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
I’m surprised this wasn’t being done already. We’ve been using MoCap systems that can infer inverse kinematics in computer graphics scenarios for decades. Tesla has been using data collected from human drivers of its cars to train its self-driving system (with mixed results) for close to 10 years. It seems like it would be a no-brainer for even a small robotics company to tell their employees to strap on an exoskeleton during the day and just record all of their normal motions.
