China is Already Testing AI-Powered Humanoid Robots in Factories (msn.com)
- Reference: 0176867799
- News link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/03/30/239225/china-is-already-testing-ai-powered-humanoid-robots-in-factories
- Source link: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/humanoid-robots-are-lousy-co-workers-china-wants-to-be-first-to-change-that/ar-AA1BV7f1
"The time has come for robots," Nvidia's chief executive said at [2]a conference in March , adding "This could very well be the largest industry of all."
> China's government has said it wants the country to be a world leader in humanoid robots by 2027. "Embodied" AI is listed as a priority of a new $138 billion state venture investment fund, encouraging private-sector investors and companies to pile into the business. It looks like the beginning of a familiar tale. Chinese companies make [3]most of the world's EVs , [4]ships and [5]solar panels — in each case, propelled by government subsidies and friendly regulations. "They have more companies developing humanoids and more government support than anyone else. So, right now, they may have an edge," said Jeff Burnstein [president of the Association for Advancing Automation, a trade group in Ann Arbor, Michigan]....
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> Humanoid robots need three-dimensional data to understand physics, and much of it has to be created from scratch. That is where China has a distinct edge: The country is home to an immense number of factories where humanoid robots can absorb data about the world while performing tasks. "The reason why China is making rapid progress today is because we are combining it with actual applications and iterating and improving rapidly in real scenarios," said Cheng Yuhang, a sales director with Deep Robotics, one of China's robot startups. "This is something the U.S. can't match." UBTech, the startup that is training humanoid robots to sort and carry auto parts, has partnerships with top Chinese automakers including Geely... "A problem can be solved in a month in the lab, but it may only take days in a real environment," said a manager at UBTech...
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> With China's manufacturing prowess, a locally built robot could eventually cost less than half as much as one built elsewhere, said Ming Hsun Lee, a Bank of America analyst. He said he based his estimates on China's electric-vehicle industry, which has grown rapidly to account for roughly 70% of global EV production. "I think humanoid robots will be another EV industry for China," he said. The UBTech robot system, called Walker S, currently costs hundreds of thousands of dollars including software, according to people close to the company. UBTech plans to deliver 500 to 1,000 of its Walker S robots to clients this year, including the Apple supplier Foxconn. It hopes to increase deliveries to more than 10,000 in 2027.
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> Few companies outside China have started selling AI-powered humanoid robots. Industry insiders expect the competition to play out over decades, as the robots tackle more-complicated environments, such as private homes.
The article notes "several" U.S. humanoid robot producers, including the startup Figure. And robots from Amazon's Agility Robotics have been tested in Amazon warehouses [6]since 2023 . "The U.S. still has advantages in semiconductors, software and some precision components," the article points out.
But "Some lawmakers have urged the White House to ban Chinese humanoids from the U.S. and further restrict Chinese robot makers' access to American technology, citing national-security concerns..."
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/humanoid-robots-are-lousy-co-workers-china-wants-to-be-first-to-change-that/ar-AA1BV7f1
[2] https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/nvidia-ceo-says-ai-computing-needs-to-surge-100-fold-at-ai-super-bowl-event-14c38221
[3] https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/how-china-is-churning-out-evs-faster-than-everyone-else-df316c71
[4] https://www.wsj.com/world/china/china-cargo-ship-trump-shipbuilding-823b1c9c
[5] https://www.wsj.com/world/china/why-chinas-solar-boom-is-a-bust-for-its-leading-players-a869ccab
[6] https://www.wsj.com/articles/robots-are-looking-to-bring-a-human-touch-to-warehouses-52a3dc6c
Is this the old Apple argument? (Score:2)
"If new technology will inevitably cannibalize sales from old technology, we should be happy to eat ourselves." I'm not sure if that's a Tim Cook aphorism or a Steve Jobs aphorism, but I know I've heard it mentioned, particularly with respect to the iPhone eating the iPod market (where the iPod was the first big popular i-device.)
Certainly humanoid robots have the potential to put a lot of Chinese workers out of work.
Re:Is this the old Apple argument? (Score:4, Informative)
That was Steve Jobs - [1]"If you don't cannibalize yourself, someone else will." [elevatesociety.com].
[1] https://elevatesociety.com/if-you-dont-cannibalize-yourself/
Re: (Score:2)
Neo-Luddites like Ted Kaczynski and Jack Ellul pointed out the fundamental issue with this kind of technological advancement, you know that it's gonna create a mess, but if you don't use it you will find yourself left behind.
A global economy also means global markets and global supply/demand. If you're not using the biggest advancements in efficiency and cost-cutting, someone else will be, and you will be left in the dust.
Whoever said that line you quoted is, I believe, sadly right.
Re: (Score:2)
> Certainly humanoid robots have the potential to put a lot of Chinese workers out of work.
There are two aspects to this. The first is economic, whether robots will displace the need for human workers. The second regards safety, whether robots can be made safe. And by safety, we acknowledge that robots working around humans can never be 100% safe but still need to achieve some number of 9's, especially concerning the highest severity outcomes.
Inventing Dystopia (Score:2)
I'd prefer if a small country invented a viable humanoid worker robot first and kept it to themselves, to demonstrate the dangers to the rest of the world with as little loss of human life as possible.
If you can stick a gun in that robot's hands and have a robot security guard, the shit will hit the fan with extra force.
It's not the year of robotic AI. (Score:2)
Just like it's not the year of the Linux Desktop, robotic AI has a long way to go. WSJ tomes like this are often done as a flag, hoisted to see who salutes.
AI is often dumber than a box of rocks. Add it to robotics and it's a disaster waiting to happen. I'm not discounting a future with robotics in it, or increasing value.
It's the drooling wet dream of capitalists to cut out labor. That's you and I. First, AI will replace all coders. Yeah, sure, go ahead with that and reap the rewards. It'll take 10x the co
Re: (Score:2)
> It's the drooling wet dream of capitalists to cut out labor. That's you and I. First, AI will replace all coders. Yeah, sure, go ahead with that and reap the rewards. It'll take 10x the costs to unravel those bugs.
> Put into self-driving vehicles? Wasn't that supposed to happen a few years ago? How many deaths will it take until the lessons are learned. How much money will get burned on the attempts? How many will die in bad crashes in the meantime, boiled in burning lithium battery fires?
I think there's a big differences between self-driving cars and using AI to replace programmers. There's no feasible way to have enough cab drivers and Uber drivers for everyone to stop driving themselves, nor will public transit ever get good enough to be a good alternative to a car outside of large cities. So self-driving car tech is doing way more than just replacing the small number of people who drive for a living. It is also giving mobility to the elderly, giving several hours per week of commute t
Re: (Score:2)
No. The same myriad inputs needed for safety in navigating an auto for a passenger is quite similar to the variety of skills needed to be a good coder.
AI isn't going to replace either, it's a labor-replacement wet dream.
Even Salesforce, who I once admired, is now embroiled in automation tricks that simply reveal the banal infrastructure behind the scenes that they remarket as textured fru fru customized infrastructure, the curtain pulled, the bald wizard of odd revealed.
C'mon man, who are you fooling?
Re: (Score:3)
> No. The same myriad inputs needed for safety in navigating an auto for a passenger is quite similar to the variety of skills needed to be a good coder.
No, not really. Being a good programmer is a creative process involving design aspects, low-level coding aspects, naming things (one of the two^H^H^Hthree hard problems in computer science), and generally figuring out how to express a vague general concept as a series of strict rules.
Driving safely is just combining GPS routing (which is a long-solved problem) with obeying a bunch of fairly well-defined road rules and recognizing hazards and stopping or steering when you see one &mdash identification,
Re: (Score:2)
We have to disagree.
The transient nature of navigating transportation obstacles requires knowing many concepts, and avoiding the ones that lead to bad outcomes. Driving automation and coding intersect at many junctures.
Code is not static, and neither is driving. On a good day, easily summoned choices can be made, and on a bad day, dependencies require astute and rapid choices to be made productively.
The timing of transportation doesn't wait; conclusions of many inputs have to render the right choice in an a
Re: (Score:2)
Human babies fall all of the time. It's a learning process. They learn.
Can AI-controlled IT become fast enough to recover from unbalance or mild unscheduled traumas? Over time, sure.
This is a pre-announcement. Nothing to see here; it's all PR designed to stir the pot for those that might want to taste early broth.
The investors, early gamblers, want return. And they want fear injected to push development along. That's all this is about, not reality, just gambling.
Robots (Score:2)
Robots are everywhere in factories already. I suppose that humanoid ones might be more flexible in the tasks that they can carry out than the current ones that are basically single task, but they would also presumably share some of the limitations of humans. The AI part seems unnecessary. There are only a limited number of things that need doing in a factory and it would probably be simpler to simple train the robots do to them without an AI capability. All the AI would seem to add is ways of screwing t
The US is following a losing strategy here (Score:2)
The intelligent thing to do would be for our government to declare this a priority and spend money to drive US technology dominance forward... but the current idiocracy running the show thinks all government spending (excepting spending on the military, of course) is bad. So, instead, we will do what we can to prevent the Chinese from getting their hands on US tech - which might work for a year or two but will eventually blow up in our faces as they develop their own tech and push past us (since the US doe
Re: (Score:2)
Those two goals don't necessarily oppose one another. Cutting government spending in the US has little to no relation to automation of factories in the US.
Unless you're dingy enough to think that our government could actually subsidize expansion of robotic workers. That would be the best (and most expensive) way to prevent automation of labor.
Meanwhile our current administration is even cutting positions at the Pentagon. Hmm!
Need a law outlawing Order 66 (Score:2)
The US is already struggling with security for embedded devices like printers, IOT, etc. Now think about these devices acting like Decepticons. If you were the Chinese government with the chance to force Order 66-like capabilities into devices that will be widespread among potential Western adversaries, what is the chance that you would actually not do this? If you have any doubts about whether China would force Order 66 into their robots, think about whether the CIA/NSA would pass up that opportunity.
So one of the ways you know how fucked we are (Score:2)
Is that China is looking to replace their factory workers with robots. For many many years they held back on doing that because their government didn't want the social unrest that was going to come from the mass layoffs.
Now they just don't give a fuck. Xi has fully consolidated his power so he's just not worried about his people rising up and overthrowing him.
So you're basically looking at 100 million people facing layoffs and their government is confident they can control that. And they are almost
Re: (Score:2)
China has a population growth problem and a labor cost problem. People aren't having enough kids to keep China running and Chinese labor is getting too expensive for their oversaturation economy.
Commie guinea pigs (Score:1)
If an injury happens Xi just covers it up.
Pretty sure Slashdot already ran the BMW article (Score:2)
[1]https://www.bmwgroup.com/en/ne... [bmwgroup.com]
[1] https://www.bmwgroup.com/en/news/general/2024/humanoid-robots.html
Yeah (Score:1)
They're called "Chinese".
Robot humor from 1954: The Midas Plague (Score:2)
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
""The Midas Plague" (originally published in Galaxy in 1954). In a world of cheap energy, robots are overproducing the commodities enjoyed by humankind. The lower-class "poor" must spend their lives in frantic consumption, trying to keep up with the robots' extravagant production, while the upper-class "rich" can live lives of simplicity. Property crime is nonexistent, and the government Ration Board enforces the use of ration stamps to ensure that everyone consumes their qu
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midas_World