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.
* 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.
I'd also point out that what makes this whole thing smell of being a grift is the fact that what's being chased is humanoid.
Humans are not the pinnacle of dexterity or stability. And freed from biological constraints, it makes no sense why we'd use the human form as a reference.
Making a humanoid robot is a hard thing to do, for sure, but it's also not particularly useful. The routines needed to balance a robot or correct for a slip are interesting to solve, but don't really make for a better robot which is more capable of doing the dishes or folding the laundry.
If I'm amazon, for example, then the most useful form factor for a general purpose robot is 2 arms on a 4 wheel omnidirectional rolling platform.
Self driving cars is far from a solved problem. It's something we've been working on for the last 20 years at least. We are getting closer, some solutions are impressive (like waymo). But even those ultimately need operators in the area of the cars to solve the problem of the car getting stuck.
Self driving cars are an infinitely simpler problem to solve vs a general purpose humanoid robot. You have basically 2 outputs, acceleration and steering. You have rules simple enough that I was driving at 14. With enough input, you'd think self driving could be completed in a snap. But it's not there yet.
Humanoid robots which are useful will come after widespread deployment of L5 self driving cars. Since we don't have that, I have no faith that we are close to useful humanoids.
I've highlighted the two main issues you are currently experiencing.
We also don't yet know how to be as efficient with training examples as any living creatures' brain, and we only partially make up for this by training on so many examples it would take you a million or so years to do the same, so we'd still stuggle with something proportionally smaller-brained such as a cat.
That said, remote controlled androids are going to be economically disruptive, as they make every (unlicensed) job open to outsourcing from an office in a low wage country.
We don't know the violations of the physical Church-Turing thesis that are conductive for machine learning. We don't have evidence for their existence in the brain (although, the brain would be the prime candidate for finding them as evolution works directly with the true physical laws).
BTW, large ANNs don't try to model how the brain does things. They are trying to mimic what the brain does. So, using "how many transistors/artificial neurons it takes to model a biological neuron" is not a good approach.
We have no evidence. We even have no solid theories how this can work (Penrose's OrchOR is "OrchOR somehow taps into mathematical knowledge somehow encoded into the structure of spacetime"). But people, for some reason, insist that there should be something there. I can't attribute it to anything else but to deeply entrenched feeling of human exceptionalism.
Look up the neural correlates replication crisis, and e. g. the "dead salmon" study by Bennett et al.
More basic movement control doesn't need loads of ram as far as I know.
The larger the context window, the better with models. Having a few TB of RAM would be exceptionally helpful.
All this just made me realise something however. Having your robot dormant and charging, is a bit of a waste. You could have robots dormant, but its compute in use to act as a compute node. If the distribution of robots is similar world-wide, we'd need a fraction of the datacenters we have now.
Using such nodes for training purposes would be beyond advantageous. And the company which can slice up the work and having training done in batches would get the big bucks. And actually, with consumer facing products soon all laden with extra ram and gpu for local compute, that applies there too.
Imagine leasing out idle time on your desktop or even laptop for cash. There may be a market here, especially with the cost of new datacenters. Any company able to securely package compute without risking data safety is going to make a mint.
Anyone have any ideas?
I don't think you understood my post. The equivalent of self-driving is the movement control I was talking about.
Self-driving cars don't have high level logic, except for route planning. Which often is offloaded to the cloud. An extra 30 milliseconds on understanding your speech is nothing.
> Imagine leasing out idle time on your desktop or even laptop for cash.
The same is true with an android. Imagine it turning on an frying pan, cooking dinner, and then going offline part way through. Or turning on a tap to wash something, and going offline while the sink overflows and destroys the house.
There are myriad of such scenarios, but local compute is absolutely, 100% necessary. Anyone betting the farm on putting network controlled devices into homes for any serious task is going to lose their shirt. Local compute is an absolute requirement, and a few TB of RAM and local compute will be nothing over the scope of this discussion (a few years minimum, just to build and kick off all these new fabs).
By the time these fabs are online, expect most smart phones to have 1TB of RAM and significant llm capable compute (gpu or other custom silicon). I would be astonished if flagship model phones in 2030 weren't sold with 1TB RAM. Note I'm saying flagship, there will be of course economy models as always. Certainly laptops will be sold in multi-TB RAM configs.
You don't need terabytes to turn things back off.
Not that I want to trust "not setting the house on fire" and "not flooding the house" to this kind of model in the first place...
> I would be astonished if flagship model phones in 2030 weren't sold with 1TB RAM.
I'll be astonished if they have 50GB.
Have you looked at RAM size/price trends? I'm not even talking about the last year, just the pattern before that. We're not in the 80s and 90s anymore. The most recent price lows were roughly $3.50/GB in 2013, $2.50/GB in 2016, and $1.50/GB in 2023. If we're lucky the cheapest stuff will hit $1/GB in a few years, and the kind that would actually fit on a phone motherboard would be significantly more than that.
Samsung hit 16GB on their top model in 2020 and it's either been 16GB or 12GB ever since. Apple only went up to 12GB in the last year. Google offers 16GB. A couple niche offerings have 24GB. Why would these RAM numbers even double during the next four years?
I think AI is what could make humanoids turn from parlor tricks to huge amounts of utility, but we're really going to have to see how it plays out in the next 5-10 years.
This is something people refuse to understand. The shape of the robot changes absolutely nothing about robot intelligence unless it abandons the basic concept of joints and links. Continuum robots are very difficult to control but they are also incredibly niche.
They're pretty good at helping themselves. Close to where I used to live in Bavaria we had a pilot project of communal living for the elderly in a community of about a hundred people that included people with quite severe conditions such as dementia.
Medical and care personell routinely checked in but they were largely self sufficient and did a remarkably job of taking care of themselves, maybe most importantly the were happy and quite dignified, something I cannot imagine is the case when your only contact is a humanoid robot.
Of course in an age where every solution is yet another technology rethinking social life isn't very high up the list.
It's also something we could help by getting rid of zoning in cities, of course, because we constantly push low income elderly out to the edges of urban areas where they can afford to live, rather than allowing supply to keep up with demand in dense, walkable, accessible places where people who can't drive can actually have quality of life.
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.
They need a solution to their plummeting birthrates which are officially worse than either China’s or Japan’s
> The wide availability of commodities typically leads to smaller profit margins and diminishes the importance of factors (such as brand name) other than price.
I'm not aware of many commodities which have only 3 world-wide sellers.
I forgot, they also had ASML, freaking next door!
Japan has an even sadder story. They were the DRAM top dog for a very long time. South Korea entirely ate their lunch.
[1] https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/chinas-cxmt-is-set-to-...
Nearly every single DRAM cycle we go through the same thing. People are saying memory are so cheap we are going to get 32GB/ 64GB / 128GB very soon. Just like they did 2-3 years before. Then every single DRAM up cycle they were earning insane amount of money, with this one being exceptionally high. Not only covering their previous lost but also extra profits. And every single time people cry out price fixing.
And every single time, Interviewer, financial reporters or share holders will ask TSMC's CEO Morris Chang the same question, and this is before TSMC was even well known in Tech cycle, will they make DRAM given it is just Fabs, TSMC could do it. And every single time in the past 20 - 30 years Morris had to explain the whole thing again.
Frankly speaking I have been rumpling about DRAM being commodity on HN for nearly 20 years. It is the first time I have seen a few comments finally picking this up as shown in the current top comment.
Reminded of Matt Yglesias’s excellent headline from 2010: Angela Merkel Lucky the Bar for “Worst German Leader” is Very High
She literally licked putin's boots well into Ukraine war and still thinks licking his ass is the correct course to solve war in Ukraine (which started 2014 and it was pretty nasty already back then, the world just didn't care also thanks to her).
She is by far the biggest catastrophe modern Europe encountered after Hitler. She helped remove any proper fighting chance for the top dog Europe had for 21st century. She singlehandedly caused proper hate against EU in large parts of (not only) eastern EU population, and hence the rise of populist left or right wing politicians whose whole success story was just point at her failings and criticize, enough to get 20-30% of the votes and even win elections, repeatedly. She literally made people like Orban or Fico.
She still admits no mistakes, even wants to become german president. How effin' out of touch with reality she is.
... what? How's that the first thing that comes to mind about her, before "neoliberal", "conservative", or "austerity"? For that matter, when has the CDU ever been anywhere near socialist, in Germany or in the EU parliament?
100% agree we're still dealing with the fallout from her policies though.
she has its flaws but remember that people vote for her, so its not only her fault
Maybe she did tons of good so it somehow averages out, but I certainly haven't heard about it (now is your time to defend her), everybody saw consequences of her disastrous policies that affected entire bloc.
East had no prior experience with migrants due to living for decades in effectively prison camp guarded by soviets, no travel or other exposition to other ways of life. We were very monolithic cultures (and still mostly are).
The voices were completely ignored and overruled by behemoths like Britain, France and most powerful voice in the bloc - Germany.
Don't revision past, I lived through it, saw masses of people getting absolutely mad pissed off and feeling helpless and unheard with arguments which over time proved them mostly correct.
I don't hold those opinions myself, some of our best friends are muslim immigrants but oh boy go to the eastern EU without camera and ask random folks on the street outside capitals, or just listen to them. Or look at election results, this gave russians and their constant influence very good arguments since they position themselves as 'guardians of traditional family values in society', regardless of how its true or not (clue - its not but thats detail here).
Absolutely, Germany essentially abandoned its position in industrial leadership solely due to neoliberal ideology. Just compare the trajectories of Germany and China in the last 20 years. One country planned and implemented a proper industrial policy, the other hummed and hawed about the infallibility of the market and thus essentially just gave up.
My best guess is that the connecting train was operated by the Deutsche Bahn
In other words, it's an industry where you have to grind white-collar workers as if they were blue-collar laborers.
A lot of the processes are automated, but at the points where automation hasn't reached, there are quite a few things that are genuinely complex to handle.
Mainland China also has the 996 schedule for office workers purely as a cargo cult ritual, forcing people to sit at a desk at midnight and pantomime doing work.
As for the 996 culture, I agree to some extent. My Chinese friends hated it too. But in China, there's this thing called neijuan (involution / the rolled up scroll). there are just so many job seekers that people are forced to endure it. What neijuan means here is "Eating one's own flesh" basically knowing that this competition is damaging to everyone involved but doing it anyway.
When New Mexico and Germany had fabs, South Korea was still a developing country ruled by a brutal dictatorship.
What happened was simple - both Taiwan and South Korea and now China took concerted steps in investing into their semiconductors businesses. South Korea did this indirectly through favourable arrangements for the industry players via the chaebol system, while China and Taiwan did this with more direct government investment into the industry.
Sure, you can't just dump money into the industry and become a semiconductor player, else the Middle Eastern countries would have tried that ages ago. Yes, the talent being locally present is important but you're once again bringing up tired tropes about Asian working culture as being relevant.
You brought up the New Mexico story quite well, but that place is notorious for the exploitation of Navajo women's labor. In the first place, the factory was occupied and shut down by the American Indian Movement. You know full well that this is a story about the exploitation of Native Americans, so why are you bringing it up like that?
The history of Shiprock itself is, at its core, a history of "cheap, obedient labor." You frame it only as state-led investment, but the reality is that the culture behind it is complex.
What my post is pointing out is not that "Asian culture is superior." What I'm pointing out is the harsh working conditions in Asia — where working hours are extremely long, and even highly educated workers are inevitably subjected to grueling hours. Why do you think TSMC's Arizona fab in the U.S. keeps getting delayed? The U.S. invested money through the CHIPS Act, but American engineers refuse to accept the "military-style 24/7 on-call readiness and brutal shift work" that exists in Taiwan. TSMC founder Morris Chang himself has pointed this out before.
What I'm saying is that the educational infrastructure is so well-established that it's easy to produce a large supply of highly educated workers, and that these highly educated workers then have to be submissive to inhumane working conditions. This isn't about Asian superiority — it's actually pointing out something bad about Asia. But from the context of your comment, it seems like you misunderstood me as saying "Asian work culture is superior" and replied based on that assumption. That was never my intention.
Before you leave a comment, I'd ask you to show some basic respect to others.
There are plenty of places with highly educated cheap workforces who work hard. Eastern European culture is almost identical down to the whole "tiger mom" stereotype.
And there are numerous counter examples: Ireland has a huge semiconductor industry: https://www.siliconrepublic.com/careers/semiconductor-compan...
The US is full of the "military-style 24/7 on-call readiness and brutal shift work" - at the high end silicon valley is built on this, and at the low end every single non-unionized factory is this.
TSMC has never built a fab outside Taiwan. Of course there will be problems.
As you said, if it were just about labor, other countries would probably have some supply of it as well. But in the case of Eastern Europe, there was likely American pushback against the European continent. As you know, semiconductors today can't be made entirely by a single entity. They're connected through a chain of trust. If Europe were to move beyond just producing semiconductor equipment and start directly manufacturing semiconductors through fabs, it would easily become a competitor to the U.S. rather than a supply chain partner.
In fact, the semiconductor chain is deliberately fragmented so that no single player can monopolize it.
On top of that, the U.S. is using South Korea and Taiwan to contain China. Under the ideology of protecting foundries from Chinese aggression and industrial attacks, the U.S. is sending the signal that it can cut off the supply chain. Eastern Europe, on the other hand, is tied up with the EU, making it much harder for the U.S. to control.
In the end, what matters when the consumer nation, the U.S., outsources production is how securely it can relocate it. Look at what happened to Japan's semiconductor industry. It was crushed through the 1986 agreement. The U.S. simply does not tolerate the emergence of an independent manufacturing hub that possesses sovereign economic power.
What matters is whether the U.S. can maintain control while keeping the price low.
There's a story in one of Feynman's memoir where he figures out that pausing the live system and debugging its physical RAM stack is turning out to be more time consuming than simply scheduling a new corrected task, on some particular 1940s mechanical supercomputer he was assigned to as a tech. It might not have taken Feynman to notice that, but you can assign Feynman for that, and it worked for the Manhattan project.
The parent comment isn't (just) reiterating the tired tropes, but pointing out that East Asia has an "educational base" similar to industrial base that supports its high tech. I don't think that much is so strange way of thinking. The state of ME countries(maybe except Iran) soft proves it - they don't believe in such a thing. And they don't have a semiconductor industry. Pure coincidence? I doubt it.
(And on "This isn't about Asian superiority — it's actually pointing out something bad about Asia." from jdw64, yuuup 100% it is quad plus bad - IMO a thing about East Asia is that there's zero inter-national mobility due to the notoriously high language barrier, so competitions are closed to within borders, and the bar just drift skywards indefinitely because of that. There was a massive domestic hiring freeze in Japan during the 90s that made "janitors with a PhD" actually not so rare, but none of them hit the global labor market or started companies - the Japanese bar for janitors just went up to PhDs. It is said that success of Japanese 7-11 was partially attributable to that event, that, when you happen to have all the cashiers manned 24/7 with top scientists, you can just throw million different tasks and they can handle it perfectly, put aside whether they're happily doing it)
https://www.citizenstrade.org/ctc/wp-content/uploads/2011/05...
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.
E.g. Siemens tried to compete but lost back then in the manufacturing part.
Socialism or more its german variant, a system that can spend much more than more capitalistic power holders can ever earn and doesn't really plan well for future. Just look at it - very protected jobs, stifling bureaucracy, very hard to fire people, brilliant folks are definitely not compensated accordingly compared to (below) average peers - more often than not they earn the same. Its not agile economy nor workforce by any means, in contrary.
The feeling that the German Way (TM) is The Right Way, regardless of situation. If it worked in the past, it will in future, right. That leads to stagnation, complacency and when competition leap frogs them by the mile, surprised puzzled looks and wondering how it all happened.
This is how overcapacity happens in a commodity. The is a rush to expand capacity to meet demand, and there will be overshoot. I hope these factories are built quickly so the memory crunch eases.
people literally cant give up AI right now and paid thousands of dollar for local AI model
5 years ago people would told you crazy spends 5k on such machine, now ????? people literally encourage you
There probably (certainly) is. But if you want to build a multi-purpose platform, you’ll soon be faced with a dumb challenge: nearly all interfaces (door knobs, taps, electric switches, cutlery, sponges, every single button out there, pillow cases, wrenches, hammers, signs…) are made for humans. Placed at human hand level. At human eye level.
Nearly all environments (houses, streets, sidewalks, factory floors, offices, toilets, bathtubs,…) are made for humans. Wide enough and tall enough (or short enough, for bathtubs) to accommodate human bodies.
So until we can find one or more form-factors superior enough to justify we adapt everything around it or them, betting that the easiest way to build a single multi-purpose platform able to do most things (and not n platforms for n+ use cases) is to borrow the shape most things are made for wouldn’t surprise me. Plus, you get a wider market.
And then, once you have happy-ish customers, figure out which of these human attributes and shapes aren’t actually needed to do the job.
The moment you have mobile tools, whats the point in forcing the robot to hold them using a human hand? You can put them on a tool changer now or have a gripper that works for the specific task. Why does a robot need to hold a wrench using a humanoid hand?
>Nearly all environments (houses, streets, sidewalks, factory floors, offices, toilets, bathtubs,…) are made for humans. Wide enough and tall enough (or short enough, for bathtubs) to accommodate human bodies.
Uhm, now we're getting into stupid territory. All of those environments have flat floors. Flat floors are not an environment that are exclusively built to accommodate human bodies... The flat floor is designed for ultimate flexibility. It can be used for anything. Furniture, wheelchairs, wheeled robots, furniture on rolls, animals, and also humans.
All of the environments you've listed should preferrably be wheelchair accessible for disabled people (in terms of locomotion at least).
>So until we can find one or more form-factors superior enough to justify we adapt everything around it
Is this some kind of joke? Factories already make heavy use of UGVs and stationary robot arms and build custom end effectors for them. It's also an extreme strawman to suggest that wireless/electronic interfaces require finding a "superior form-factor" to the point that it feels insulting. There's also often an easy wheelchair accessible equivalent. E.g. a button to activate the electronic door opener at wheelchair level can still be at a comfortable height for standing people.
>And then, once you have happy-ish customers, figure out which of these human attributes and shapes aren’t actually needed to do the job.
So solve the impossible (come on you know it's hyperbole) first, only then can you build a simpler system.
I think its incredibly unreasonable to suggest that you need to solve every single problem ever encountered in human existence to be allowed to solve one much simpler problem.
I’m not arguing that humanoids are the only robots that can operate in human environments, nor that specialized robots shouldn’t exist. We already know they should, and do, and work very well.
I’m saying it depends on what you’re after.
If you want a specialized machine, then by all means optimize the form factor for that task.
If you want a general-purpose platform, then you’re faced with a near-infinite variety of environments, tools, and situations: homes, offices, hospitals, factories, hotels, streets…
Almost all of them were designed around human reach, dexterity, height, mobility and perception.
> The moment you have mobile tools, whats the point in forcing the robot to hold them using a human hand? You can put them on a tool changer now or have a gripper that works for the specific task. Why does a robot need to hold a wrench using a humanoid hand?
It doesn’t. The wrench was just one example among many. Nearly all our tools and interfaces are designed around human hands and bodies. If a different manipulator works just as well across all of them, great. My point isn’t that it must literally be a human hand.
> I think its incredibly unreasonable to suggest that you need to solve every single problem ever encountered in human existence to be allowed to solve one much simpler problem.
That’s not what I’m suggesting.
I’m saying it’s a deployment strategy. Start with the form factor that’s already compatible with the largest installed base of tools and infrastructure. Not because it’s mechanically optimal, but because it minimises the amount of adaptation required from the market.
And enables you to sell to markets you aren’t even aware exist.
If, over time, you discover that hands don’t need five fingers, legs don’t need knees, or an entirely different morphology delivers much better performance, then you have both the experience and the demonstrated value to justify changing the robot, or even convince your customers to change the environment to fit a better robot.
They’re basically trying to go for the "one size fits most" of robotics. And yes, we both know how well that usually fits anyone.
I’m not convinced either, but I can understand the logic.
If you want a weld you need a 1 arm robot, if a robot to weld, then stack, then push parts on a cart across the factory - then sweep up, then etc.. etc.. perhaps a humanoid is alright.
There will definitely be too many people comfortable with ownership / master relationship with a humanoid robot that will do their bidding.
A good mobile multi-purpose robot should have 3 arms, or 4 arms for symmetry.
Human legs are normally not necessary. A mobile robot would just need some means to raise and lower its wheels, so that it could step when ascending or descending stairs.
A human head is not useful. The place for the "brain" of a robot is in its "chest", because robots do not have the limitations of living beings, where the very slow propagation speed of the nervous signals forces the nervous systems to be concentrated in the proximity of the main sense organs.
Instead of a head, one should have a couple of mobile arms with video cameras at their end, somewhat like the mobile stalks of crab eyes.
Of the components of a human, only the hands and arms are models useful to imitate. Cephalopod-like arms would be even more versatile than human-like arms, but it is likely that they would be much more expensive at similar performances.
Having the size of a human and human-like hands and arms is good for working in environments designed for humans, but having the shape of a human has no purpose.
Why are we pretending the hardest version of this is close to existing?
When you have arms that can reach into the dishwasher, you're also going to want them to put away your dishes. And so suddenly they need to get up high. And you're not going to have a SECOND set of arms at your washer/dryer to fold laundry, you're just going to buy a second DLC for your existing robot. And it needs to get between those places, so if you have stairs, wheels don't cut it. You need a bipedal robot very quickly.
That solves the horizontal mobility problem. And then you have cabinets - and wheels don't solve the vertical mobility problem. So then you need a scissor lift on those wheels, or a hydraulic lift.
The robotics nerds always end up back at bipedal because it's vastly simpler once you're already solving arms.
I think the key is that none of our actual home use cases can be done with just arms. You don't need your folded clothes sitting in front of your washer and dryer, and a set of arms can't handle folding sheets.
And then you want them to put away your dishes, and they can't, even though it's just a software update, because they're across the house. And they're BIG, so you don't have room to store two anyway.
And they were $20,000, so...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rw_8FWJuSho
If we start making robot arms at scale, they're going to get cheap.
I'm also not sure people are really going to want bipedal robots walking around their home, blocking the hallways, recording you in your underwear, etc.
And the arms need cameras too...
That said, I think this is way farther off than anyone thinks. I want to know what the maintenance schedule looks like for robot arms. Looks like a lot of small moving parts. Probably a lot of plastic gears.
In an industrial setting, sure, maintenance is just an expense. But wheels require less maintenance and factories can be designed around the robots.
As I said, maybe earlier in this thread, I've now seen a laundry folding robot work, but I think loading a dishwasher and then putting away dishes is going to come first.
Alternatively a 2 foot tall or a 20 foot tall humanoid robots aren’t particularly useful. But a good enough 5-6 foot tall humanoid robot can be swapped into an assembly line wherever a human is currently working without redesigning that workspace.
Not the best wording... I wonder how serious this announcement is.
For example, the Japanese word 軸 (jiku) is used to mean the "axis" of a graph, but it is also used in business to mean the "core pillar/backbone" of a strategy (e.g., 経営の軸 keiei no jiku, literally "the axis of management," but conceptually "the pillar of management").
the phrase used is "대도약" (daedoyak), which literally means "great leap forward" or "great jump forward." This is NOT "대약진" (daeyakjin), which would be the direct translation of China's "Great Leap Forward" (大跃进).
If a Korean speaker wanted to talk about that Chinese movement, they'd use the full name, 대약진운동 (大跃进运动): the great leap forward movement.
China: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f8/Populati...
Japan: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2e/Japan_po...
South Korea: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4a/South_Ko...
United States: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c9/US_Popul...
Europe: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/86/Europe_p...
Also the technology carries over to defense purposes
And then there’s the fact that tremendous investment is going into all things AI, and now hard tech
https://www.rethinkx.com/blog/rethinkx/the-disruption-of-lab...
(Fwiw, >20 years ago RethinkX correctly projected the exponential cost declines of solar and batteries, when everybody else was drawing straight lines.)
That’s not at all what I remember, what are you basing that claim on?
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? Excavators can cost 50 - 100k pa in maintenance and fuel costs.
Why does creating a multifunction tool, with even finer tolerances, working in human safe workspaces cost less?
This person clearly hasn't spent much time educating themselves how high volume manufacturing works, nor have they spent much time on flexible manufacturing systems either.
The entire article boils down to "Humanoids! Humanoids! HUMANOIDS!"
Cyberpunk is great game and I would like to have cyborg arm
They're only better at some things, and some they can't do at all. If there's going to be a mass market for household robots, people are going to want a robot that can clean their toilet, read a book to their kids, unblock their kitchen sink, and climb a ladder onto the roof to get leaves out of their gutter, not a separate robot for each job. Any non-humanoid robot would struggle to do everything around the house that a human can do.
The idea is this: You build a robot in the shape of a human with the hope that by building the robot well enough in the image of humans, it will become sentient and intelligent on its own.
That is literally the pitch of every single humanoid robot company on the planet.
More info: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufmu1WD2TSk
and battery powered consumer devices will be able to run those and lower sufficiently capable models by then, distributing the need for compute away from capital projects
the glut will be enormous
yes, immortalize this phrase just like the 640kb ram phrase, I’ll stand by it
Curious, what's this based off of?
These data centers also get huge tax incentives because “jerbs”. Local politicians don’t understand after construction they don’t bring jobs or revenue to the city or county. This is where the resistance comes from.
As for tax revenue, data centers contribute significantly to local communities.
https://www.wyedc.org/media/p/item/61886/data-centers-provid...
"Loudoun County, Virginia, often dubbed the "Data Center Capital of the World," provides a compelling example of how data centers can reshape a community's fiscal landscape. In 2018, the county hosted about 13 million square feet of permitted data centers. By 2024, that figure skyrocketed to 43 million square feet—a 231% increase in just six years.
This remarkable growth has substantially boosted Loudoun's tax base. The county's data center industry now contributes an estimated $890 million annually in tax revenue, nearly matching its entire operating budget of $940 million.
What makes data centers particularly advantageous is their cost-to-revenue ratio. For every dollar of tax revenue received from data centers, the county spends just $0.04 to support them, compared to $0.25 for traditional businesses. This financial efficiency has allowed Loudoun County to maintain the lowest real property tax rate in Northern Virginia—approximately 25% lower than neighboring counties."
