It sounds like the best way to bootstrap a machine learning system. You generate the data the system will be seeing in production along with the proper labels. Then in a later stage you can start doing reinforcement learning.
The problem is the lying about it.
I honestly don’t see an issue with it. These robots aren’t for sale, there’s no estimated sale date, nor are they likely in production in any meaningful sense. Yes, he gave a price range, but that’s obviously aspirational and not confirmed seeing as there’s no expected release date whatsoever.
From the video I watched, it seemed obvious the robots were limited to a handful of interactions, such as:
- hand gift bag to person - it certainly seemed to go through a certain routine each time, but the person seemed to be able to point at the one they want
- rock paper scissors
- fill and hand drink to someone (didn’t see it in the video)
- dance according to some choreography
There certainly seemed to be some AI happening (i.e. detect which bag, let go of gift, etc), but it seemed like a very on-rails experience.
And I got that from watching it live, not looking at someone dissect what was going on. Having a handler there to push the robot into one of a handful of pre-programmed routines seems absolutely reasonable.
