u/edurakhan

My last post was about why humanoid robots need realistic faces and expressions at all, and this is another reason I am not sure I want them to look too human.

Let's say a family has a humanoid at home for years. It cleans, helps with things, talks naturally and is always around. It remembers everything the child tells it, plays with them, comforts them when they are upset and probably has much more patience than any real person. Of course the child is going to become attached to it. Maybe at some point they won't even see it as a machine anymore.

Adults can at least understand what it is, although adults will probably get attached too. But I don't think a small child can really understand the difference between something that cares about them and something that was programmed to act like it cares. We already see children getting extremely attached to phones and games, and those don't have a face, don't talk like a person and don't put a hand on their shoulder.

Then what happens when the robot breaks, the family replaces it with a newer one, they stop paying for the service or the company disappears? For the parents they are replacing a product. For the child it may feel like they lost a real friend.

I'm not saying children should have zero contact with robots. They will probably see them everywhere and may have robot teachers and assistants. But I don't think a humanoid should become emotionally important to a child, and I definitely wouldn't want one replacing human friendship. We talk a lot about whether robots will be physically safe around children, but maybe the emotional side will be a much more difficult problem.

I understand why humanoid robots need human-like proportions. Our homes, stairs, doors, tools, cars, kitchens, etc. are designed for humans, so obviously two arms, two legs and hands make sense. What I don't really understand is why we're also trying so hard to make the face look human. Realistic eyes, skin, facial expressions, fake breathing... what does any of that actually add if the robot is there to help around the house, carry things, cook, do laundry, etc.?

For me, even if it looks almost exactly like a person, the moment I know it's a robot, it's still a robot. The part that matters much more is whether it can make decisions and take actions based on its own judgment instead of just following strict instructions. That's where things become really different.

Personally I'd rather humanoids stay obviously machines. Make them extremely capable, let them understand us, talk naturally, give advice, whatever. I just don't see why they also need to visually imitate a person that closely.

Would you actually prefer a humanoid with a realistic human face, or one that clearly looks like a machine?

I understand why humanoid robots need human-like proportions. Our homes, stairs, doors, tools, cars, kitchens, etc. are designed for humans, so obviously two arms, two legs and hands make sense. But I don't really understand why we're also trying so hard to make them look human. Realistic eyes, skin, facial expressions, fake breathing... what does any of that actually add if the robot is there to help around the house, carry things, cook, do laundry, etc.?

For me it doesn't matter how human it looks anyway. It can look almost exactly like a person, but the moment I know it's a robot, it's still a robot. What matters much more is whether it can make decisions and take actions based on its own judgment, rather than just following strict instructions. That's where things become really different.

Personally I'd rather humanoids stay obviously machines. Make them extremely capable, let them understand us, talk naturally, give advice, whatever. But I don't see why they need to pretend to be human. Would you actually prefer a humanoid that looks almost exactly like a person, or one that clearly looks like a machine?

I've been thinking about humanoid robots around kids. A robot teacher I can imagine pretty easily, especially if it's in a controlled environment, maybe even moving on rails, with someone monitoring it and with a very specific job. But a humanoid nanny is a different thing. If it can walk around the whole house, open doors, pick things up, touch a child, carry things, and also make decisions based on what it thinks is happening, that's where it gets more complicated.

I don't think the answer can just be "make the AI smart enough so it knows what is safe."

We have plenty of machines around us that can hurt us, but over time they became safer because we added more and more protections. A breaker is a simple example. If something goes wrong with a dishwasher, the dishwasher doesn't decide if power should stay on. Something completely separate can shut it off.

Maybe humanoid robots need the same idea. Some independent system that the AI itself can't override. It could limit speed or force, disable motors, keep the robot out of certain rooms, whatever. Let's say you decide a robot can never get closer than 3 feet to a small child unless some specific condition is met. I wouldn't even want that to depend only on the robot's cameras and face recognition. Maybe the child has a small Bluetooth/RFID type tag and another system is enforcing that distance no matter what the robot thinks it sees.

And that's another thing I haven't really thought about before. We always assume robots will have to adapt to our world, but maybe if we really let them into our homes, we will have to change too. Maybe houses eventually have some kind of robot safety system built in. Maybe wearables become normal in some situations.

I'm not saying humanoid nannies are a bad idea. They could be extremely useful. I just wouldn't want the only thing between my kid and a bad decision to be the robot deciding that its own decision is safe.

Would you leave a small child alone with a fully mobile humanoid robot? What would you need outside of the robot itself before you would trust it?

I've been thinking about all the talk about humanoid robots lately. The idea seems to be that eventually we'll have them at home doing laundry, loading the dishwasher, cleaning, moving things around, etc.

But why humanoid?

I think the answer is pretty obvious: because everything around us was built for humans. Doors, stairs, washing machines, buttons, shelves, tools... If you want a robot to work in an existing house, making it roughly human-shaped makes perfect sense.

But is that really the long-term future, or just a transition?

Look at self-driving cars. We aren't building humanoid robots that sit in the driver's seat, turn the steering wheel and press the pedals. We're making the car itself intelligent. And if autonomous cars eventually become the majority, I would expect some of the road infrastructure to change around them too.

Why wouldn't houses evolve the same way?

Take laundry. Instead of a humanoid robot walking around collecting clothes and operating a washer designed for humans, a future house could have a built-in system: drop clothes somewhere, they get transported, identified/sorted, washed, dried, maybe folded, and returned to some kind of automated closet system. At that point the "washing machine" doesn't even need a door or buttons accessible to a person.

Same with deliveries. Amazon uses trucks going house to house because that's how our cities work today. But a neighborhood designed from scratch could theoretically have an underground/covered automated package network connecting a distribution point directly to homes.

Obviously rebuilding infrastructure is much harder than building a robot that can use what already exists. That's exactly why I think humanoid robots make sense in the near future.

I'm just not convinced they're the end state.

Maybe we're currently trying to build robots that can operate in a world designed for humans, while the bigger change eventually comes from redesigning the parts of that world that don't actually need to be human-oriented.

50–100 years from now, will we really have humanoid robots walking around pressing buttons on appliances?

Or will that seem as strange as building a robot today to sit in the driver's seat of a self-driving car?