James Vincent

Robots are uncertain.

They are uncertain in their perception, so they can't see the glass very well, and they can't position where it is exactly in space.

They have uncertainty in control, so they can't move their gripper exactly into a particular location in space, even if they could see it.

And then there's a third uncertainty, which I call uncertainty in physics, which is that we don't know the frictional properties, the mass properties of the object, which turns out to be very important if you're going to grasp it.

And all those conspire together, so they add up at the fingertips.

So that's why robots...

today are better but they still often are very clumsy and maybe you can help us understand as someone who's been at this since you were tinkering in a garage it sounds like with your dad in the 70s why is it so important that a humanoid robot learn how to pick up a glass because here we are

people who can pick up a glass, for the most part.

Yeah.

No, we do it very well, very naturally.

We do it so effortlessly that it doesn't seem hard to us at all.

Playing Go, on the other hand, seems extremely difficult, right?

There was an actual discussion whether computers could ever beat a grandmaster at chess.

This is more of X-paradox, that the things that are easy for us are hard for robots.

and that AI is very good at playing go, that's hard for us, right?

So it is a paradox.

And yes, we do it, but we've evolved over 300 million years.

And why do you think it's so important that we help these humanoid robots figure out how to pick up a glass?

Just for the sake of doing it?

Or is there some greater intention here?