The New World Of AI Robots

It's been a good time for robots. While on vacation last week I caught this video of a robot running. It's impressive for a bit, and then it devolves into the inspiration for lots humorous comments as it crashes into a wall. There are some funny comments, but some pedantic ones that note the robot can't beat a human record because it's not a human.

That's correct, but ...

The comments miss the point. The robot will improve it's capabilities, and much faster than a human can. The AI/ML advances of the last few years mean that we don't have to program robots to be precise and exact. The fact that a robot can balance and run and stay inside the lanes is incredible. I suspect these robots, both humanoid and other form factors will start to become more commonplace in our world.

Which is scary.

Not for us tech people, though certainly AI advances are worrisome. More, I worry about other jobs. Think about the industrial robots of the last 30 years that have been used in places like car manufacturing. They are bespoke, designed to do certain jobs, and in a certain way. They are programmed with fairly tight tolerances to perform a specific task, often at a quicker and more reliable (and repeatable) way than a human can. There were plenty of false starts here, but today many robots are used alongside humans to assemble cars. You can see them working here, doing tasks that would be slower and harder for humans, even with mechanical aids.

There is talk of humanoid robots being used in place of some humans, reducing the slow and complex setup . This also lets the robots work in the same places and spaces, moving the same way, as humans do. This might reduce some of the labor costs in the future. That might not seem like a big change overall, as lots of manufacturing uses automation in some way today, but think past this.

You can purchase a humanoid robot for under $5000. That might not be very capable now, but as LLMs get more capable and perhaps specialized models for different purposes like image recognition, this is an issue. Imagine you own an oil change business. You pay 5 people to do most of the work on cars. Those people likely cost you $2000-2500 a month each. That's the cost of 2 robots, without the hassles of hiring, termination, breaks, etc. An AI LLM can already identify items from a camera image. Is it a far stretch to think that a robot could identify the oil drain plug and the oil filter on a car by moving around it? How hard would it be for a robot to grab a human ratchet, pick the right socket after a database lookup, and remove the plug. They could tell when the oil finished draining and then replace the plug, tightening it to the correct torque. And being a robot, they might do this without forgetting to position the drain or replace the plug.

In my mind, a $5k robot quickly becomes capable of a lot of human jobs. There might still be the need for some humans, but we might easily replace 50%+ of them in a lot of common jobs. Stocking shelves, acting as cashiers, who knows what else these AI driven systems might accomplish. That's truly a scary world, where human labor in many cases might be devalued.

In the software world, it seems the people having the most success have the best judgment. People who are above average software engineers get above average results from LLMs, and I suspect this will be the case for a long time. Very average, or worse, engineers get worse results and I think are the source of many of the stories of AI coding failures.

I don't know what a lot of manual labor jobs will do when management starts to experiment with robots, but I know that in our world you can compete and succeed against AI coding agents by learning to work with them, apply your judgment and use them as tools that make you more effective.

Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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