Humanoid Robots This Year!
Last week I mentioned the likelihood that 2024 would see the introduction of humanoid robots from at least 2 American companies. These new robots would be able to independently control and coordinate their sensors and actuators in such a way as to perform useful work without direct coding or programming. On Sunday, January 7th, Brett Adcock, CEO of Figure, @adcock_brett, announced that the company (founded in 2022) has successfully merged a humanoid robot with an so-called end-to-end-internal-neural-network-autonomous-control-system. His posts from Sunday on X show a video of the company’s Figure 01 prototype robot making coffee. The accomplishment is not in the making of coffee. The accomplishment is that the robot “learned” how to make coffee and correct its mistakes as it went along, simply by “watching” people do it over a 10-hour period. Adcock did not specify what he meant by “learning” and “watching” since these terms apply to human cognition, not to machines.