What’s the fascination with humanoid robots?

I was reading an interesting article on the fusion of robots and LLMs (see link below). One concept in the article that caught my attention was ’embodied AI’ – that current AI is ‘disembodied’ but once you ’embody’ it, the AI can learn about the world in the same way as living creatures do.

Well, not ‘living creatures’ but ‘humans’ is what article focuses on.

Dr Kendall of Wayve says the growing interest in robots reflects the rise of “embodied ai”, as progress in ai software is increasingly applied to hardware that interacts with the real world. “There’s so much more to ai than chatbots,” he says. “In a couple of decades, this is what people will think of when they think of ai: physical machines in our world.” As software for robotics improves, hardware is now becoming the limiting factor, researchers say, particularly when it comes to humanoid robots (from: Robots are suddenly getting cleverer. What’s changed?)

Hands on my body
I like ’embodied AI’ as it touches on some thoughts I’ve been having on connecting an AI with some action in the physical world. I think folks can be unfair saying that some AI is stupid, when the poor AI not only doesn’t have any connection to the physical world, but they never had the benefit of millions of years of evolution _in_ that physical world (for example, see my comment here).

So, yeah, I suppose the biologist in me groks why embodiment could do wonders for AI learning.

But then, with ‘light is over here’ lazy thinking, folks start wanting AIs to be human-smart and the navigate the world like humans. Because the world is built for humans.

Hm, the biologist in me asks ‘what’s the fascination with humanoid robots?’

BASAAP all the way down
The biologist in me sees humans as a single species among millions. And one answer to being in the real world.

Rather than say, ‘let’s make humanoid robots,’ we should be first asking ourselves (just like nature asks every day) what is the need at hand and what best addresses that need. Nature has exploded into millions of species, each evolved for their needs. The same should be for AIs embodied in robots.

Indeed, I claim that there are many tasks that humans do that would be better suited for something of a very different shape and form. Especially if that thing were clever.

For example, I wonder if a horse’s intelligence would be better for a car than a human intelligence.

It, robot
It is not that I don’t believe in humanoid robots. It’s just that I think most folks jump to humanoid robots without asking if humanoid is the right form factor.*

Decades ago** I learned the term ‘horses for courses’ – each horse has the course it is best suited for.

While I think embodied AI is a great thing to do, I just hope folks realize that embodiment can take many forms (geez, just think of all the forms manufacturing bots have).

We don’t need to ape God and make robots in our own likeness all the time. 🙄

 

** Frakkin’ heck, how many times in Star Wars was either C3PO or R2D2 absolutely not well suited for the environment they were in? What about Daleks (sorta)?
**Earliest reference in this blog back in 2005, tho I remember already using it in my writing in 1999.