6 ms·

> 3) Transformative technologies succeed by redesigning a task, and usually not by simply trying to reproduce the existing forms of human labor. Paige built an

by arbuge 1mo ago

> 3) Transformative technologies succeed by redesigning a task, and usually not by simply trying to reproduce the existing forms of human labor. Paige built an amazingly complex mechanical imitation of the human compositor which attempted to repeat a human worker’s actual movements. By contrast, Linotype simplified the problem by doing something humans didn’t already do. That would in fact be the main argument against humanoid robots in many (most?) applications. The counterpoint is that what humans already do is exactly what's needed in some cases, making those cases the ideal applications for humanoids.

hnchm 1mo ago
Well, LLMs are a great example of the argument for the power of doing what "humans already do": language, however imperfect for the task, so maybe humanoid robots turn out to be the most natural way to interact with a human environment (broad strokes here, I know, but hopefully you get the gist)
- somenameforme 1mo ago
  Another point on this is that as you improve the robot you improve those endless tasks it can do, whereas with specialized robots improvements to that specialization are much more limited in scope. So there's a lot more incentive and value to be gained from improving the tech than there are for specialized solutions. Sike with LLMs.
  - gofreddygo 1mo ago
    A group of specialized actors with deeper singular skills, working on a task, well coordinated outperform a single actor with wider, shallower skills. I acknowledge that the depth the group brings is at a cost higher than the single actor and it isn't always a better thing.
adrianN 1mo ago
If you have a general solution like a robot that can do human tasks, i.e. copying manuscripts with a pen, that is often highly inefficient compared to a specialized solution like a printing press but the R&D effort of applying it is minimal compared to inventing a specialized machine. It's similar with LLMs. Compared to a bespoke piece of software for the task they are incredibly inefficient, yet they are extremely useful because they can do things where developing that piece of software would require a lot of research.
Animats 1mo ago
Actually, no. Replicating the manual process was quite feasible. There were keyboard-driven typesetters that worked well. Here's the Unitype.[1] This sets type by assembling type slugs into a line. It doesn't cast hot metal. It even has an automatic distribution system; it can sort type slugs by letter, so you can reuse the type. That's the same thing the Paige machine did. The Unitype was much simpler. The Unitype was late to market. Mergenthaler already had the Linotype out when the Unitype shipped. The Unitype was half the price of a Linotype. Unitype machines sold for about 20 years, so it wasn't a total failure. The Paige machine uses a lot more parts and space to do the same job. Mechanism design skill is very rare. All the good Teletype machines were designed by just two people - Howard Krum and Edward Kleinschmidt. There were competing machines, and they were all much worse. William Burroughs invented the first adding machine that worked reliably, and it was better than all the competitors. Burroughs dominated banking well into the computer era. The video claims that the big problem with the Unitype that it required not just a keyboard operator, but someone manually justifying the lines at the output end. Linotype figured out automatic justification, using expanding wedges. No need for a second worker. Plus someone had to feed used type back into the Unitype for sorting and return to inventory. With a Linotype, the matrices with the letter forms never leave the machine; they are dispensed, set into a line, used for casting, and then immediately recycled back to the magazine for further use. As long as the supply of lead bars ready to melt holds up, you can keep setting type. With ordinary type setting, mechanized or not, you can end up with all your type tied up in pages waiting to be printed. So the real problem with the Unitype was that it wasn't labor-saving enough. Despite that, it powered many small country newspapers for years. [1] https://youtu.be/5n5JQrN8qx4?t=152 https://youtu.be/5n5JQrN8qx4?t=152
somat 1mo ago
See also: the sewing machine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sewing_machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sewing_machine The 30 second version, sewing is very labor intensive and people started trying to make a sewing machine from about when manufacturing tolerances got tight enough to attempt the process. It still took about 100 years until machines that actually work well were invented, The genius bit that took so long is to not try and sew like a human does but to develop an inverted process that a machine can do. Honestly, despite being quite common at this point in time sewing machines still blow my mind when you consider the intricate process they are required to do with thread. And a fun fact for free: Apparently patent cartels(cough MPEG LA) are not a new thing and Singer et al set one up in the 1850's to lock up the market on these marvelous machines.
- ButlerianJihad 1mo ago
  It is said that Elias Howe was granted a vision in a dream about how to construct the needle for such machines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elias_Howe#Invention_of_sewing_machine_and_career https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elias_Howe#Invention_of_sewing...
- brianpan 1mo ago
  And the dishwasher, the laundry washer/dryer... There's also plenty of examples where technology creates something very different than the thing that humans were doing: photograph vs painting, car vs horse/bike. It would be silly to say that we have all this horse infrastructure and saddle UX that we don't want to break compatibility with. Maybe the lesson is that humans are adaptable but machines/manufacturing is not? It's easier to make a great new thing that humans will use than it is to make a cost-effective production thing that exactly replaces what humans did.
- stevekemp 1mo ago
  If you have 30 minutes to spare the old program "The Secret Life of Machines" has an episode demonstrating how sewing machines work, in a delightfully quirky way. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lwI4TSKM3Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lwI4TSKM3Y
miki123211 1mo ago
Humanoids are the Turing machines of physics. They're Mediocre at everything, and worse than a dedicated machine at almost every task, just like a CPU is worse than an ASIC. However, they adapt to new tasks quickly. This decreases ownership costs (you only need one humanoid, not one machine per task), as well as manufacturing costs, as you can make one design and spend a lot of R&D money on scaling that design.
- anon-3988 1mo ago
  There's no reason why an ideal body needs to have such a high center of gravity though? Clearly we are wasting a lot of energy and capacity to maintain that balance. I am pretty the ideal body is actually a spider.
  - pineaux 1mo ago
    Actually bipedal systems are very energy efficient when walking and moving and very slightly inefficient when standing still.
  - wongarsu 1mo ago
    Spiders can't reach as high. Unless you make them really big, but then they take up a lot of space Humans are very space efficient
    - Joker_vD 1mo ago
      Something vaguely centauroid is probably would be the most middle of the road design: easy to maintain steady balance with 4 legs without taking too much of the floor space, the central column on top of it can go quite high up and easily have up to 4 hand-like manipulators attached to it with wide range of motion.
    - anon-3988 1mo ago
      The mechanical spider can simply extend its torso or body up. You are only bounded by your imagination!
  - 1mo ago
LarsDu88 1mo ago
This whole episode suggests to me that people are misjudging the future of robotics. Many companies are building robots to exactly imitate humans, perhaps with the thought that the "egocentric" training data widely available will be more useful for this form factor. Look at Tesla, Unitree, Boston Dynamics, or Figure... But humans are just barely adapted to bipedalism and hunter-gathering as it is. The perfect kind of robot is perhaps something closer to the linotype... a AI controlled macine that has the capability to birth or re-assemble to be optimal for the task at hand. Just like the linotype automated the "casting" of lines of text. Not necessarily a 3d printer or a nanobot universal assembler... but maybe something more akin to a modular assembly line that can rearrange itself intelligently.
- cestith 1mo ago
  The Inspector Gadget robot, only not necessarily in humanoid form, might be useful. Modular bits it can carry along. As for overall form, a compact and stable form has already come to us in media as well. The astromech droids from the Star Wars galaxy are bipedal / tripodal adaptable so they can be very agile or very stable. To be more adaptable to more terrains, maybe a compact tripodal or quadrupedal stepping robot, or a bipedal one with optional third leg.
wongarsu 1mo ago
The counterpoint is that we already exploited a lot of the cases where simplifying the problem helps. We've spent approximately two centuries doing that. That leaves a lot of processes left over where that kind of specialization was either not feasible or not economically attractive
Joker_vD 1mo ago
> The counterpoint is that what humans already do is exactly what's needed in some cases, making those cases the ideal applications for humanoids. If my old textbook on control theory (printed in 80s) to be believed, there apparently were quite a lot of processes where simply recording the video of hand/arm movements of the human operators, smoothing the trajectories, and then making the mechanical manipulators simply follow them, was precisely the fastest and cheapest way to automate, compared to trying to reimagine the whole process and rebuild a whole manufacturing line with the newly invented machines.
bcjdjsndon 1mo ago
> That would in fact be the main argument against humanoid robots in many (most?) applications. Buy one robot, use it for many things, is an attractive proposition I think
- arbuge 1mo ago
  Depends on the price... if it can indeed do many things reasonably well, it might be pretty expensive.

by arbuge 1mo ago

hnchm 1mo ago

Well, LLMs are a great example of the argument for the power of doing what "humans already do": language, however imperfect for the task, so maybe humanoid robots turn out to be the most natural way to interact with a human environment (broad strokes here, I know, but hopefully you get the gist)

somenameforme 1mo ago
Another point on this is that as you improve the robot you improve those endless tasks it can do, whereas with specialized robots improvements to that specialization are much more limited in scope. So there's a lot more incentive and value to be gained from improving the tech than there are for specialized solutions. Sike with LLMs.
- gofreddygo 1mo ago
  A group of specialized actors with deeper singular skills, working on a task, well coordinated outperform a single actor with wider, shallower skills. I acknowledge that the depth the group brings is at a cost higher than the single actor and it isn't always a better thing.

adrianN 1mo ago

If you have a general solution like a robot that can do human tasks, i.e. copying manuscripts with a pen, that is often highly inefficient compared to a specialized solution like a printing press but the R&D effort of applying it is minimal compared to inventing a specialized machine. It's similar with LLMs. Compared to a bespoke piece of software for the task they are incredibly inefficient, yet they are extremely useful because they can do things where developing that piece of software would require a lot of research.

Animats 1mo ago

Actually, no. Replicating the manual process was quite feasible. There were keyboard-driven typesetters that worked well. Here's the Unitype.[1] This sets type by assembling type slugs into a line. It doesn't cast hot metal. It even has an automatic distribution system; it can sort type slugs by letter, so you can reuse the type. That's the same thing the Paige machine did. The Unitype was much simpler. The Unitype was late to market. Mergenthaler already had the Linotype out when the Unitype shipped. The Unitype was half the price of a Linotype. Unitype machines sold for about 20 years, so it wasn't a total failure. The Paige machine uses a lot more parts and space to do the same job. Mechanism design skill is very rare. All the good Teletype machines were designed by just two people - Howard Krum and Edward Kleinschmidt. There were competing machines, and they were all much worse. William Burroughs invented the first adding machine that worked reliably, and it was better than all the competitors. Burroughs dominated banking well into the computer era. The video claims that the big problem with the Unitype that it required not just a keyboard operator, but someone manually justifying the lines at the output end. Linotype figured out automatic justification, using expanding wedges. No need for a second worker. Plus someone had to feed used type back into the Unitype for sorting and return to inventory. With a Linotype, the matrices with the letter forms never leave the machine; they are dispensed, set into a line, used for casting, and then immediately recycled back to the magazine for further use. As long as the supply of lead bars ready to melt holds up, you can keep setting type. With ordinary type setting, mechanized or not, you can end up with all your type tied up in pages waiting to be printed. So the real problem with the Unitype was that it wasn't labor-saving enough. Despite that, it powered many small country newspapers for years. [1] https://youtu.be/5n5JQrN8qx4?t=152 https://youtu.be/5n5JQrN8qx4?t=152

somat 1mo ago

See also: the sewing machine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sewing_machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sewing_machine The 30 second version, sewing is very labor intensive and people started trying to make a sewing machine from about when manufacturing tolerances got tight enough to attempt the process. It still took about 100 years until machines that actually work well were invented, The genius bit that took so long is to not try and sew like a human does but to develop an inverted process that a machine can do. Honestly, despite being quite common at this point in time sewing machines still blow my mind when you consider the intricate process they are required to do with thread. And a fun fact for free: Apparently patent cartels(cough MPEG LA) are not a new thing and Singer et al set one up in the 1850's to lock up the market on these marvelous machines.

ButlerianJihad 1mo ago
It is said that Elias Howe was granted a vision in a dream about how to construct the needle for such machines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elias_Howe#Invention_of_sewing_machine_and_career https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elias_Howe#Invention_of_sewing...
brianpan 1mo ago
And the dishwasher, the laundry washer/dryer... There's also plenty of examples where technology creates something very different than the thing that humans were doing: photograph vs painting, car vs horse/bike. It would be silly to say that we have all this horse infrastructure and saddle UX that we don't want to break compatibility with. Maybe the lesson is that humans are adaptable but machines/manufacturing is not? It's easier to make a great new thing that humans will use than it is to make a cost-effective production thing that exactly replaces what humans did.
stevekemp 1mo ago
If you have 30 minutes to spare the old program "The Secret Life of Machines" has an episode demonstrating how sewing machines work, in a delightfully quirky way. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lwI4TSKM3Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lwI4TSKM3Y

miki123211 1mo ago

Humanoids are the Turing machines of physics. They're Mediocre at everything, and worse than a dedicated machine at almost every task, just like a CPU is worse than an ASIC. However, they adapt to new tasks quickly. This decreases ownership costs (you only need one humanoid, not one machine per task), as well as manufacturing costs, as you can make one design and spend a lot of R&D money on scaling that design.

anon-3988 1mo ago
There's no reason why an ideal body needs to have such a high center of gravity though? Clearly we are wasting a lot of energy and capacity to maintain that balance. I am pretty the ideal body is actually a spider.
- pineaux 1mo ago
  Actually bipedal systems are very energy efficient when walking and moving and very slightly inefficient when standing still.
- wongarsu 1mo ago
  Spiders can't reach as high. Unless you make them really big, but then they take up a lot of space Humans are very space efficient
  - Joker_vD 1mo ago
    Something vaguely centauroid is probably would be the most middle of the road design: easy to maintain steady balance with 4 legs without taking too much of the floor space, the central column on top of it can go quite high up and easily have up to 4 hand-like manipulators attached to it with wide range of motion.
  - anon-3988 1mo ago
    The mechanical spider can simply extend its torso or body up. You are only bounded by your imagination!
- 1mo ago

LarsDu88 1mo ago

This whole episode suggests to me that people are misjudging the future of robotics. Many companies are building robots to exactly imitate humans, perhaps with the thought that the "egocentric" training data widely available will be more useful for this form factor. Look at Tesla, Unitree, Boston Dynamics, or Figure... But humans are just barely adapted to bipedalism and hunter-gathering as it is. The perfect kind of robot is perhaps something closer to the linotype... a AI controlled macine that has the capability to birth or re-assemble to be optimal for the task at hand. Just like the linotype automated the "casting" of lines of text. Not necessarily a 3d printer or a nanobot universal assembler... but maybe something more akin to a modular assembly line that can rearrange itself intelligently.

cestith 1mo ago
The Inspector Gadget robot, only not necessarily in humanoid form, might be useful. Modular bits it can carry along. As for overall form, a compact and stable form has already come to us in media as well. The astromech droids from the Star Wars galaxy are bipedal / tripodal adaptable so they can be very agile or very stable. To be more adaptable to more terrains, maybe a compact tripodal or quadrupedal stepping robot, or a bipedal one with optional third leg.

wongarsu 1mo ago

The counterpoint is that we already exploited a lot of the cases where simplifying the problem helps. We've spent approximately two centuries doing that. That leaves a lot of processes left over where that kind of specialization was either not feasible or not economically attractive

Joker_vD 1mo ago

> The counterpoint is that what humans already do is exactly what's needed in some cases, making those cases the ideal applications for humanoids. If my old textbook on control theory (printed in 80s) to be believed, there apparently were quite a lot of processes where simply recording the video of hand/arm movements of the human operators, smoothing the trajectories, and then making the mechanical manipulators simply follow them, was precisely the fastest and cheapest way to automate, compared to trying to reimagine the whole process and rebuild a whole manufacturing line with the newly invented machines.

bcjdjsndon 1mo ago

> That would in fact be the main argument against humanoid robots in many (most?) applications. Buy one robot, use it for many things, is an attractive proposition I think

arbuge 1mo ago
Depends on the price... if it can indeed do many things reasonably well, it might be pretty expensive.