058. Halcyon Robotics: Building the world's most dextrous hand cover art

058. Halcyon Robotics: Building the world's most dextrous hand

058. Halcyon Robotics: Building the world's most dextrous hand

Listen for free

View show details
There is no King Charles III Space Station this week. There is a flat in Saffron Walden — Saf Francisco, as Calum insists on calling it — with a half-built humanoid torso left behind in California and what its makers reckon is the world’s most dextrous robot hand sitting on the table between the beers. Into the flat come Oli and Ivor of Halcyon Robotics, two Saffron Walden schoolfriends who have known each other since they were fourteen. Oli is the roboticist: cybernetics, a mechatronics degree, a master’s thesis spent trying to rebuild the most dextrous hand on earth, then a stint as a one-man army building the hands at 1X. Ivor is the convert: a chemist who taught himself to code, spent the best part of a decade as what he calls a plumber for software engineers, got absolutely shook by ChatGPT in 2022, and concluded that the only safe ground left to stand on is hardware.The thesis is simple and the engineering is not. Robotics solved walking — Spot the dog, the old Toyota machines that could just about manage the stairs, the endless parade of humanoids doing backflips — but avoided the thing that would actually make a robot useful, which is the hand. Oli’s framing is that you see a great many robots doing backflips and very few doing anything useful. Put a motor in every finger joint and it overheats. Move the motors back to the palm, as Figure does, and the robot can only lift light packages. Do it properly and you end up running forty-odd tendons over the wrist with near-zero friction for a million cycles, which Oli cheerfully calls a mechanical engineering nightmare and the exact place where everyone, Tesla included, is stuck. Elon Musk reckons half the engineering in Optimus is the hands. Halcyon thinks that is an underestimate. The human hand, by contrast, took billions of years, learned to throw a spear, and used that to take over the planet — and surgeons still tend to fuse the bones in a broken wrist rather than repair them, because the biomechanics are so poorly understood. The proudest achievement of Halcyon’s hand, the one Oli says nobody gets, is turning a dial.What makes a two-person company plausible is the same thing that made Ivor nervous. AI is eating software, so the convert’s logic is to run at the one thing software cannot yet touch — the physical world — and the irony is that AI is exactly what lets two people attempt it. Between Claude and a 3D printer, Oli and Ivor span CAD, circuit boards, firmware and operating-system-level control that used to need a building full of specialists. When their toilet broke they printed the part. And the moment Oli decided Ivor was co-founder material was a fortnight in Greece, where Ivor built an endoscope-and-tape contraption rigged to a laptop to fish a dropped phone out of a wall void, lost it to a marauding snake, and got it back several days later. This is a robot, Oli told him. You’ve built a robot. This is the guy.From there the conversation climbs. The case for a human-shaped robot is that the world is already built around human hands — every object was designed around the average finger — even though, as the founders happily concede, you would never march a humanoid with a scythe into a wheat field when a combine harvester exists. Calum, who builds specialised robots himself, presses the point, and the reply is that the clothes everyone is wearing were fed through the sewing machine by a human hand while towels are fully automated. The deeper bet is that dextrous hands turn all manual labour into the next thing to automate, the cost of labour falls towards zero, almost everything becomes nearly free, and you are left wondering whether capitalism still works. Oli, who is at pains to point out he would like to keep capitalism for as long as possible, reaches for Alfred North Whitehead on civilisation advancing by the number of operations it can perform without thinking about them. But Halcyon is leaving Saffron Walden for San Francisco, and the reason is less tax than psychology: in SF everyone you bump into is building something and is unembarrassed about optimism. Americans, Ivor says, believe they are making history every day, while Europeans believe history has already happened — and Calum reaches for the word hypermnesiac, a country with so much history it can no longer move. The British specifics are familiar to this audience and no less damning for it: the Town and Country Planning Act, Victorian infrastructure still doing all the work, energy priced for failure, a neighbour who believes he has a right to your land. They call it losing the mandate of heaven. The close is a clean split — either abundance and a space-faring civilisation of ringworlds and Dyson spheres where everyone owns their own means of production, or a hyper-centralised future where whoever controls the most GPUs and humanoid robots controls everyone at no cost to themselves.The episode explores— Why locomotion was the easy ...
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_t1
No reviews yet