Humanoid robots have always been seen as “the pinnacle of robotics,” when a robot can do anything a human can do, but robots can do much, much more. Humans are good at many things; carrying water bottles, typing essays, cooking, and even formulating the theory of relativity, but when a robot is designated to do one thing and that thing only, it can do that thing really well. For example, if you instructed a hypothetical humanoid robot to carry a container of liquid, it would probably carry it similar to how a human would. Not very optimized. But if we build a robot specific to carrying water, it can carry it efficiently and quickly.
Above is a DALLE-E rendered image of humanoid robot carrying a container of liquid, by Medium.com
Another problem is that building humanoid robots is hard. Trying to make a robot replicating billions of years of evolution is just too hard compared to making a robot for a specific task. Building a robot to assemble items is simple, and is already built, and so is a robot that can clean the floor, do calculations, and write essays (kidding). Combining all those tasks for one robot to do is much more difficult. What if we could invest more money in humanoid robots to make them work? Quote from Medium: “Hardware investments when the AI isn’t there are bad investments. The dollars required to bring a humanoid robot to production quality are likely to be well over $1B invested. Biomimicry isn’t the right approach. Humanoid robots aren’t the right design solution for most production tasks.”
Then again, technology has grown so much over the past 30 years, from computers that only work by text, to computers that can open PDFs, run AI models, and render complex images to form a video game, and humanoid robots could actually become practicable in a few years.
Related Stories:
https://medium.com/@bp_64302/the-problems-with-humanoid-robots-9d8684d62008
https://www.thomasnet.com/insights/what-are-humanoid-robots/
https://www.automate.org/robotics/news/the-impact-of-humanoid-robots-on-the-production-workforce
Take Action:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/363400696_Right_to_vote_for_robots
