Emptying a washing machine located in the cellar/basement, taking the clothes to a room on the ground floor, folding and sorting them before putting them in the closet still is quite the challenge.

Wirelessly hooking such robot up to a data centre running heavy machine learning models isn't a proper solution either, because in contrast to digital agents, latency matters quite a bit in physical interactions.

Running up the stairs is the easy part after all. The difficult part in such scenario is lack of orientation due to smoke, obstacles like locked doors or fallen debris, unstable walls and ceilings, locating people and getting them out safely. All of those things require a good amount of autonomy, on-the-spot physical problem solving and judgement.

To this effect, the recent DARPA Triage Challenge, which has its final taking place in November this year, seems like a much more thorough and practical demonstration of current capabilities. Something to look forward to if you're interested in the current state-of-the-art w.r.t. real-world applications of robotics.

Riddle me this then: what role does a robot that has been built to run real fast play in that scenario?

Sure, a good deal of engineering went into this, but the hard part - solving bipedal locomotion - had been done long before that. Apart from showing off it's not really advancing the field and so there's not too much left to be impressed by (honestly, the battery and actuator efficiency that allowed the thing to do a half marathon was MUCH more impressive, at least to me). It seems to me to be more analogous to car tuning.

The ones I see deployed in construction do stuff like drilling holes in hard to reach places, or laying bricks. None of them look like people, though. Much like the typical household dishwasher hasn't been named Alice or Doris for the past 50+ years, but rather Bosch or Samsung and doesn't use actual hands.

But yeah, humanoid robots do look cool and many movies and books told us to be fearful of them.

So a purpose-built (look at the thing - running is all it can actually do) two legged fast running robot doesn't seem all that impressive today. Cool? Sure! Useful? Not so much. Impressive? Whatever... it's just showing off at this point, much like Boston Dynamic's Atlas series that went nowhere (in contrast to this machine: this one did half marathon distance:)

We've had purpose-built machines that outperform every human at specific tasks for over a century now. Just because a subset that's popular these days (the "humanoid" and dog-like variants) invoke some psychological and cultural (we've been primed by media for over 150 years at this point) fears, doesn't make them more capable than they seem.

Sure, the thing can run real fast, but looking at it, that's pretty much all it actually can do. In contrast to a boring old industrial robot, though, being able to win a half-marathon or a 100m dash against any hypothetical human isn't all that useful, no?

Such robot would easily smash the current marathon record as well and the only thing I'd be impressed by, would be the battery capacity tbh.

50 years ago the main barrier was access to hardware - computers were big, expensive, and not easy to come by for average people.

30 years ago, the biggest hurdle was access to resources: you had to spend a fortune on books that quickly became obsolete or had to wait for your local library to get them for you.

Today, you basically have everything - up-to-date free reference material on pretty much everything in an instant, cheap and accessible hardware (no need for high-end stuff), great online tutorials and interactive courses, message boards, the works.

But then you also have a machine that completely removes the need to put in the effort required to actually learn and hone your skills. Human psychology always seeks shortcuts and more discipline than ever is needed to not give up and have the machine do the thinking for you instead.

Proficient developers are getting pressured into outsourcing their craft and skills to the machine, thus deskilling quickly. Juniors never get the chance to become proficient in the first place - either because they're not getting hired to begin with, or because they succumb to the siren song of the machine...

Numerous attempts have been made in past 70 years, but we landed on the compromise that is high level programming languages with their (mostly) well-defined syntax and semantic rules.

If you look outside of the world of programming you'll find that the same is true for every craft and profession that requires precision and unambiguity. Cooking, logistics, military, carpentry, mechanical engineering, law, medicine, etc. all have their own domain specific languages for describing tasks, procedures, and tools. Heck, even sufficiently large organisations have their own internal languages and terms for that reason.

also

> I don’t follow all these religiously.

So if you need an overview of a system, you can and should provide access to the entire codebase. Even the rule itself says "preferably", not "don't ever". If you have different needs, you can always just look at it as a useful guideline. It's just a blog post by some rando on the internet, not the epiphany of AI coding's Ten Commandments.

But that would require causality-breaking FTL, no? Otherwise the speed of light itself would create enough of an obstacle to make any trade impractical. Property rights only work if they are enforceable, which is the case on Earth but not over interstellar distances.

Common trope in sci-fi, pretty much impossible in practise. Humans aren't capable of surviving being frozen, we lack the genetic machinery for that. Could you breed/engineer hybernation-capable humans? Sure. Otherwise this approach would require to literally being able to kill and then resurrect people at will.

> Or have a robot ship that gives birth to the colonists from an artificial womb on arrival.

I like this idea. It kills two birds with one stone: for one, fertilized eggs and fetuses can be stored safely for a long time.

Secondly - and I think this is something that's underdiscussed - genetic modification will be necessary anyway. The target environment won't be a carbon copy of Earth. Different atmosphere, different gravity, different starlight, different pathogens, etc. If you insist on colonising planets and start terraforming via automated means ahead of time, the resulting ecosphere will still differ from Earth and adjustments will be necessary. A ship carrying unborn settlers would be informed of the specifics of the target world and the ship's biolabs could make genetic alterations accordingly.

Big cities in Europe are usually surrounded by more rural areas in most of Europe for historical reasons (surrounding farmlands used to feed the city), lessening the need for city parks and greenery since the countryside was surrounding the city. If the city IS the country and even isolated on an island, that's of course not an option.

Another factor is also rooted in history. Like most cities in Europe, Singapore is old, though most of its growth happened in the past 60 years with proper urban planning. Europe's cities on the other hand grew over centuries without any kind of modern urban planning and the pressure of rebuilding quickly after the many devastating wars didn't help either.

Finally there's the issue of money - being one of the richest countries/cities on Earth helps tremendously with building a nice, liveable urban environment compared to some cities struggling to keep basic infrastructure running.

Even worse. It was monoculture of trees that aren't even native to the climate zone. The trees were imported from Scandinavia for their superior lumber quality, and were on edge even without the added stress from droughts and heat waves.

Never make guesses based on a particular programming language. In Apple's own C documentation (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/integer-over...) it is stated that "Overflows result in undefined behavior." and enabling wrapping behaviour "may adversely impact performance", indicating that overflow detection is in fact not "virtually free".