Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

Maybe it's just me, but everything about this announcement feels very I, Robot... and not in a good way.

> allowing the entire fleet to upload terabytes of data for continuous learning and improvement

Ugh.

Edit: Yes, I meant I, Robot the film. U.S. Robotics and the like.

Robotics AI has a massive "training data bottleneck" issue. If you aren't using your deployed robot fleet to get more real world training data, you're just stupid.

Yeah tech companies have a weird fixation on using dystopian literature as their entire branding playbook

Dystopian literature was training data and road-mapping.

Do you mean "I, Robot", not iRobot the vacuum company? And if so, I'm guessing you're referring to the movie with Will Smith? The original book of short stories isn't really dystopian, it's more just an interesting exploration of Asimov's concept of how robots would work.

Nearly everything about this screams I, Robot and it is kinda wild that they went that route with this article. The package delivery and the quick intro and head turning in particular.

I agree on the data part. I love the potential idea of a humanoid robot at home to take care of chores, but now it seems like the potential for it not being constantly connected and collecting data is gone out the window.

I find it quite strange that they are openly bragging about how much data it will be gathering and uploading from within your home. That feels like the part you would not say out loud.

> U.S. Robotics and the like.

The modem[1] folks? :)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USRobotics

It's just that sci fi authors try to see into the future and have to write things interesting. There's two ways:

- novel idea or technology

- counterintuitive effect of technology

I think the second is easier written as "what if Good Thing was actually Bad". So that's what you get. The former style is perhaps still available in books like Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky.

But the latter style is much more readily written and consequently has dominated sci fi as more authors enter the field.

The Torment Nexus view is mostly driven by context blindness. "oh my god, they'll scan the mother's blood to perform eugenics if they have sequencing technology and it will be horrible". Well, advanced societies do that a lot: Down's is scanned for using a Maternal Serum Alpha Foetoprotein test. "oh my god, they'll use ultrasounds to find undesirable genetics, torment Nexus" but Nuchal Translucency tests are fairly routine in advanced societies and we're fine with them.

This might appear like a fixation on dystopian literature to others. "omg gattaca this MSAFP". It's just generic technoluddism because almost all near future tech is explored via sci fi in the "what if Good is Bad" genre.

I mean, you're definitely assuming positive outcomes here too. Far too early to tell how most tech will end up being used.

No, I'm not. I'm simply saying that whether the outcomes are going to be positive or negative, it will always seem like the Torment Nexus. Therefore, something sounding like the Torment Nexus does not provide information towards a prediction that it will be the Torment Nexus.

People warned about the dangers of social media (or with modern LLMs + Diffusion Models and scamming) and that's kinda come true, but people also warned about the dangers of IVF and that's just been good. So what happens is that people always warn about the dangers. Humans are loss-averse so they find it easy to do that.

It is unsurprising that every new tech seems like dystopian literature because there's a lot of dystopian literature focused on the near future and we're good at coming up with negative hypotheses. There is no significance in it.