This is a great one. The manipulation is hard, but we're probably on a trajectory to be able to do it in 1-3 years if you were tolerant of some risk to the baby, but, of course, your tolerance for injuring babies is basically zero. I think 'risk & reliability' is a good potential category: there is the bar of 'got it to do a task reliably enough that we got a video' and the bar of 'got it to do a task reliably enough that I'd risk an infant in its grippers.
> but we're probably on a trajectory to be able to do it in 1-3 years
This is wildly optimistic. I quit working in robotics because I got tired of all the bullshit promises everybody made all the time. I'm not saying robotics isn't advancing or the work is unimportant, but the spokespeople are about as reliable as Musk when it comes to timelines.
I doubt it will happen in 10 years, even with a constrained environment and hardware that costs well into 6 digits.
I think GP was basically talking about doing it on a doll. As in, a robot in 1-3 years might be able to change diapers with occasional success, but half the tries will result in a dismembered diaper user: we'd use dolls in this scenario, since dismembering babies is taboo and generally frowned upon within the robotics community.
It will have to be a robot doll. Changing my baby's diaper was a piece of cake until he learned how to escape midway through the process. Babies can be surprisingly hard to restrain!
after fiddling for 10 minutes with the baby, while being late for the day job, because it KEEPS ON MOVING while your changing the FRIGGING diaper that is full of FECES I can assure you that my tolerance is clearly above zero :-)
> your tolerance for injuring babies is basically zero.
Um, no it's not. Is absolutely zero tolerance. There is not weasel words out of this. If a robot was to cause any pain to the baby, there would be no remorse. There would be no front of mind thoughts to not repeat the same thing the next time. There would be no guilt for causing pain to the baby.
Why you would "basically" this the way you have is disturbing.
Sorry, this is me communicating like an engineer. In a technical sense risk of anything can only approach zero: never actually get there. I meant that there should be essentially zero chance, similar to holding a baby in your arms or putting it in a high chair, and probably less chance of injury than driving in a car with a baby in a car-seat. Basically zero.
I don't think the parent comment advocates for hurting babies. It just, probably correctly, states that cherry picked examples won't be representative of roboty safety with infants in the next years, but that true safety will improve over time as well.
real world treatment of babies is very different from the zero tolerance you've described. From pregnant mothers smoking/drinking to medical care unavailability to doctor errors to various toxin contaminated baby products and the environment (Flint leaded water comes to mind) to babies left in hot cars and other abuse to poor availability of daycare (even less availability of daycare good for mental development) to ...
Granted most of this is unintentional. The same about injuries by robots - we're supposedly talking about unintentional injuries here. So, if robots save money/time/effort (like Flint water switch) i'm not sure that the society would suddenly change its current approach to unintentional baby injuries and implement zero tolerance.
To illustrate - Uber self-driving killed a woman, and another self-driving maimed a woman in SF. Uber case was an obvious criminal gross negligence running with explicitly disabled emergency braking), and the company wiggled out of it in part by having to shut down the self-driving. Where is in SF it was an obvious case of technology limitations and teething issue, so there were no real severe consequences as we're much more tolerant to honest technological accidents (at least when they happen not to us personally).
> From pregnant mothers smoking/drinking to medical care unavailability to doctor errors to various toxin contaminated baby products and the environment [...]
You don't even need to go so extreme. Driving involves risk. And so does getting out of bed at all (or staying in bed..)
If the chance of the robot hurting your kid becomes orders of magnitude smaller than the chance of getting hit by a freak asteroid, you can probably call that save enough, even if it's not strictly speaking zero.
Well that is simply not possible. Even mothers drop their babies to the floor sometimes (very infrequently, I hope). Even for humans the tolerance isn't zero.
