' in case t…

This is a very important point about shifting the calculus of automating human labor when doing it incompletely. There are still big debates in the self driving car world between people who want to get to level 2-3 (partial/conditional automation) vs level 5 (full automation).

The earlier group often says since Edge cases that they can't automate now constitute only <5% of training scenarios they encounter, they've automated 95% of the job. But with what you're saying, we can't really expect the calculus to work that way.

Re: OpenAI disbands its robotics research team

#124

Post by visarga »

tejtm wrote: post #31
fartcannon wrote: post #20

This is lunacy. The first country/company to replace human labour with general bipedal robots, will reap wealth beyond imagination. The short sitedness is astonishing, if you ask me. I genuinely believe how we as a society act once human labour is replaced is first aspect of the great filter.

There are no mechanisms in place for the generated wealth to benefit the replaced people, the wealth will go mainly to vanishingly few persons self selected to be okay with gross economic inequality. We have been at this since at least the dawn of the industrial revolution and do not have it right yet. Backing off and taking it slow now to let some cultural adjustments happen is a responsible step. My cultural norms…

AI will impact productivity but not replace humans. We have the needs and wants, AI lends our goals, it has none of its own. We'll expand our desires to match the increased abilities and remain as busy as always. We can't even begin to imagine the future applications, and that's where most of the work will be.

The ability to train huge models does not belong to a single entity and many of these models get shared with everyone. So you can right now type "import transformers" and have thousands of trained models at your fingertips. All these toys are ours (thanks to important work done for free by some of us) we just need imagination to use them.

Re: OpenAI disbands its robotics research team

#125

Post by an_opabinia »

rwallace wrote: post #106
TchoBeer wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you suggesting that Go literally was purpose built for this?

There is a sense in which it was: out of all the games that have ever been designed, or that it would be logically possible to design, humans selected Go as one of the relatively few to receive sustained attention, in part because it is particularly well suited to the deep neural network that is the visual cortex. So it is not a coincidence that it is also well suited to artificial deep neural networks.

It’s one of the few interesting games out there whose rules can be neatly represented as algebra on binary matrices and still make sense.

Re: OpenAI disbands its robotics research team

#126

Post by joe_the_user »

PeterisP wrote: post #114
iandanforth wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're demonstrably wrong. I can waldo any number of commercially available arms to do work humans do today. Surgeons waldo precise robots to conduct surgeries as a matter of course. Every piece of construction machinery operated by a human today is an incredibly useful robot lacking sufficiently capable software. "When the hardware is ready, the software will be comparatively easy to develop." I take it you've never…

The way I see it, the problem is that the "any number of commercially available arms" - the models that are beyond absolute toys and might be waldoed to do work humans do today - are staggeringly expensive compared to the humans they might replace. The cheap arms are ... toys, they can do a nifty demo, but they are really shit for doing any actual work, and while there are also good arms available, they're so expensi…

The way I see it, the problem is that the "any number of commercially available arms" - the models that are beyond absolute toys and might be waldoed to do work humans do today - are staggeringly expensive compared to the humans they might replace. The cheap arms are ... toys, they can do a nifty demo, but they are really shit for doing any actual work, and while there are also good arms available, they're so expensive that they're tricky to afford even for experimental use

But the expense of such is a product of the lack of demand for them. Cars (again) are produced with engines now having astoundingly good accuracy.

Of course, an accurate arm is going to always be expensive than a simple arm but cars, chips, phones and whatnot show that with large scale processes and heavy capital investment, accuracy and cheapness are compatible. But today, with software incapable of doing useful things with those arms, the people and institutions with the capital to make accurate robot arms cheap, through economies of scale, are not going to mobilize that capital.

just as we got the computer revolution not when we developed capable computers, but only after we developed affordable capable computers

Some technological advances happen through a feedback loop of commodities getting sold and producers improving those commodities (cars are an example here). Other technologies require a leap where a significant clump of capital has to be devoted to creating an advanced device for which there's no sellable (and sometimes no operable) device. (the biggest example of technological leap was the Manhattan project). It might be the case that things will happen that way with robots. But I'd also say it's an open question.

Re: OpenAI disbands its robotics research team

#127

Post by [deleted] »

PeterisP wrote: post #114
iandanforth wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're demonstrably wrong. I can waldo any number of commercially available arms to do work humans do today. Surgeons waldo precise robots to conduct surgeries as a matter of course. Every piece of construction machinery operated by a human today is an incredibly useful robot lacking sufficiently capable software. "When the hardware is ready, the software will be comparatively easy to develop." I take it you've never…

The way I see it, the problem is that the "any number of commercially available arms" - the models that are beyond absolute toys and might be waldoed to do work humans do today - are staggeringly expensive compared to the humans they might replace. The cheap arms are ... toys, they can do a nifty demo, but they are really shit for doing any actual work, and while there are also good arms available, they're so expensi…

[deleted]

Re: OpenAI disbands its robotics research team

#128

Post by dekhn »

modeless wrote: post #68

I think most people believe that the problem with robots is that we don't have the right software, and if we just knew how to program them then today's robots could be incredibly useful in everyday life. From that perspective, this move from OpenAI seems dumb. That belief is wrong. Today's robots can't be made useful in everyday life no matter how advanced the software. The hardware is too inflexible, too unreliable,…

robots do a lot today, it's just not AI and most of it isn't ML. I think the ML folks find what robots do today "tiresome and manually trained" but that doesn't stop robots from producing billions of dollars a year in goods.
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