By Will Knight | 01.04.24 |
Hello, happy New Year, and welcome to the first Fast Forward of 2024. Just before the break, I sat down with Marc Raibert, the founder of legged-robot company Boston Dynamics, to talk about the physical side of artificial intelligence. You've no doubt seen videos of his remarkable humanoid and four-legged robots leaping, dancing, and doing parkour. One of them sketched my portrait during my visit. But they still require a huge amount of human programming and remote operation to do each stunt. Raibert now leads the Boston Dynamics AI Institute, which is trying to remove humans from the loop by making mobile robots more intelligent.
A full version of the interview can be found here.
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Teaching Prancing Robots Some Mental Dexterity 🤖🧠🤷 |
Boston Dynamics' Spot robot. |
Will Knight: When did you decide to pivot from focusing on robots' physical capabilities to working on their intelligence? Marc Raibert: It's been a while that I've been frustrated, if you want to call it that, with how much work it's been to get the robot to do each next thing. You need substantial resources, and it's going to take years to accomplish at the level I'd love to see. The athletic part of robotics is really doing well, but we need the cognitive part. There have recently been some big leaps in AI thanks to large language models and systems like ChatGPT. Can this technology help your mission? We have a significant effort here looking at the role they can play in robotics. I'm an enthusiast for using what you know in combination with what you learn. One of the interesting things about language models is that the language comes from humans, who are embodied creatures. It's not focused on physicality, but it's also not devoid of embodiment. |
Several companies seem to be following Boston Dynamics' lead by developing humanoids—including Tesla. What do you think of that trend? I used to think all that matters is functionality—mobility, dexterity, agility, the ability to see things in the environment, and some kind of intelligence—and it shouldn't matter what the robot looks like.
But if you look at the reaction to our robots, humanoids get 10 times the reaction to anything else. So if you care about people responding, you have to care about that. At Boston Dynamics we got a fantastic reaction to the "Do You Love Me" video, and contrary to what some people think, we did it for pure fun. I would never count Elon Musk out. He has a big voice that's helping make it feasible for other people to do humanoids, even though I think Boston Dynamics blazed the trail. Some robots, including from Boston Dynamics, are already doing warehouse work. Do you expect to see that humanoid workforce growing in the coming years? Warehouse work is one of the great applications at the moment because there's such a need for people. Employers are really frustrated with the difficulty of getting humans and training them and the turnover. You can organize the environment, but then that's less interesting for people like us who want to, you know, make the real future happen. |
What are some of the more challenging environments that the institute will try to have robots master? One group is working on robots that repair bicycles. The dream is to be able to fix any bicycle, which isn't as hard as fixing a car, but it's also not just stacking boxes. There's a bicycle out there in the lab, and the robot is doing some stuff, but it's early days. Another thing we're doing is building an ultra-mobile two-wheeled vehicle—a bicycle with a jumping and bouncing mechanism on it. It will also have a vision system and will plan. If you watch a parkour cyclist, they are jumping from object to object, which requires a lot of understanding of the environment and planning out a sequence. The third large-scale project is dexterous manipulation. When you look at the world of robotics, this might be a biased opinion, but I feel that locomotion and mobility has come a long way, but manipulation has a much longer way to go, even though we've been working on it for 50 years. Intelligence is a key part—integrating cognitive intelligence and perception. |
People sometimes feel creeped out by the robots you've built. Do you think that could get worse now that systems like ChatGPT have prompted more discussion around AI potentially becoming dangerous? Most bad things that happen in the world aren't coming from robots. And the question I have is, are people really afraid of robots? My experience of going around with Spot is that people love to engage with it, they love to have selfies with it, and they will pet the robot. Even in individuals, depending on how you pose the question, you could get people saying, "Yeah, I'm afraid of that robot but not afraid of this other robot." I'd just like to know what the real story is. Are you at all worried that the leaps we've seen in AI could bring new risks? I'm not afraid at all. I'm a little surprised that Musk and Sam Altman are so out there saying we need to be careful. People worry about robots taking every job, but we're really trying to get them to do one job in most cases, or a couple of jobs. Will we get there someday? You know, maybe, but it's going to be a long haul. |
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A fascinating look at high-flying ecommerce apps like Temu and Shein and how they affect small manufacturers in China. (The Wall Street Journal) As artists wrestle with the financial, legal, and moral implications of generative AI, the company at the center of the storm has installed its first artist in residence. (The New York Times) Scientists have mapped the world's oceans in new detail thanks to satellite imagery and AI, revealing clandestine fishing and an offshore energy boom. (The Verge)
Despite safety concerns, an armada of self-driving cars are currently being tested in California, and some are calling for more oversight and clearer rules of the road. (NBC News)
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حبيبي ليس يعدله حبيب *** ولا لسواه في قلبي نصيب حبيب غاب عن بصري وسمعي *** ولكن في فؤادي ما يغيب يا حبيب ...
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