technician on Nostr: After having quite a few conversations about robotics and automation, I’ve noticed ...
After having quite a few conversations about robotics and automation, I’ve noticed people often conflate robotics and AI.
When people explain that the future of robotics may not look the way you expect and the timeline may be longer than you think, the response is often to point out how fast AI is developing.
However, AI and robotics are related—but separate—fields of technology.
AI is software running on static hardware. Robotics is software running on dynamic machinery.
This is why I suspect robotics, especially incredibly intricate and advanced robotics such as humanoid robots, will develop on a longer timeline than AI.
In fact, it seems the order of operations will be to develop AI, then use AI to accelerate the research and development of robotics and automation.
Primarily because both AI and robotics require a lot of electricity, and AI appears to be winning the competition for energy.
Therefore, the robots will likely have to wait until more energy generation is constructed to power them.
Humanoid robots are interesting, but over the next decade, keep in mind the power requirements.
The human brain is an *immensely* powerful computer and runs on like 20 watts. It is a breathtakingly efficient thing. Plus with a bit of water and (optionally) some food, a human body can operate for days.
Getting humanoid robots to the point of being able to walk around and participate in our world with high levels of processing and long run times is going to be a hard and long-term engineering challenge. Harder than EV adoption. Robots in the real world are an order of magnitude more complex to get right than robots in a controlled industrial setting.
I’m pretty bullish on smaller non-humanoid home robots though. Things like robodogs. They can plug themselves in to recharge whenever they are low on power, and can do all sorts of tasks that a well-trained dog could do, plus some other things (language recognition, a mounted arm that can grasp things better, etc). They’ll get exponentially better in the years ahead.
Published at
2025-04-26 17:09:15Event JSON
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