I could supply a substantial deposit to purchase
when marketable.
Posted on 07/24/2026 7:38:17 AM PDT by BusterDog
The upshot of Wang’s creative fervor is the GD01, which Unitree bills as the world’s first mass-produced, transformable mecha robot. Standing 9 ft. tall and weighing half a ton, it can transport a pilot in its torso-mounted cockpit, walk on either two legs or four, and wield fists powerful enough to knock down walls. Heavy-duty mechanical hinges connect titanium-alloy limbs to a protective casing of carbon fiber, enabling smooth, deliberate strides on brutish red legs.
(Excerpt) Read more at time.com ...
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“We could be, Wang says, anything from two to 10 years away from a ‘ChatGPT moment’ for humanoids, whereby a robot achieves sufficient ‘generalization’ to be able to execute 80% of requested voice commands in an 80% unfamiliar environment. ‘Once the technology surpasses this ... inflection point, robots can gradually be rolled out for large-scale commercial use,’ he says.”
Humans need not apply.
Lol, I’ll pass. Unless they get a LOT more accurate.
Yeah... because if only 20% of the time the robot, say, mistakes a person for an object that should be crushed and tossed into a refuse bin that’s a perfectly acceptable margin of error! Yikes!
I'm still waiting for an answer as to why they are trying to make robots indistinguishable from humans. Like: Why do they have to blink?
Get back to me when there’s a robot that can repair my deck or rebuild my toilet.
These are the things that will come for you if you criticize the government.
We watched Space X boosters landing back on the pads and on the recovery ship for the first time not too many years ago. Self driving cars are becoming a reality. I’m 63 and I’ve seen alot of things go from science fiction to science fact : personal computers, smart phones, the internet among them. AI and robots are still young but both techs are starting to mature and it wont be too many years when humanoid robots that can do everything a human can do, including learning new tasks via visual inputs will become commonplace. Not sure I’ll still be around then, but this is still and exciting time to be alive. I believe these technologies will improve the human condition at least ten fold. There are risks of course, but that is just the nature of mans technological growth as it always has been.
Again, reminds me of Philip K Dick’s The Defenders. (free on Gutenberg).
Dan Bongino has a set in his studio. He refers to them often.
That’s an excellent sci fi worldbuilding question.
In the real world, most robots are not and never will be humanoid in appearance. They’ll be purpose built for whatever, and if built as multipurpose, would probably have extra appendages; we all have plenty of experience with needing an extra pair of hands even for simple human scale jobs.
The first cut on humanoid rebots would be for use in confined environments with limited storage, shared by mixed human-robot crews. The bots would need to move in human engineered spaces, and common toolsets would make sense. Although I might still give the bot an extra set of hands and arms, and a built in Swiss army knife tool.
To carry it beyond that, we have to start imagining bots built as surrogate humans. Some visual distinction would still be useful in most cases; think Data in whatever version of Star Trek he appears.
To eliminate the visual distinction and to give the bots simulated personalities require even bigger leaps. I can think of several pathways. Deliberate misrepresentation and fraud would be one. To provide modeling of perfect human behavior in a teaching or mentoring capacity is another. Use as sex bots is a third. In a military application where bots might be used as part of combined human-bot teams, confusing an enemy on target identification might be important in close combat. The bots would presumably be faster, stronger, more lethal, and more able to absorb damage than humans. But the humans would be there for command and control. Whether the human or the bot should be the first or primary target might depend on circumstances, and one might not want an enemy to know which is which.
Really, the only (sensible) thing I can see about human-like bots would be to perfect artificial limbs, etc. for human amputees. I mean, don't they have already bionic hands with working fingers (or did I dream that)?
Look, all I want is house cleaning robot that makes coffee in the morning.
How about Rosie from the Jetsons?
Robots that could sort garbage and reclaim land that is lost to landfills would actually be very valuable.
That is, sorting for recycling purposes. This could in theory make landfills obsolete.
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