I guess all R&D is 'smoke and mirrors' until a product is finally on sale?
The next decade I think is going to be really interesting in robots, the emergence of the robotics industry has been in the waiting for 10, 20 years without really emerging other than for pre-program behavior and stuff like that. And the main issue is, again, the Moravec paradox, how do we get those systems to understand how the world works and plan actions? And so we can do it for really specialized tasks. And the way Boston Dynamics [and everyone else] goes about it is basically with a lot of handcrafted dynamical models and careful planning in advance, which is very classical robotics with a lot of innovation, a little bit of perception, but it’s still not, they can’t build a domestic robot.
So until we have, again, world models, systems that can train themselves to understand how the world works, we’re not going to have significant progress in robotics. So a lot of the people working on robotic hardware at the moment are betting or banking on the fact that AI is going to make sufficient progress towards that.
There’s zero demonstration of hierarchical planning in AI where the various levels of representations that are necessary have been learned. We can do two level hierarchical planning when we designed the two levels. So for example, you have a dog-like robot, you want it to go from the living room to the kitchen. You can plan a path that avoids the obstacle, and then you can send this to a lower level planner that figures out how to move the legs to follow that trajectories. So that works, but that two level planning is designed by hand.
