this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2025
11 points (100.0% liked)
TechTakes
2097 readers
135 users here now
Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Okay, complete shot in the dark here - the "humanoid robot" part is an attempt to convince investors they're making AI more humanlike or some shit like that
I may get this half right as I'm not super hip to this stuff, but I have read that from a design and engineering standpoint humanoid robots are the least efficient possible whereas purpose-build robots (which typically look nothing like humanoid) are the obvious choice in most cases. Having said that, a lot of companies are chasing the humanoid form because they'll be able to immediately adapt to existing infrastructure (to replace human workers). They'll be able to occupy existing work spaces, use existing tools, etc etc. Which from a profitability/capitalism perspective is the goal.
The better these things get at doing general labor and even skilled tasks like harvesting crops, building houses, garbage collection, etc etc... the less jobs for the working class. Libertarians genuinely believe that AI and robotics will create a utopia but the self-same libertarian billionaire assholes will never stoop to paying taxes, or contributing to social safety net programs, etc etc. So for them robotics taking over as many labor markets as possible is a dream come true. They don't give a flying fuck what happens to the rest of us. If we don't have work, we don't have money to participate in capitalism. They're already outlawing homelessness and building concentration camps for the poor.
It's a good time to re-read
The Grapes Of Wrath
in my opinion.that's the story, but this doesn't work, like, at all, with just a moment's thought.
if humanoid was a good shape we'd have humanoid robots already.
the reason is they're selling sci fi dreams of robot servants even though these dreams are lies.
I'm not saying I believe they can do it, or that even they believe they can do it. I'm saying that's the profit motive behind why they're trying to develop humanoid robots. If any of them can be "the first" to making ones that can use tools and spaces designed for us, they'll immediately get into "disrupting" labor markets etc.
We've seen the same with chatbots, I guess. Objectively speaking, they perform worse at most tasks than regular search engines, databases, dedicated machine learning-based tools etc. However, they sound humanoid (like overly sycophantic human office workers, to be more precise), thus the hype.