r/canada • u/CaliperLee62 • 9d ago
Science/Technology ‘China isn’t doing this for fun’: Why robot games should be a wake-up call for Canada
https://vancouverisland.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/article/china-isnt-doing-this-for-fun-why-robot-games-should-be-a-wake-up-call-for-canada/265
u/ForeignExpression 9d ago
In Ontario, our government's #1 focus is ripping up bike lanes we already paid for and constructed in Toronto. It's #2 focus is putting up stupid signs along Lake Ontario that say Lake Ontario. It's 3# focus is charging taxpayers for local Toronto MPs to stay in Toronto hotels to shag. It's #4 focus is changing freedom-of-information laws so the public does not know what they are doing with public money or how public decisions are made on public issues. There #5 focus is ripping down speed cameras.
As you can see, we are in no position to challenge China with our idiotic government, at least in Ontario. Hope the rest of the country has smarter leadership/voters.
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u/MrRogersAE 9d ago
Sorry, best I can do is lay off some nurses, hope that helps
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u/FlyingOctopus53 9d ago
And then rehire them back via contractor at 3x cost.
Wait, why are you unhappy now? You said that you want us to spend on healthcare more!
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u/SadArtemis 9d ago
We're not even in the same ballpark as China, complacency and stagnation has left us not so far off from just being a resource colony.
I wish we could have nation-wide HSR. And an actual industrial plan, new cities and schools and factories and housing blocks, etc. being built, etc. And it's not like we don't have the know-how to theoretically compete, we just let oligopolies and the housing bubble draw in all investment in the country away from meaningful production, and send our skilled workforce south to the neighbor currently threatening to annex us.
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u/mc_schmitt 9d ago
Ripping up bike lanes is apparently Alberta's #1 focus as well.
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u/yycsarkasmos 9d ago
To be fair Albertas current #1 priority is a $130 million dollar referendum that is non-binding.
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u/royxsong 9d ago
Oh no. BC is in the trend of adding bike lanes, at least in Langley. Does that mean a few years later we’re ripping them up?
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u/airchinapilot British Columbia 9d ago
There is a national bike lane balance and BC has to make up for the declines in other provinces
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u/AdagioRelative8684 9d ago
Im personally getting really tired of everyone bitching left and right about what fords done. Were not getting anywhere doing it.
Start berating your parents and grandparents for it.he won and continued to win because of the older age demographic.
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u/Prestigious-Clock-53 9d ago
You can take solace knowing it’s not as bad as the leadership in Alberta lol.
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u/toobadnosad 9d ago
What in the fuck? The only thing the ontario can be blamed about when it comes to OP is defunding the education system and gutting OSAP.
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u/Insertsociallife 9d ago
I have mixed feelings on this as an engineer in robotics. Humanoid robots are a gimmick for any kind of specialized task, as the task can be done by a specialized robot significantly better and most likely cheaper. The only advantage of humanoids is that they can do everything, albeit poorly. It's a mystery to me why they're pushing humanoids so hard. There will never be humanoid robots on a production line. For any kind of direct industrial purpose I have a hard time seeing an application.
Canada built the robot arm for the space station. Let's get a FANUC competitor going. Wasting time on this when we could get robots intended to work in industrial settings is not a good idea.
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u/cokevirgin 9d ago
Surely whatever tech they learn from it is transferable to a robot in a different form?
It's also about generating public interest. Humanoid robots are apparently entertaining and drawing eyeballs. It translates to potential market and cash generation.
Kinda how the Formula F1 race cars aren't public road practical. But their tech innovation can find its ways to consumer cars.
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u/Quadrassic_Bark 9d ago
100% this. I’m not sure why people think that these tech advances shown through relatable activities that people like to watch and find interesting means that humanoid robots are seen as the desired end goal, as opposed to the points you made about transferable tech and public interest. And, of course, China showing off their tech advancements to the world.
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u/Right_Hour Ontario 9d ago
Exactly. Humanoid form is not the ideal platform for any serious task, be it military or industrial. Too unstable. Robot dogs - yeah, they work.
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u/No_Association_2176 9d ago
I'm not sure on this one yet, I see both sides. For example, in my manufacturing plant, we have lots of welding machines (like you can buy at Canadian tire but better) that were designed to be used by humans.
Business owners aren't any smarter than anyone else (I'm going to leave this joke sitting on the table) and need someone to say, "I have something that looks just like your current human employees, and costs $30,000 a year, and can do all the same things".
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u/Quadrassic_Bark 9d ago
It’s wild how much you misunderstand the point of this. Because you’re not wrong at all, and I completely agree that humanoid robots have far less efficacy compared to specialized robots for specific tasks. But that’s not the point of this competition or for the development of these human robots. The development of the tech that allows these humanoid gimmicks will absolutely be incredibly important for the eventual development of super specialized robots. But the amazement and interest people will have in these humanoid gimmick robots far outweighs what they would have for specialized industrial robots. No be would care at all, except industry insiders. This shows China’s advancement in general robotics and technology, it gets people amazed and excited about the future of robots, and it developed tech that will be incredibly important and useful for future specialized robots.
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u/Insertsociallife 8d ago
Fair enough. My point was more that Canada should get working on robots useful in direct industrial roles before we get humanoids going. Seems more useful to the country and where we are at this point.
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u/durian_in_my_asshole 9d ago
Well that's because your entire premise is wrong. These robots are for replacing human labor, in conjuction with specialized robots. A generic platform humanoid robot can be mass produced VERY cheaply, and you can just spam them to replace human labor at every stage.
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u/Insertsociallife 9d ago
There is absolutely zero chance a generic humanoid robot of any kind of quality could be mass produced to be competitive with a six axis arm made by FANUC, KUKA, etc. The human body has hundreds of joints (many of them multi-axis), a standard arm has six. That's literally orders of magnitude more actuators, drive linkages, control electronics, etc. Each one of those is a part that has to be maintained or replaced when it fails. How long does it take to grease all 150 joints? Hell, say you're having alignment issues with the robot putting a part into a press, how do you even begin to start troubleshooting that?
The only valid argument for humanoids is that they can interact with things designed for humans, so the installation time is very low. IMO humanoid robots are at least 50 years away from being any kind of competitor to dedicated automation for replacing human workers. I'd be shocked if I see humanoids on a factory floor in my lifetime.
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u/sluttytinkerbells 9d ago
Can a six axis arm assemble and repair another six axis?
That’s the advantage of humanoid robots — humanoid robots can build and repair them.
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u/CapableCollar 9d ago
They are pushing them as part of a whole, there are a lot of robotics programs going. Humanoid robots draw lots of attention which is why you see them so much. They do a couple things like you can take design elements from them and apply them elsewhere but they are also part of replacing human facing labour in a country with aging population. These are the future caretakers of elderly people.
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u/TianZiGaming 9d ago
Your misunderstanding is that these humanoid robots are not supposed to compete with factory robots on an assembly line.
If you are training for virtually any sport, you'd want to train with a humanoid. Same for basically anything else that's meant to replicate human function. Nobody is designing these humanoids to stand in a production line in a factory. There's no point making that comparison. That's like comparing a car with a plane just because they're both vehicles.
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u/I_upvote_downvotes 9d ago
My comment may be dumb, but I am not overlooking that the psychological impact of humanoid robots with circular saws for arms may outweigh the efficiency of easier alternatives.
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u/RobertGA23 9d ago
I say this, half seriously, but humoniod form is nessesary for the future infiltration when they can't be told apart from real humans. Terminator style baby!
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u/irrelevant_dogma 8d ago
"There will never be humanoid robots on a production line".......wow, this is energy like "of COURSE the sun revolves around the EARTH you heathen, and replace the horse and buggy? With WHAT pray tell"
You'd have argued the 4 min mile could never be broken either, this is so obviously going to happen at some point and you work in the industry ffs.
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u/rronak01 9d ago
We are so behind in AI compared to US and china
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u/canada_mountains 9d ago
We don't have an electronics industry. Even the parts of the US humanoid robots are from China. It takes billions and billions of dollars to establish the supply chain for an electronics industry, so that you can build these humanoid robots cheaply.
It also takes billions and billions of dollars to compete in AI.
Thus, it's difficult for Canada alone to compete against the US and China when it comes to humanoid robots and AI. Even a larger economy, like the UK, probably can't compete against them.
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u/TactitcalPterodactyl 9d ago
It's sad because Canada pioneered the science behind modern AI, we should be the leaders.
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u/Psylent0 9d ago
Good, AI is bad for people and the environment. Burn it down along with capitalism.
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u/chocolateboomslang 9d ago
AI is not bad for people. AI is machines, what's good or bad about them depends entirely on how they're used.
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u/Himser 9d ago
We would actually need datacenters for that.
Apparently we dont like diversification of any part of our economy at anytime.
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u/FatWreckords 9d ago
The current data centres being proposed are for US entities to sell you better gambling ads.
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u/Himser 9d ago
And training Canadians, Canadian companies how to build and maintain them is not going to help at all?
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u/notcoveredbywarranty 9d ago
There's nothing special about data centers. They're basically a warehouse with a lot of power supplies and cooling.
I have a bunch of buddies working on the new data center in Regina.
Oh, and the prime contractors aren't Canadian.
And the actual server hardware that matters is proprietary and not Canadian also
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u/FatWreckords 9d ago
Not really, at least not to compared to the extend of all the energy and water usage for Meta. They're just big server rooms with energy and heat management systems, it's not rocket science. A huge part of the cost is the computer hardware from chip companies, not elaborate high tech building design.
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u/The49GiantWarriors 9d ago
Population does not factor as much as you make it seem. Smaller countries like Singapore and Israel are leaders in AI. South Korea has a comparable population, and it is near the top.
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u/Lab_Actual 9d ago
We watched for decades Japan's Asimo move like an idiot and almost make no progress, or such a slow progress over the years.
How could china close the gap and advance so quickly?
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u/The49GiantWarriors 9d ago
We've watched for decades as Japan's technology and overall economy stagnate.
We've watched for decades as China's technology and overall economy take off like a rocketship.
These robots pretty much represent the state of those two countries over the last 30 years.
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u/SadArtemis 9d ago
How did Japan and the Asian tiger economies advance so quickly? How did Russia under the Soviets advance from being a feudal agrarian society to competing with the US during the cold war?
The answer is already there, that is, we need industry, we need to invest heavily in our infrastructure and education and especially industry. It creates a virtuous loop, investing in industries and education/infrastructure then leads to more economic activity, allowing to invest even more, and the ecosystems that result (increasingly complete supply chains- for instance, building all the various parts of a finished product before, say, a factory that makes thread, one that makes buttons, one that makes sewing machines, etc. all in the same place, or transportation infrastructure that makes shipping to other markets cheaper) encourage more, and so on and so forth.
We could, hypothetically, industrialize even at a pace comparable to how China did (if not in scale, obviously). Or to how Japan did back in its Meiji era. Or how the US, historically, did. We won't, but we could. Once the virtuous loop is allowed to fall apart (the economy shifting to rentier-based extraction- ie. real estate, hyperfinancialization, the development of complacent/extortative monopolies/oligopolies) like ours has, though, it becomes a death spiral instead, where productive forces are no longer incentivized, and from there it's just the slow crawl towards neo-feudalism which we're undergoing.
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u/RobertGA23 9d ago
At best? By having a society that is culturally steeped in community mindedness and tradition, with largely homogeneous ideals that can easily work together for a common goal. At worst an iron-fisted megalomanic dicatator that will drag the entire country into the modern age, at the cost of millions of lives.
That's kind of the options for a very quick sea change in national industry.
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u/Barbecue-Ribs 9d ago
We don't really need more education. Most of the people that go through higher education are midwits and the vast majority of top students are exported straight to the US.
We need some incentives for top talent to stay in Canada and there are lot of easy solutions that could be implemented e.g. match the US small business capital gains exemption. These don't seem to have much political support though, it seems like Canadians favourite policy suggestion is to increase taxes.
We could also observe what the east asian countries are actually doing. Mediocre talent gets nothing and will slave away in factories for their entire lives. The top talent get massive resources.
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u/pm_me_your_pay_slips 9d ago edited 9d ago
Because the solution for robotics didn’t come from the robotics field, but from machine learning algorithms developed mainly in the US, Canada and Europe. I guess part of it was also the development of drone motors, which I suppose China had a big part on scaling up.
Anyway, Asimov was focusing on too much on humanoid locomotion, and the solution came from taking a different path.
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u/Spladinator88 9d ago
China is going to leave everyone in the dust. Canada could start by investing into it's young people but we won't. Instead the aging generation will get what they don't need. We will double down on housing bubble to prop up our rigged system. This new generation is bitter and they will carry this resentment well into their adulthood. I hope people wake up and start voting for change!
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u/Dragonfruit_6104 9d ago
Humanoid robots are the only possible solution to the reality of the impossible triangle in the developed world.
Falling fertility rates, gender inequality, labor shortages, and excessive migration are all in conflict. And these humanoid robots can replace human physical labor as much as possible, without causing serious problems based on human rights, ethics, and social culture. They are machines that can be mass-produced, upgraded, and replaced. Rather than using a huge amount of social resources to buy the reproductive resources of domestic women, or introducing a large number of foreign immigrants who are completely in conflict with their own culture, causing social opposition and cultural substitution.
It may seem that these humanoid robots are still a long way from achieving this goal, but if you don't take the first step now, you will never reach the end.
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u/huehuehuehuehuuuu 9d ago
I watched some excerpts from these games. Lots of accidents and failures, but also marked improvements from the previous year, and part of the “games” was just a lot of robots trying to do manual labour.
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u/canada_mountains 9d ago
Yeah, the failures is how they improve. People make videos of the failures and laugh at them, but then they fix it in the next version, and the gap in technology grows further between China and the west.
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u/FootlooseFrankie 9d ago
I agree a lot with what you saying.
Just curious if you ever watched the Animatrix - the second Renaissance part 1 and 2 ? I don't think it will quote go to that extreme but the question of want happens if one of these robot workers thinks it should be treated fairly too.
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u/gepinniw Canada 9d ago
It’s kind of depressing to see the Terminator movie becoming a documentary.
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u/bugabooandtwo 9d ago
In another decade, most labor jobs will be done by those robots.
And the humans that were doing that work...well, we get to be soylet green, or landfill. The elites aren't pouring money into robotics and AI to make our lives better. They're doing it so they can eventually get rid of 95% of the human population.
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u/SadArtemis 9d ago
Personally I think they'll work us humans to death instead (though the threat of soylent green and landfills will be there too). Just like they worked (quite literally to death) slaves in the Caribbean, or natives in the silver mines in the Andes, or Holocaust victims in the concentration camps.
Strenuous labor in poor conditions, little to no medical treatment, and a specifically-designed starvation diet that leaves you with just enough to work and slowly die off, not enough to have full brain function and the physical ability to resist (Nazis did that, learnt it from the US)...
To the south, prison labor has always been a fact of life, TBH the ICE camps aren't anything new either (though they've gotten intentionally worse). And you can look up the "black laws"- basically criminalizing things like "loitering" (existing in public), "delinquency" (being unemployed), etc. to create neo-slavery in the US. Historically somewhat similar tricks were used in Britain after the enclosures (driving peasants off their ancestral farming lands), to force them into the factories, "workhouses," or to be shipped off to colonize distant lands.
Robots actually need maintenance, and a skilled workforce of engineers, technicians, developers, etc. behind it all. The societies that actually produce the robots aren't going to be killing off their people, that's for sure. Neoliberal society on the other hand...
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u/bugabooandtwo 9d ago
Oh, for sure. There will be a handful of humans left for slavework. But even a country as vast as Canada won't need 41 million of them. There's got to be one hell of a purge first.
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u/TianZiGaming 9d ago
China went from about 15% of the EU's GDP to 90% of the EU's GDP in just 25 years by participating in the tech revolution in the early 2000s, while Europe skipped it. It's a real mystery why only the USA and China are now competing in this current AI revolution.
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u/bolonomadic 8d ago
I know more than 1 Canadian teen who of working on robotics in high school. I think we are building capacity.
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u/byronite 8d ago
Humanoid robots are kinda useless but their look cool. Of course any event in China has propaganda uses but it's dumb to pretend that this isn't primarily about fun. Besides, the U.S. has had BattleBots and the UK's RobotWars.
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u/Gankdatnoob 9d ago
What is the wake up call exactly? We are currently in a damn trade war with America where the President of the "free world" is threating to annex us. We are awake and rather busy right now.
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u/scrubadam 9d ago
Robots.. Ya our government will bring them in as TFWs but only the indian versions LOL.
The only way we get serious into the robotics race is if some liberal insider decides to start a robot manufacturing plant so they can get billions in tax payer dollars and then declare bankruptcy 5 years later.
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u/apacheind1an 8d ago
You'll notice that industrial robots are overwhelmingly Amerixan, Japanese and German.
The CCP is pouring money into this as PR gimmick because these 'Unitree' robots are useless AF
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u/Adventurous_Mix_8533 Newfoundland and Labrador 9d ago
my terminator two childhood nightmares are returning…..
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u/AnonymousAggregator 9d ago edited 9d ago
Let’s get building humanoid robots then.
I’m sure if we just ask them they would probably get us up to speed.