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Comment by Miraste | Hacker News Reader

GP didn't say that AI was easier than expected, rather that AI is easier than robotics, which is true. Compared to mid-century expectations, robotics has been the most consistently disappointing field of research besides maybe space travel, and even that is well ahead of robots now.

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> well ahead of robots now

I am not working in that field, but as an outsider it feels like the industrial robots doing most of the work on TSMC's and Tesla's production lines are on the contrary extremely advanced. Aside from that what Boston Dynamics or startups making prosthetics came up is nothing short of amazing.

If anything software seems to be the bottleneck for building useful humanoids...

I think the state of the art has gotten pretty good, but still nowhere near as good as people thought it would be fifty years ago. More importantly, as of a year ago AI is literally everywhere, hundreds of millions of regular users and more than that who've tried it, almost everyone knows it exists and has some opinion on it. Compare that to even moderately mobile, let alone general, robots. They're only just starting to be seen by most people on a regular basis in some specific, very small geographical locations or campuses. The average person interacts with a mobile or general robot 0 times a day. Science fiction as well as informed expert prediction was always the opposite way around - robots were coming, but they would be dumb. Now it's essentially a guarantee that by the time we have widespread rollout of mobile, safe, general purpose robots, they are going to be very intelligent in the ways that 20 years ago most thought was centuries away.

Basically, it is 1000x easier today to design and build a robot that will have a conversation with you about your interests and then speak poetry about those interests than it is to build a robot that can do all your laundry, and that is the exact opposite of what all of us have been told to expect about the future for the last 70 years.

Space travel was inevitably going to be disappointing without a way to break the light barrier. even a century ago we thought the sound barrier was impossible to penetrate, so at least we are making progress, albiet slow.

On the bright side, it is looking more and more like terraforming will be possible. Probably not in our lifetimes, but in a few centuries time (if humanity survives)

Forget the light barrier, just getting into space cheaply enough is the limiting factor.

Barring something like fusion rockets or a space elevator, it's going to be hard to really do a whole lot in space.

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