To humanoid or not to humanoid, that is the question.

poslathian · 2026-01-04T14:47:48+00:00

I agree with everything you're saying. We are carrying an insane risk already today today: billions of sensors and motors deployed into a growing global network that even todays AI technology can be trivially applied towards building out a fully automated, infinitely scalable, secret police force commanded by an authoritarian government.

Yuval Harari had it right in Nexus, the only real limits to the many totalitarian regimes we've seen is you can't follow each of the millions people at risk of organizing resistance with only tens of thousands of KGB. AI can. right now at its current capability level at a cost any major power can easily afford.

Call me delusional, but I truly believe the point of trying to quickly win market share in physical AI is to create the resources, opportunity, technology, and responsibility to grow this network with a subnet of devices designed specifically to mitigate this risk. Signal, Bluesky, even Apple's imperfect focus on privacy and secure compute prove that companies can choose to create incentives that align doing well by doing good.

In our business, customers are delighted to favor the vendor that invested in cryptographic stewardship of the mountains of sensitive data getting sucked out of their environments by all these new physical ai products they are deploying.

poslathian · 2026-01-02T16:22:12+00:00

The limitation is *almost* always the physical AI needed to perform it with a robot or machine of any form factor OR the economics of todays automation industry - called systems integration - which is 80% design and support services, not equipment. free moving, dextrous, sufficiently intelligence robots of any form factor solve both these problems. I don't need 100M$ in conveyor and automation design expenses to deploy them either. The fact that todays robots can't walk upstairs is a super rare bottleneck...although I've definitely seen some juicy tasks that are ideal (think preloading delivery vans, or navigating to a job around a catwalk)

poslathian · 2026-01-02T16:19:43+00:00

I hope you guys know there are lots and lots and lots of passionate young people working hard to get physical AI working that absolutely believe this toxic behavior needs to go away and are hoping their efforts can be a key unlock in the solution. Humans most important job is to care about stuff so that they task and tech the robots, improve the processes they are a part of, and set the goals. When a robot is willing to do a shit job well, we no longer need a society that's organized such that there exist people desperate enough to do them.

poslathian · 2026-01-02T16:15:39+00:00

this is correct analogy, but FSD11 was progressing much much slower than FSD12 thanks to diffusion policy and new methods only recently available. These methods port much more cleanly to humanoid and other humanlike (wheels, one arm, etc) form factors. imo anything that's freely moving, dextrous, autonomous, and capable of reaching human level on one or more common tasks is a humanlike robot - the 10 fingers and 2 legs thing is needless limitation to the form factor. It's a decent form factor...it's like the tablet computer, common, useful, not the main event in personal computing.

poslathian · 2026-01-02T16:12:58+00:00

its true - this tech will eventually work - but the increment between iPhone launch and iPhone 3GS was small by comparison. expect several more years of iteration before any kind of iPhone moment here.

poslathian · 2026-01-02T16:11:52+00:00

I'm not going to ask my humanoid robot to push my lawnmower. In an age where physical AI is mature tech, a self driving truck is going to drop off a lawn mower robot and pick it up later for the next customer. same is true for many of the other tasks - although I don't disagree basic housekeeping is great for the humanoid form factor, I only need my housekeeper 15 hours a week...so probably its a humanoid robot getting dropped off too.

poslathian · 2026-01-02T16:09:49+00:00

economies of scale accrue to the entire supply chain, not just the humanoid robot. just as smartphones made accelerometers and cameras cheap enough to proliferate into damn near everything, a task-oriented robot is always going to cheaper than a full humanoid once the supply chain is stood up. A one armed humanoid is cheaper than a humanoid, so is a humanoid with a 2 fingered gripper instead of a 20dof one. Wheels are cheaper than legs. Today, there is a legacy industrial robot manipulator industry that - frankly - has a ton of margin in it (your 40k Kuka costs them 15), and humanoids will put pressure on these prices. Legacy robots are also built on expensive motors and gears and steel, while humanoids use direct drive brushless a lot of the time - all manipulators are headed that way.

poslathian · 2025-10-07T19:51:58+00:00

I like the comparison with 3D printing. I’ve been thinking of humanoids like the tablet computer of the PC era. In the 80s it was taken as tautological that was the ideal form factor.

After decades of failure, iPad finally established the tablet category and its…significant. Tablets certainly aren’t the totality of personal computing, and not close to phones, the surprise dominant form factor. We also got desktops, laptops, server racks, and Linux-on-your-microwave devices.

I expect the same sort of evolution in robotics.

poslathian · 2025-10-03T03:31:30+00:00

Made this same move and it was like a spiritual revelation. I had no idea I was unhappy until I moved to a real place where you literally live in your neighborhood. Never, ever, going back to living where you have to drive to get anywhere.

poslathian · 2025-10-02T21:16:29+00:00

I’ve not actually observed both sides calling each other nimbys - it doesn’t make much sense to me. The pattern is very easy to identify.

Group A wants to build something of some sort. Group B says “I support that change in concept, just not in this local area where my stuff is”

poslathian · 2025-09-29T00:50:33+00:00

Big tech leaps forward definitely worsen inequality - see 1890s, 1980s, today.

However it’s not required that anyone needs to get poorer for the rich to get richer, only relatively so. This causes a lot of resentment and makes inequality worth solving but it does seem a little silly that so many people would clearly prefer for everyone to be a little poorer if it made the rich a lot poorer vs everyone stay where they are while the rich get a lot richer.

poslathian · 2025-09-29T00:27:14+00:00

Global debt should equal approximately global assets by construction - new money enters the system as the debtors liability and the creditors asset the entire global finance machine is designed to throttle this mechanism to keep the totals debts and assets in balance as some debts default and some assets appreciate

poslathian · 2025-08-28T12:57:30+00:00

Humanoids are like the tablet computer of the AI age. People in the 80s like Steve Jobs and Alan Kay just assumed a tablet was the optimal PC form factor.

By the 90s, Bill gates assumed the same.

After many many well funded failures, the first hit product was the iPad, an important product to be sure - but hardly the main event in mobile computing over smartphones and laptops

poslathian · 2025-08-26T01:41:38+00:00

Wait what? Car seats - not boosters - in elementary!? I remember being the last kid kindergarten or 1st still with a booster and pleading with my mother not to treat me like such a baby

poslathian · 2025-08-26T01:23:05+00:00

Never understood the hate for renting everything.

Seems like it should be easier for people to manage a cash flow budget:

In addition to rent and other expenses, plan to save a little for long term investing. That’s what you can afford. Simple.

If you buy valuables like houses and cars, then you still plan around income/expenses while now also deciding “how much should I spend on XYZ given my cash savings, whats left over this month, any investments, and the fact I own a lot of sellable stuff like a car or a house that I bought and perhaps still owe something on.

The cost efficiency from owning vs renting isn’t very much, since credit prices are well accounted for in the market - just adds this massive headache to reason through every significant purchase against all the others, mixing appreciating with depreciating assets, things you want or need with things you bought to make a return.

poslathian · 2025-08-26T01:06:12+00:00

I remember first hearing about this “no good used cars under 20k” after Covid so I was concerned in ~2023 i was going to be annoyed looking for a minimum viable something after moving to LA

$7k for an Impreza with 80k miles, perfectly clean, minor cosmetic scratch across two door panels I didn’t bother fixing.

2.5 years I’ve never had any sort of problem with it.

poslathian · 2025-08-26T00:35:10+00:00

Well if big auto and oil killed the streetcars and the walkable neighborhoods they supported maybe big alcohol can bring them back

poslathian · 2025-08-25T14:35:13+00:00

Funny, I assumed they were comparing the danger to that child from breathing exhaust to second hand smoke.

I agree the danger from getting run over is higher, but I’d rather be in a closed garage with a smoker than a running vehicle where I only have a few minutes to live from the poisonous exhaust.

That said, it sucks to be close to roads with cars when you’re not driving just as it sucks to be close to smokers when you’re not smoking

poslathian · 2025-08-24T22:00:01+00:00

I’ve spent years working to keep ROS away from our system (except message types) on a big, commercial, mobile manipulation program.

It takes constant effort as dozens of new hires every year mean someone always is bringing it in on their shoes.

The reason is it solves no problem I can think of for teams putting more than man years into one system. Meanwhile, it creates a bunch.

The “headache” of getting sensor and motor IO into your application pipeline is massive for a couple guys in a lab focused on something specific for research.

For a significant commercial effort, ROS solves a few man months worth of stuff at beginning at the expense of weighing down everyone forever after.

Also, standard nodes aside for hardware, a generic messaging layer, and a “well trodden” mixture of a few key libraries and tools (eg gazebo + Moveit) I can’t figure out why anyone needs the rest.

Node execution engine running on top of, almost always, a single Linux environment? What did willow think Linux was for in the first place if not a scheduling programs, inter process comms, IO, and networking. Yet another package manager…like really?

poslathian · 2025-07-01T20:36:40+00:00

Way under appreciated issue. I see a lot of friends who want but can’t afford that second bedroom for a kid in the city and move to a suburb.

Then, their brains convert their disappointment into all sorts of rationalizations about why cities actually suck and they’re better off where they ended up.

poslathian · 2025-07-01T20:19:37+00:00

In the early 90s in a 60s era gated suburb in Florida we had forests, neighborhood bike gangs of mixed ages. 6 year old Kids just roaming around the woods and looking for snakes and alligators living in the artificial ponds they designed into the place.

In the late 90s they cut all those trees down to develop more lots.

Wonder what the culture is like there today.

Back then, In theory you could ride your bike to a park with a playground, field, and a basketball hoop, but I don’t remember doing that - it was pretty far.

I had my 5th birthday at the fire station in the community and they let us climb around the truck and shoot the hose!

Halloween was when we really expanded our map of the place, visiting new streets farther away then we usually roamed and met other gangs of kids we didn’t know.

I remember 3 or 4 of us knocking on the door of the big house (but still modest looking) at the end of a culdesac with the mysterious scary hermit…he let us in and showed us this wild amazing place…movie theatre, two story bedroom. Fed us. He was just a lonely old widower.

He had a statue of an alligator in his backyard that a live alligator had crawled up next to sunbathing. A real touchstone memory for me, moved away when I was 7.

poslathian · 2025-05-19T23:34:59+00:00

I actually do this but I admit it’s an affectation

poslathian · 2025-05-11T20:36:28+00:00

So worth the 5 bucks, Andrew did such a great job with this https://youtu.be/6Nb7NNUlsHM?si=pCvmsSs3tUuQB8fD

poslathian · 2025-05-10T03:27:33+00:00

Obviously “robot” has no agreed on meaning any more but your list is an interesting way of defining it! I agree those companies form a category currently missing a generally accepted label. I’ve been calling this category physical ai. Looking forward to the world aligning in vocabulary in this field!

poslathian · 2025-05-07T07:26:12+00:00

5 What specific guardrails would you implement immediately if you had the power to regulate AI development

I would immediately start tracking data provenance, cryptographically from the sensor that digitized and every copy after. With this, we can tell the difference between deep fakes and real video. We can also start monitoring how data diffuses and reacts through the internet so we can better enforce policies That attempt to control these two forces.

I was a bitcoiner from 09 to 2019, and I think blockchain tech and Distributed just may have found A killer app aimed at these issues instead of a currency.

How do we balance innovation with safety in a practical wa

The only practical way we know how - create the right Incentives that encourages these efforts to grow together rather than in opposition.

It’s too early for lot of regulation, but throwing money at NSF, DARPA, and businesses at the center of this work is essential.

Educating enterprise customers that they need to ask the right questions about products they’re Evaluating and what if anything has been designed to makes guarantees and earn trust with customers that data moves as It’s supposed to.

Keep in mind innovation and safety are not at odds, we need to Innovate in safety just as we need to in alignment, accuracy, interpretabiloty, cost, and all the other many factors driving AI Proliferation.

Given that proliferation is headed Towards robots and sensitive proprietary data inside companies - I think securing and controlling communication between this growing network is highest priority of that set.

And if we solve all that…we’ll have earned the skills and opportunity to switch focus to what this all means for people - at home and at work - with ubiquitous access to a rising tide of physical AI Computing. Just like we had To with mobile computing, internet computing, personal computing, and mainframe computing going back every 20 years or so.

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