Future mismatch of a humanoid summer
Weekly thoughts on human-AI partnerships
One thing that happened during the summer was a rise in attention-seeking humanoid robots. It triggers thoughts. The rise of the humanoids... it feels like humanoid summer, as some say. New ones are popping up.
Listening to a podcast on soccer-playing robots, it is interesting that the goal is to create humanlike players who can win in 2050. During the research phase, all kinds of optimizations are done that fit the current state of technology, like using wheels or special forms of dribbling. The rules are adapted to stimulate the research towards the final goal of creating humanlike soccer.
But why not create optimized soccer robots with robot-exclusive features to challenge humans?
The reason is mainly that the research is meant to create multipurpose robots, as the professor in the podcast (René van de Molengraft) explained. To create a multipurpose robot, you want to connect to our human-optimized world. All of the current world contexts we live in are optimized for our human form factor.
So that raises an interesting question: Are we optimizing robots for our world, or will we develop together with robots towards a new balanced society that has an optimized environment for both humans and robots? We are changing, too, as humans, maybe not so fast in physical capabilities but in behavior and attitudes.
What if we have a phase first where we have single-task robots because the business model makes more sense, even if we have a kind of multipurpose robots with narrow AGI that might still be much more complex and expensive than single-task robots? Will the context of the physical world we live in then be adapted first to that robot, making way, smoothing out certain things? From the other angle, will humanoids be out of date (business) before becoming a reality first?
So the question is if it is most efficient to have an AGI and general-purpose robot.
Another aspect as a side path; is sport in the end the right place for robotics. Is this man right that when we move into a highly optimised and enhanced AI and robotised world, sports might that one place where we can feel like real humans.
You can challenge this, of course; sports have so much technology to play in it, and technology plays such an important role in mastering the optimal material in the field, making a difference in finding the best ‘co-performance’ with a ball, a stick, etc. For the research. Choosing soccer as context is more a means than the end goal, I expect. Widen our scope to non-humanoids (or should I say more-than-humanoid) is more interesting and fruitful.
This weekly “Triggered Thought” is written as part of the Target is New newsletter, which offers an overview of captured news from the week, paper for the week, and interesting events. Find the full newsletter here.
About the author; Iskander is particularly interested in digital-physical interactions and a focus on human-tech intelligence co-performance. He chairs the Cities of Things foundation and is one of the organizers of ThingsCon. Target is New is his “practice for making sense of unpredictable futures in human-AI partnerships”.