alphaxion

alphaxion t1_j6uxw6b wrote

Air conditioning in homes is virtually unheard of in the UK, ensuring more places have tree cover will help with dealing with a future where 40C becomes the norm, rather than record breaking.

Not everywhere is like the US.

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alphaxion t1_j6uwzdh wrote

The other great aspect is if you have your tree aligned to provide shade for your windows during the hottest part of the day, it massively cuts down on the amount of heat getting into your home. This reduces the need for active cooling and makes getting to sleep at night far easier and more comfortable.

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alphaxion t1_ivhm5md wrote

You're making a hell of a lot of assumptions, there. No-one has mass-produced any humanoid robot in decades of developing them.

There's also the major hurdle of how to power them. How long would a humanoid robot last on a charge? Will they be able to accomplish their tasks in the physical space they're looking to be operated within on that charge? Will the environment even be able to support something with the inevitably high weight they'll have?

The world we operate within is immensely complex, complete with people in it who are adversarial rather than compliant. The software for roads is proving a massive stumbling block already and that's semi-controlled. Hell, people have been discovering all sorts of issues with how those systems are sensing the world when they are adversarial to it, such as projecting different speed limits onto signs to trick the AI.
Free roaming in areas with squishy humans that don't have any of the safety features that modern cars have? I worry about our seeing the elderly crushed to death as someone with dementia freaks out in its company for the first time and knocks it over. Or where it cannot react in a quick enough time to the changing landscape of an industrial workplace and results in injury for the people still working there.

You're talking about this robot as if they've already got the solutions to fundamental aspects of both its design and its manufacturing sorted. It's not even a functioning prototype - it can't even walk unassisted. I'd also be extremely wary of claims made by Musk, the man who faked solar roof tiles for a demonstration.

I doubt a generalised (in function, that doesn't mean you can bolt together off the shelf components to manufacture it) humanoid robot will even be on the market by 2030. It's such a massively difficult task to accomplish, it takes humans near enough two decades before we consider them to be adults, and that's with millions of years of evolution behind us.

2050? That might be closer to the real timeframe when we can trust allowing these robots to walk amongst us.

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alphaxion t1_ivh5fst wrote

The robot they showcased was worse than tech from 15 years ago. Asimo was worlds ahead of what they had people awkwardly and manually walk onto the stage. It looked less advanced than an A100 audio-animatronic found in Disney rides (the model that was running the Wicked Witch in the Great Movie Ride), never mind the latest A1000 model seen here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qteMlMAaNM

A generalised robot will be even more expensive than a specialised one, because it is orders of magnitude more complex to do the things you're talking about.

Without putting huge amounts of R&D money into the product and a team of hundreds of engineers, I fully doubt they'll have anything by 2030 that is close to what Boston Dynamics have today.

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