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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   23882 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025

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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.

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