South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots

I don't have the historic numbers at hand, but I would assume that for each of those categories this is a similar proportional increase, so it's similarly notable to mention the increase in spending on humanoid robots.

Androids (humanoid robots) will require loads of ram, and loads of model training under the current paradigm. So it sort of makes sense. At least, I see robots as the top of the pyramid.

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I agree they may be strategically necessary. I’m just less convinced that “commercial humanoids by 2028” means anything close to replacing a meaningful amount of labor by then

This is the path that Japan tried to go down and it hasn't worked out yet, but we have also solved a lot more of the technical issues since they began. going to be interesting to see if we pull it off this time.

>Aging populations need help, They're pretty good at helping themselves. Close to where I used to live in Bavaria we had a pilot project of communal living for the elderly in a community of about a hundred people that included people with quite severe conditions such as dementia. Medical and care personell routinely checked in but they were largely self sufficient and did a remarkably job of taking care of themselves, maybe most importantly the were happy and quite dignified, something I cannot imagine is the case when your only contact is a humanoid robot. Of course in an age where every solution is yet another technology rethinking social life isn't very high up the list.

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Vertical integration. Produce the chips, build data centers to run LLMs on the chips, and the robots to deliver the result to end users.

Even better, Qimonda was ultimately bought (alongside all their patents) by SMIC [1] who is now the Chinese memory player. For 30 million. [1] https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/chinas-cxmt-is-set-to-...

> Looking back, it's easy to say the German govt should have thrown them a billion or two to keep them afloat. However, state intervention was very unpopular at the time in economic circles, and there was much furor over bailouts following the 2008 crisis. Absolutely, Germany essentially abandoned its position in industrial leadership solely due to neoliberal ideology. Just compare the trajectories of Germany and China in the last 20 years. One country planned and implemented a proper industrial policy, the other hummed and hawed about the infallibility of the market and thus essentially just gave up.

Infineon still exists as a semiconductor manufacturer. Their stock has gone crazy since start of the year as well.

Germany’s austerity policy after 2008 may be one of the largest economic blunders in history. It would be one thing if they merely committed self-harm, but they also used their pull in the EU to drag the rest of the continent down with them. Reminded of Matt Yglesias’s excellent headline from 2010: Angela Merkel Lucky the Bar for “Worst German Leader” is Very High

lmao

I’ve always wondered what is unique about semiconductors that PhDs need to work like assembly line workers. I’m sure they’re not solving partial differential equations all day, but what’s so different between different batches of chips?

I believe some of the earliest Intel fabs were in New Mexico (Shiprock and Rio Rancho). What combination of the above did New Mexico have? When New Mexico and Germany had fabs, South Korea was still a developing country ruled by a brutal dictatorship. What happened was simple - both Taiwan and South Korea and now China took concerted steps in investing into their semiconductors businesses. South Korea did this indirectly through favourable arrangements for the industry players via the chaebol system, while China and Taiwan did this with more direct government investment into the industry. Sure, you can't just dump money into the industry and become a semiconductor player, else the Middle Eastern countries would have tried that ages ago. Yes, the talent being locally present is important but you're once again bringing up tired tropes about Asian working culture as being relevant.

According to late Intel founder Andy Grove, having domestic manufacturing, including chip fabrication, is very important for a country's ability to innovate. https://www.citizenstrade.org/ctc/wp-content/uploads/2011/05...

Most of those now need memory to function. At some point it becomes a national security issue.

Those require a hand on a stick. The stick isn't so interesting. Humanoid robots are the stick part, and actually not THAT interesting.

Most fixed infrastructure like switches and buttons that can be operated with a single hand are amenable to any robot with at least one hand. We've had Sawyer demonstrations operating tools clearly designed for humans for more then a decade ago and Mobile Aloha had demonstrations showing how it can operate the switches of an elevator just fine. None of these are humanoid robots. The moment you have mobile tools, whats the point in forcing the robot to hold them using a human hand? You can put them on a tool changer now or have a gripper that works for the specific task. Why does a robot need to hold a wrench using a humanoid hand? >Nearly all environments (houses, streets, sidewalks, factory floors, offices, toilets, bathtubs,…) are made for humans. Wide enough and tall enough (or short enough, for bathtubs) to accommodate human bodies. Uhm, now we're getting into stupid territory. All of those environments have flat floors. Flat floors are not an environment that are exclusively built to accommodate human bodies... The flat floor is designed for ultimate flexibility. It can be used for anything. Furniture, wheelchairs, wheeled robots, furniture on rolls, animals, and also humans. All of the environments you've listed should preferrably be wheelchair accessible for disabled people (in terms of locomotion at least). >So until we can find one or more form-factors superior enough to justify we adapt everything around it Is this some kind of joke? Factories already make heavy use of UGVs and stationary robot arms and build custom end effectors for them. It's also an extreme strawman to suggest that wireless/electronic interfaces require finding a "superior form-factor" to the point that it feels insulting. There's also often an easy wheelchair accessible equivalent. E.g. a button to activate the electronic door opener at wheelchair level can still be at a comfortable height for standing people. >And then, once you have happy-ish customers, figure out which of these human attributes and shapes aren’t actually needed to do the job. So solve the impossible (come on you know it's hyperbole) first, only then can you build a simpler system. I think its incredibly unreasonable to suggest that you need to solve every single problem ever encountered in human existence to be allowed to solve one much simpler problem.

For multi-purpose tasks, human hands and arms are excellent, but only 2 are too few for many tasks. Humans very frequently need to have specialized gripping tools in order to accomplish tasks that cannot be done with only 2 arms, or they must work in pairs. A good mobile multi-purpose robot should have 3 arms, or 4 arms for symmetry. Human legs are normally not necessary. A mobile robot would just need some means to raise and lower its wheels, so that it could step when ascending or descending stairs. A human head is not useful. The place for the "brain" of a robot is in its "chest", because robots do not have the limitations of living beings, where the very slow propagation speed of the nervous signals forces the nervous systems to be concentrated in the proximity of the main sense organs. Instead of a head, one should have a couple of mobile arms with video cameras at their end, somewhat like the mobile stalks of crab eyes. Of the components of a human, only the hands and arms are models useful to imitate. Cephalopod-like arms would be even more versatile than human-like arms, but it is likely that they would be much more expensive at similar performances. Having the size of a human and human-like hands and arms is good for working in environments designed for humans, but having the shape of a human has no purpose.

I understand the argument but its honestly ridiculous in my eyes. How about a set of arms that can reach into dishwasher and stack dishes and a washer/dryer to fold laundry... Except even without solving the bipedal movement, that doesn't exist at a consumer price point. Why are we pretending the hardest version of this is close to existing?

I generally don't like the phrase cargo culting, but building a humanoid robot is probably the ultimate form of cargo culting. The idea is this: You build a robot in the shape of a human with the hope that by building the robot well enough in the image of humans, it will become sentient and intelligent on its own. That is literally the pitch of every single humanoid robot company on the planet.

To expand a bit, even saying 대약진 _daeyakjin_ "great leap forward" wouldn't have turned many eyes, because _dae_ is just a common prefix ("great") and _yakjin_ is also a common word meaning "leap forward, push forward, improve". The word simply doesn't have the same connotation of the English phrase "Great Leap Forward", which is almost always used for the infamous Chinese movement. If a Korean speaker wanted to talk about that Chinese movement, they'd use the full name, 대약진운동 (大跃进运动): the great leap forward movement.

Sure, but I'm not sure humanoid robots is the best form factor for this. E.g. something with a wheeled base makes movement calculations a lot easier since you don't need to deal with balance while moving.

> RethinkX correctly projected the exponential cost declines of solar and batteries, when everybody else was drawing straight lines That’s not at all what I remember, what are you basing that claim on?

Your "Fwiw" feels meaningless and hollow. The fact that there are stupid people out there, doing stupid things does not make you a savant just because you didn't make the same mistake. This person clearly hasn't spent much time educating themselves how high volume manufacturing works, nor have they spent much time on flexible manufacturing systems either. The entire article boils down to "Humanoids! Humanoids! HUMANOIDS!"

> Humanoid robots will enter the market at a cost-capability of under $10/hour for their labor, on a trajectory to under $1/hour before 2035 and under $0.10/hour before 2045. I dont see it, unless this is an expectation that a robot will work for 50 years without maintenance at capex. Why doesnt a comparable tool, like an excavator, work with this math? Why arent they 100 times cheaper to run than 20 years ago? Excavators can cost 50 - 100k pa in maintenance and fuel costs. Why does creating a multifunction tool, with even finer tolerances, working in human safe workspaces cost less?

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Economies like South Korea and Japan have a drastic population deficit that means there are simply not enough people around to perform many kinds of manual labor tasks.