Futurology Today

One of the surprising side stories of 2020s AI has been the triumph of Open Source. It has beaten or equalled the privately funded efforts that investors have poured hundreds of billions of dollars into. Is Open-Source about to triumph again in robotics?

Unitree's robot hardware is on par with any competitor's; their primary remaining challenge is software. Closed-development companies like Boston Dynamics can still claim a lead there - for now.

But how long will that last?

Unitree has targeted open-source developers around the world, and it's paying off. Here's the latest example of many. Irony of ironies - it's Americans using Apple tech, doing the work to build Unitree as the world's leading robotics company.

Humanoid Everyday: A Comprehensive Robotic Dataset for Open-World Humanoid Manipulation

NVIDIA is helping to build our AI future without caring much about any negative consequences, and it's the same playbook when it comes to robotics. A world with a billion humanoid robots will be a world with hundreds of millions of humans displaced from paid work. Does this bother anyone at NVIDIA? Seemingly not.

You'd think they might worry, if only for purely selfish reasons. Do they think their sky-high stock market valuations & easy funding money will still exist in an economy where a 25-50% unemployment rate is the norm? If they do, they're not as smart at Economics as they are about AI.

The Next Wave of AI Is Physical: Inside Deepu Talla’s Keynote at RoboBusiness 2025

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/51285518

Stellantis and Pony.ai will jointly develop and test SAE Level 4 (hands-off, eyes-off) autonomous vehicles, integrating Stellantis' AV-Ready Platform with Pony.ai's autonomous driving technology.

Initial focus on battery-electric medium size vans, ideal for robotaxi applications.

Real-world testing will begin in Luxembourg

75% of the US stock market growth of the past few years has come from AI, but that was built on a promise. That AGI was just around the corner. Now companies like OpenAI are pivoting to selling ads and porn, a sure sign they do not think AGI is about to arrive.

If the AI bubble bursts, what happens afterwards?

I'd guess there will be a backlash against Big Tech. Perhaps 2025 is the high watermark of their political influence. AI is already broadly unpopular with many people, and that will only grow when they see if it has crashed the economy and their pensions.

AI, the technology, will still be with us, even if many of today's AI companies won't be. Even without AGI, it still has the potential to be transformative and economically disruptive. Rules-based businesses — legal, accounting, transaction, and claims processing could all be made obsolete. Humanoid robotics and self-driving, both aspects of AI, will eventually replace millions of human workers.

The AI bubble crashing would mean a recession. Recessions mean companies cut workforce numbers. Ironically, this time, they will be able to replace many of those people who were let go with AI. So the crash that AI causes will also speed its adoption.

People often complain about lab breakthroughs going nowhere in the real world. That makes CATL's claims for its Naxtra sodium-ion batteries interesting. CATL is the world's biggest battery maker. If anyone can bring a product to market, it can.

Current lithium-ion battery pack prices are around $100-150/kWh. CATL says one day sodium-ion batteries could cost just $10/kWh. That would require a lot to go right, and massive economies of scale. But that has worked for lithium batteries, and CATL has the heft to make economies of scale plausible.

If fossil fuels and nuclear energy are already feeling the heat from renewables plus lithium being cheaper, renewables plus sodium-ion batteries at $10/kWh would be an annihilation event for other energy sources. They could also usher in an age of micro-grids and decentralized energy, reducing reliance on big business, autocratic countries, and large corporations. Fingers crossed it happens soon.

CATL’s sodium-ion EV battery passes China’s new certification with 15-minute fast-charging capability

cross-posted from: https://leminal.space/post/27314526

I wonder how close the day is when we will have cheapish ( $20k, or so) humanoid robots capable of most unskilled or semi-skilled work? I'd guess 2030, or so. This new training approach confirms that the guess is on track to be right.

Significant too that they used Unitree's G1 model. It retails for less than $20k. When these robots capable of most work arrive, they won't be expensive. They'll work 24/7 for a fraction of the cost of a minimum wage human employee.

Dealing with this, by reorganizing our economic system, is likely to be the main political issue in developed nations in the 2030s.

HumanoidExo Turns Human Motion Into Data That Teaches Robots to Walk