I always thought that Asimov's Laws of Robotics ("A robot may not injure a human being" etc) were an interesting prop for science fiction, but wildly disconnected from the way computing & robotics actually work.
Turns out he was just writing LLM prompts way ahead of his time.
Not only wildly disconnected, but purposefully created to show ambiguity of rules when interpreted by beings without empathy. All of Asimov's books that include the laws also include them being unintentionally broken through some edge-case.
It was weird to actually read I, Robot and discover that the entire book is a collection of short stories about those laws going wrong. Far as I know, Asimov never actually told a story where those laws were a good thing.
Well it's quite difficult to come up with much better rules than Asimov's.
HPMOR offers a solution called 'coherent extrapolated volition' – ordering the super intelligent machine to not obey the stated rules to the letter, but to act in the spirit of the rules instead. Figure out what the authors of the rules would have wished for, even though they failed to put it in writing.
Exactly! That was kind of the point IMO, that human morality was deeply complex and ‘the right thing’ couldn’t be expressed with some trite high level directives.
All of fiction is a distortion of sorts. Consider Wall-E movie fat people. The AI advancements shown in the movie should transitively imply that biotech, biomedical progress would be so high that we would have solved perfect health by then.
More just that the rules are actually a summary of a very complex set of behaviours, and that those behaviours can interact with each other and unusual situations in unexpected ways.
It's funny because Isaac Asimov would have come up with some convoluted logical puzzle to justify why the robot went on a murderous rampage - because in sci-fi robots and AI are all hyperrational and perfectly rational - when in real life you'd just have to explain that your dying grandmother's last wish was to kill all the humans, because a real AI is essentially a dementia-riddled child created from the Lovecraftian pool of chaos and madness that is the internet.
I recall that story of the guy who tried to use AI to recreate his dead friend as a microwave and it tried to kill him[0].
You couldn't sell a sci-fi story where AIs just randomly go insane sometimes and everyone just accepts it as a cost of doing business, and because "humans are worse," but that's essentially reality. At least not as anything but a dark satire that people would accuse of being a bit much.
Worth noting is that the article is from April 2022 and used gpt-3. The "friend" was an imaginary friend, not a dead friend, and so probably more prone to taking actions which would appear in a fictional context. From my research it looks like the base gpt-3 model was just a text predictor without any RLHF or training to be helpful/harmless.
Certainly AI safety isn't perfect, but if you're going to criticize it at least criticize the AIs people actually use today. It's like arguing cars are unsafe and pointing to an old model without seatbelts.
It's not surprising at all that people are willing to use AIs even if they give dangerous answers sometimes, because they are useful. Surely they're less dangerous than cars or power tools or guns, and all of those have legitimate uses which make them worth the risk (depending on your risk tolerance.)
I use CNC machines and know how powerful stepper and servo motors are. You can ask yourself what will happen if your motor driver is controlled by an AI hallucination...
If this makes it easier and faster to sort garbage, we could probably improve the efficiency of recycling 100x. I know there are some places that do that already, but there are so many menial tasks that could be done by robots to improve the world.
There are plenty of places [1] where garbage is sorted for free by poor people who scrape a living from recycling it.
Sorting garbage is a terrible job for humans, but it's a terrible one for robots too. Those fancy mechanical actuators etc are not going to stand up well to garbage that's regularly saturated with liquids, oil, grease, vomit, feces, dead animals, etc.
are you implying that society shouldn't aim to reduce human interaction with vomit, feces, and dead animals? Robotics in harsh environments isn't unheard of
Haha I just came up with that off the hip (never heard of, seen, or even contemplated sorting garbage before) because the idea that this needs articulation and graspers is the height of "we're VC funded and don't care about anything except runway". Laughable.
Yeah, maybe someone with more industry knowledge can give a better picture, but I have a hard time seeing how these robots would fit into and improve existing processes [0]. Garbage is mechanically sorted most of the way already; then IR is used to identify different plastics and air blasts are used to separate them out at dozens per second.
The Gemini robot tech is cool as heck, don't get me wrong, but it doesn't seem particularly well suited to industrial automation.
I doubt anyone would use this kind of fancy machine to garbage handling until they become a commodity. I would bet that the first application would be to send those robots to trenches and foxholes...
Well, it's actually good to have that kind of marketing. First, because there are people that don't care anyway and keep mixing things. So, robots can be useful just the same.
And for the ones that actually follow the marketing, it's a good incentive to try to reduce the usage of one use plastics and packages in general. Recycling is the last of the 3 Rs for a reason.
Most folks when they think of recycling, think of the blue bin they put out every week.
That’s about 25% by weight of all that gets recycled in the country.
Metals, industrial scrap, and other sources are 75% of what gets recycled in the US.
We are blue collar businesses, with high labor costs. Many are exploring robotics actively for repetitive tasks. We have some robots in our process, looking for more when the ROI makes sense.
It may not be 100x, but there will be value in robots in recycling.
Big corporations definitely care about recycling. Sustainability is a major issue for them, not for marketing and such, but because they're thinking 50 years down the line. If they can't keep making xPhones then, they'll need to find a new product or invade a country, and both of these things need to be planned decades in advance. If recycling is a gimmick, it's more to stakeholders than consumers.
Plastic recycling, as commonly understood and promoted, is largely a myth. While technically possible, the reality of plastic recycling falls far short of public perception and industry claims.
# The Reality of Plastic Recycling:
- Low recycling rates: Only 9% of all plastic worldwide is actually recycled[1][2]. In the United States, the recycling rate for plastic waste is even lower, at just 5-6%[5].
- Limited recyclability: Most types of single-use plastic cannot be recycled in the United States. Only plastic #1 and #2 bottles and jugs meet the minimum legal standard to be labeled recyclable[1].
- Downcycling: The majority of recycled plastic is of inferior quality, resulting in downcycling rather than true recycling[2].
- Economic challenges: Recycling plastic is often not economically viable compared to producing new plastic[4].
# Industry Deception:
The myth of plastic recycling has been perpetuated by the plastic and oil industries for decades:
- Misleading labeling: The Resin Identification Codes (RICs) on plastic products were created by the industry to give the impression of a vast and viable recycling system[3].
- Disinformation campaigns: The fossil fuel industry has benefited financially from promoting the idea that plastic could be recycled, despite knowing since 1974 that it was not economically viable for most plastics[3].
- Lack of commitment: In 1994, an Exxon chemical executive stated, "We are committed to the activities, but not committed to the results," regarding industry support for plastics recycling[5].
#Environmental and Health Impacts
- Pollution: Most plastic items labeled as recyclable often end up in landfills, incinerators, or polluting the environment[1].
- Health hazards: Plastic waste contamination affects soil, water, and air quality, potentially impacting human health[4].
Conclusion
The concept of widespread plastic recycling is largely a myth propagated by the plastic industry to distract from the real issues of plastic pollution and to avoid regulation. While some plastic can be recycled, the current system is far from effective or sustainable. To address the plastic crisis, focus needs to shift from recycling to reducing plastic production and consumption.
There's one shot that stood out to me, right at the end of the main video, where the robot puts a round belt on a pulley: https://youtu.be/4MvGnmmP3c0?si=f9dOIbgq58EUz-PW&t=163 . Of course there are probably many examples of this exact action in its training data, but it felt very intuitive in a way the shirt-folding and object-sorting tasks in these demos usually don't.
(Also there seems to be some kind of video auto-play/pause/scroll thing going on with the page? Whatever it is, it's broken.)
It felt extra fake - the cherry picked people lacking rudimentary mechanical skills, using the ~$50K set of Franka Emika arms vs their default 'budget' ALOHA 2 grippers, the sheer luck that helped the robots put the belt on instead of removing it from the pulley.
The trick was in that the belt was too tight for an average human to put on with brute force, and disabling the tensioner or using tricks would require better than average mechanical skills their specially chosen 'random humans' lacked.
I slowed it down to 1/4 speed to check -- the autonomous video is sped up 3x, but the human video seems to be 1x. I say that because generally no one moves that slowly for a physical task, not just in the "problem solving" aspect, but also in the "getting a belt to the gears" aspect. So, it appears that the robot did a better job than the human, but I believe the human only spent 1/3 of the time in the clip. After stretching the belt, it was probably put on easily, and likely the human still completed the task in 2/3 of the time of the robot.
Reference video (saw your clip is robot-only, but the robot vs human video is more telling):
Earlier in the video, where it was going to fold a "fox", I was expecting a fox, but a fox face. I know I should have high expectations at this point, but was disappointed from the result given the prompt.
I am not sure whether the videos are representative of real life performance or it is a marketing stunt but sure looks impressive. Reminds of the robot arm in Iron Man 1.
It's an impressive demo but perhaps you are misremembering Jarvis from Iron Man which is not only far faster but is effectively a full AGI system even at that point.
Sorry if this feels pedantic, perhaps it is. But it seems like an analogy that invites pedantry from fans of that movie.
The robot arms in the movie are implied to have their own AIs driving them; Tony speaks to the malfunctioning one directly several times throughout the movie.
Jarvis is AGI, yes, but is not what's being referred to here.
The upshot of this is that anyone will be able to order a couple of robot arms from China and then set them up in a garage, programming them with just text, like we do with LLMs now.
The cost of robotics is coming down, check out Unitree. A couple of robot arms would cost about the same as a minimum wageworker for 1 year right now. But of course they can go virtually 24/7 so likely 1/3rd the cost
Those tracks could be at the ceiling. Imagine a robot arm in a kitchen that is dangling from the ceiling. It could be helping when needed and disappear in a cupboard after that.
The issues with all of these robotic demo videos is "repeatability" and "noise tolerance".
Can these spatial reasoning and end-effector tasks be reliably repeated or are we just looking at the robotic equivalent of "trick-shots" where the success percentile is in the single digits?
I'd say Okura and Vinci are the current leaders in multi-axis multi-arm end-effectors and they have nothing like this.
No, it's the WYSIWYG model of robotics: the robot can do exactly what you see in the demo
e.g. the robot can put that particular fake banana in that particular bowl placed in that particular location. Give it another banana and another bowl and run for cover.
Readit News
Turns out he was just writing LLM prompts way ahead of his time.
I don’t think that’s the main problem, there are a lot of moral dilemmas where even humans can’t agree what’s right.
HPMOR offers a solution called 'coherent extrapolated volition' – ordering the super intelligent machine to not obey the stated rules to the letter, but to act in the spirit of the rules instead. Figure out what the authors of the rules would have wished for, even though they failed to put it in writing.
We are debating scifi, of course.
I recall that story of the guy who tried to use AI to recreate his dead friend as a microwave and it tried to kill him[0].
You couldn't sell a sci-fi story where AIs just randomly go insane sometimes and everyone just accepts it as a cost of doing business, and because "humans are worse," but that's essentially reality. At least not as anything but a dark satire that people would accuse of being a bit much.
[0]https://thenextweb.com/news/ai-ressurects-imaginary-friend-a...
Certainly AI safety isn't perfect, but if you're going to criticize it at least criticize the AIs people actually use today. It's like arguing cars are unsafe and pointing to an old model without seatbelts.
It's not surprising at all that people are willing to use AIs even if they give dangerous answers sometimes, because they are useful. Surely they're less dangerous than cars or power tools or guns, and all of those have legitimate uses which make them worth the risk (depending on your risk tolerance.)
And now I wouldn’t even trust them to understand the laws 100% of the time.
Or so says Ted Chiang: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lifecycle_of_Software_Ob...
Like seemingly all torment nexii, the warning part of the tale is forgotten.
Sorting garbage is a terrible job for humans, but it's a terrible one for robots too. Those fancy mechanical actuators etc are not going to stand up well to garbage that's regularly saturated with liquids, oil, grease, vomit, feces, dead animals, etc.
[1] https://loe.org/shows/segments.html?programID=96-P13-00022&s...
Just had cameras, visual detection, some compressed air nozzles, and millisecond (nanosecond?) reaction time to separate the non-recyclable materials.
Lead to nothing. At least not at the time. AFAIK the initial garbage stream is still manually inspected and separated at most sites.
And the people doing that have a much higher risk of getting sick, because of all sorts of bacteria, mold, spores, chemicals, VOC, whatever.
Not to mention the stink.
They used AI to identify and sort
One issue was just the sheer muck of trash, if someone dropped an open smoothie, all sorts of sensors got covered, etc
Really cool idea I thought though
The Gemini robot tech is cool as heck, don't get me wrong, but it doesn't seem particularly well suited to industrial automation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUrBBBs7yzQ
You can just send explosives into both those things, and it's cheaper and more effective.
https://youtu.be/YyXCMhnb_lU?si=zJsQn2m8Fu5ccV6n
Dead Comment
This is because if it becomes easy then it won’t matter and all the marketing, non profit orgs and everything goes away, making it a non problem.
While I am sure you will find people who will like these ideas and want them, they will have zero control.
At this point recycling is a marketing thing. And it’s more important that people think about the cause than solve the problem.
That’s about 25% by weight of all that gets recycled in the country.
Metals, industrial scrap, and other sources are 75% of what gets recycled in the US.
We are blue collar businesses, with high labor costs. Many are exploring robotics actively for repetitive tasks. We have some robots in our process, looking for more when the ROI makes sense.
It may not be 100x, but there will be value in robots in recycling.
[1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PET_bottle_recycling)
# The Reality of Plastic Recycling:
- Low recycling rates: Only 9% of all plastic worldwide is actually recycled[1][2]. In the United States, the recycling rate for plastic waste is even lower, at just 5-6%[5].
- Limited recyclability: Most types of single-use plastic cannot be recycled in the United States. Only plastic #1 and #2 bottles and jugs meet the minimum legal standard to be labeled recyclable[1].
- Downcycling: The majority of recycled plastic is of inferior quality, resulting in downcycling rather than true recycling[2].
- Economic challenges: Recycling plastic is often not economically viable compared to producing new plastic[4].
# Industry Deception:
The myth of plastic recycling has been perpetuated by the plastic and oil industries for decades:
- Misleading labeling: The Resin Identification Codes (RICs) on plastic products were created by the industry to give the impression of a vast and viable recycling system[3].
- Disinformation campaigns: The fossil fuel industry has benefited financially from promoting the idea that plastic could be recycled, despite knowing since 1974 that it was not economically viable for most plastics[3].
- Lack of commitment: In 1994, an Exxon chemical executive stated, "We are committed to the activities, but not committed to the results," regarding industry support for plastics recycling[5].
#Environmental and Health Impacts
- Pollution: Most plastic items labeled as recyclable often end up in landfills, incinerators, or polluting the environment[1].
- Health hazards: Plastic waste contamination affects soil, water, and air quality, potentially impacting human health[4].
Conclusion
The concept of widespread plastic recycling is largely a myth propagated by the plastic industry to distract from the real issues of plastic pollution and to avoid regulation. While some plastic can be recycled, the current system is far from effective or sustainable. To address the plastic crisis, focus needs to shift from recycling to reducing plastic production and consumption.
[1] https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/the-myth-of-single-use-plasti...
[2] https://www.plasticsoupfoundation.org/nl/blog/recycling-myth
[3] https://www.earthday.org/plastic-recycling-is-a-lie/
[4] https://kosmorebi.com/en/plastique-le-mythe-du-recyclage/
[5] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/the-plastic-industry-knowi...
(Also there seems to be some kind of video auto-play/pause/scroll thing going on with the page? Whatever it is, it's broken.)
The trick was in that the belt was too tight for an average human to put on with brute force, and disabling the tensioner or using tricks would require better than average mechanical skills their specially chosen 'random humans' lacked.
Reference video (saw your clip is robot-only, but the robot vs human video is more telling):
https://youtu.be/x-exzZ-CIUw?feature=shared&t=65
https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/07/googles-best-gemini-demo-w...
… but don’t disappoint shareholders…
It's an impressive demo but perhaps you are misremembering Jarvis from Iron Man which is not only far faster but is effectively a full AGI system even at that point.
Sorry if this feels pedantic, perhaps it is. But it seems like an analogy that invites pedantry from fans of that movie.
Jarvis is AGI, yes, but is not what's being referred to here.
edit: it didn't.
Dead Comment
Time to think bigger.
I want to strap robot arms to paralyzed people so they could walk around, pick up stuff, and climb buildings with them.
Isn't programming just text anyway ?
Deleted Comment
Ehh, no need - just let the LLM figure out what to build in your garage.
Can these spatial reasoning and end-effector tasks be reliably repeated or are we just looking at the robotic equivalent of "trick-shots" where the success percentile is in the single digits?
I'd say Okura and Vinci are the current leaders in multi-axis multi-arm end-effectors and they have nothing like this.
e.g. the robot can put that particular fake banana in that particular bowl placed in that particular location. Give it another banana and another bowl and run for cover.