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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   25110 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025

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This will come for blue collar jobs pretty soon too.

Consider meat processing: parting out chicken or pork carcasses is something that’s hard to automate. Every carcass is slightly different, and the nature of the tasks makes it hard to build a machine that will do this with good enough accuracy and low enough waste.

Now, imagine we have robots with flexible arms like humans. Current AI tech solves the image recognition problem, so that the robot understands the carcass like human does. It also solves explaining the purpose of the task, so that the robot understand the actual purpose of separating thighs or breast, instead of just mindlessly following the programmed moves. Lastly, it solves the reasoning part, so that the robot can plan the task independently for each carcass, and adjust to conditions as it proceeds.

All that remains is integrating these into one performing system. This is by no means an easy task: it will still probably take years before the finished product is cheaper and better than illegal immigrant. However, 5 years ago, the idea of training robots to part out chickens was complete science fiction.

Absolutely not. You think it's basically straightforward because you're human and you take your senses and capabilities for granted.

Imagine that you have to part out a chicken carcass but:

  • You are wearing glasses that make everything smeary and screw up your depth perception (cheapish RGBD camera)
  • You are only allowed to use one hand (robust control of two arms in sync is still an ongoing research problem)
  • Your arm is heavy and your joints are super stiff (soft robotics isn't used in production because reliable manufacturing processes / control algorithms are still in development and their response profile changes daily due to wear and tear)
  • Your fingers are frozen so you get basically no sensory feedback; at best you can feel vaguely how much force you're applying at your wrist (anything more sensitive than basic force feedback are still experimental because optical touch sensors they have short lifetimes and need constant recalibration)
  • Your body is locked in place, so you can only move your shoulder/elbow/wrist joints

Unless you're planning to cut up the chicken with a circular saw, you also have to figure out how to analyse the structure of a carcass, and how the meat will react under manipulation. This data doesn't exist right now so you're going to have to train it on your own data, which means you need to find a way of obtaining and labelling that data.

EDIT: Sorry if this came across as harsh. I agree that we've gone from 'we have no idea how to approach this problem' to 'solving this is really REALLY hard'. Mostly what I want to say is that "Now, imagine we have robots with flexible arms like humans." is a much bigger deal than you think it is (and not theoretically solved as of now) and I think that training the relevant AI is much harder than you think it is.

I've butchered meat before - nowhere near at the level of a professional processor for Tyson, but enough to have the basics down.

You've correctly itemized many of these challenges. Still, when I see the primitive human robots of today and apply our current rate of technological process, these all seem eminently solvable very soon.

Likewise, I will bemoan missing the occasionally overstuffed Taco Bell burrito the blazed-out-of-his-mind fast food worker occasionally serves me. But I'll appreciate that my order will be ready when I get there 100% of the time and the missing flavor of subtle racial animus.

To me the edge cases are going to be home services for a while longer yet, where tight spaces (the ability to suck in your gut) and ingenuity/hacking are going to require that human touch a little longer than food factories.

A humanoid robot is not the right tool for the job though -- what you want is a machine with sharp knives matching the number of joints on a chicken mounted to some kind of press, plus several hooks that can grab the carcass and align it appropriately. (the knives probably need to self-adjust too, depending on the size-consistency of you chickens)

Machine vision probably helps with this some, but as others have said "object segmentation" was a pretty solved problem years ago -- and there's no AI anywhere close to performing at the "I need you to cut this chicken apart at the joints, m'kay" level on the forseeable horizon.

There's a reason why welding bots are not humanoid form -- humans are generalists, bots are not.

We're all speculating here. It's all going to depend on the timing and use cases. But imagine a factory that's sunk millions in capital for their human driven processing.

They can re-do all that with hyper-specialized machines, dozens of vendors, the nightmare of IT/OT interactions (doing a project on this right now in bottling actually). Which they probably do every couple of decades.

Or they can wait for a humanoid robot with these capabilities and drop them almost completely in-place.

Humanoid robots work with existing interfaces. With sufficient image recognition quality and human-like sensory capabilities, they're going to fit in way more jobs. Think of the difference in outlay between training a single humanoid robot to cut chicken legs (which is doable by illiterate illegal immigrants) compared to the expense of developing and deploying a hyper-specialized machine.

This would be more convincing if humanoid robots existed -- or llms were able to control them. If you ask an LLM "how do you break down a chicken?" it will probably give you a pretty good description that a human could follow -- this sort of thing is well represented in its training set. If you ask it for a program to activate the servos of a hypothetical knife-wielding humanoid robot such that a chicken if front of it will be disassembled, it will give you utter trash. (if it doesn't demur)

It's a pretty good example of the difference between an intelligence and language model actually -- a language model can describe things, and AI can do things.

All that to say, if you want your chicken factory automated, waiting for a humanoid robot so you can drop it into place is not a very effective approach. Buying some machines from the Dutch would work much better.

LLMs != AI. Critical here - the models for understanding physical feedback while cutting aren't going to be built from scraping Reddit.

One thing I will concede is that these hyper specialized machines are going to have other physical advantages. A humanoid robot will take up humanoid space. When you compare it to these automated cutting machines elsewhere in the thread, the latter has more throughput than a humanoid interface would at even superhuman speed.

LLMs != AI.

Agreed!

(that means that there is no AI at all though -- and the sheer effort/$ being devoted to LLMs is if anything making it less likely that there will be anytime soon.)

I’ve done butchery before- you absolutely do not want this. You need a generalist robot at least to start with.

The Dutch company video somebody linked downthread shows it done with rotating knives and alignment guides, not robots at all -- which seems to work, and is not at all generalist.

The approach I'm imagining involves laying the carcass out flat on a cutting board, holding it with the robot hooks, and slicing off limbs based on the location of the joints as determined by AI(tm). Probably another stage for de-breasting is needed -- or the hooks could take another bite or something.

I don't really claim that this would work well; certainly not better than the machine in the video -- but it would work better than some non-existent humanoid robot attached to a non-existent AGI.

I didn’t say it will be easy. What you describe are real problems. However, they are not as insurmountable as AI was 10 years ago. 10 years ago, there was relatively little investment in touch sensors, because even if you perfected them, there was little you could do with them. Now it is different.

My point is that AI advancements allow us to leap over solving problems by designing tool paths and configuration spaces, and onto solving problems by telling a robot “we need you to cut chicken, look how it’s done and imitate”.

A LOT of stuff is gated behind advances in (imitation) reinforcement learning + real-time adaptation. Especially soft robotics - if you can learn and update the material's dynamics on the fly rather than trying to model them mathematically then I think many doors open.

This seems like the self-driving car redux. They improve, and they improve... and at some point they stop getting better because the remaining problems are intractable.

But the thing about self-driving cars is that they are already better than human drivers. There's just a huge wall of tradition preventing them from becoming much more widespread.

Meat processors aren't going to give a shit if robots can only attain 98% accuracy or something

Sure, but, you can take a Waymo if you are I'm a city they service. It works to the point that self driving cars are right now successfully self driving around a few cities.

With the caveat that these plateaus tend to be bottlenecked by specific problems. AI moves like glaciers - sometimes they stick, sometimes you get lucky and the pressure shifts something and then a thousand tons of ice move at once.

I agree 100% with all of this, but in the longer-term, robots will have other offsetting advantages.

Humans have 2 arms and 10 fingers. Robots might have 50 arms and 1000 fingers. Humans have 2 eyes in a fixed position. Robots might have hundreds of eyes, including flexible antennae that can look into crevices and small spaces. Robots can have wheels, they can have saws, they can have radar, sonar, lidar, flashlights, they can fly, they can be tiny, they can be huge, they can swarm with other robots. And they can be iterated on.

One other big challenge currently is latency. Those big reasoning & purpose models are not quick compared to the speeds industrial automation of that sort tends to run at.

Basic image recognition I'd say has gotten there, but not the rest of it.

5 years ago, the idea of training robots to part out chickens was complete science fiction.

5 years ago we already had robust image segmentation models based on labelled data https://paperswithcode.com/sota/instance-segmentation-on-coco Given the controlled lighting and camera angles on a factory floor, it's definitely tractable problem with that period's technology.

Of course that period's AI would lack decision making and merely use vision as a mechanism to adjust the tool path with feedback. But processing chickens is quite mindless and mechanical, merely accounting for variation in the size and shape of the chicken. I don't see how modern humanlike AI will help here, when we end up training assembly line workers to be more mechanical.

I'd guess that making and foodproofing an industrial robot to be able to function safely in the factory environment would be the hard part. Even if the software package was already perfected, I doubt you could build the robot cheaply enough to make it worth it.

I believe that things like iphones are still assembled by hand even though those are perfectly uniform and good for automation.

Isn't this a solved problem?

I'm sure I've seen footage of automated chicken processing in the Netherlands or Germany.

For example https://youtube.com/watch?v=QIciSPOm1h0

No AI required.

Yes, and here's a machine that does the plucking / beheading / de-footing, and claims to also do eviscerating though that's not in the video. All done without AI. There are still humans in the loop hanging up the carcasses onto the machine, so possibly the question is at what point would it become profitable to replace those with automation.

While the capabilities seem impressive, I can't help but notice the difference in quality between those two machines, and legitimacy of the demo video.

The second has simpler, non-moving parts that probably degrade the quality of the product, jump cuts, and is moving pretty slowly. Can't believe that selling an expensive machine like that isn't worth paying an American a couple of bucks to read a script instead of just some shitty TTS engine.

That's interesting, I had thought they were farther from automating meat processing. That does sound like a terrible job, anyway.

In America, it’s done by parolees(will be arrested if they don’t have a job) and illegals(no access to welfare). Law abiding citizens would rather take welfare.

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