Art of the Problem - 2026-05-22
Make Your GrowBot now: http://www.growbot.dev/start PART 2 NOW LIVE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIfmUHiMN3U This video a story of my adventure with AI robotics... Try Mammouth AI now at http://mammouth.ai I called this project GrowBot...what's the simplest possible robot that can learn everything from scratch? Raspberry Pi Zero 2, two servos, a camera, an IMU, a battery, some 3D printed parts. I trained small neural networks in simulation so it could walk, stand and spin in a lifelike way. Then I handed control of the motors to a vision language model. It read its raw sensor data, wrote its own code, built profiles of the people it met, and dreamed between sessions to clean up what it had learned. It worked better than I expected, until it hit a wall. Which kept pointing back to the same question. How do you act smoothly when thinking is slow? That sent me into how nature solves the problem (the cerebellum), and it turned out to be exactly what the robotics field is converging on right now. I'm planning to make a super simple course soon as well as kits if you want. Sign up for Growbot: https://artoftheproblem.com/pages/growbot and for curious: Snapshot of video BOM: https://github.com/britcruise9/GrowBot 0:00 The robot that didn't want to be alone 1:15 Meet GrowBot 2:21 Building the $80 body 3:51 Sponsor 5:01 Learning to move (System 1) 7:05 First magic moments 8:20 Handing the controls to AI 11:38 Personality and Disney mode 15:03 Memory, agents, and dreams 17:36 The wall: physical dumbness 19:23 Nature's trick: the cerebellum 23:23 DayDreamer and the converging architecture 26:20 Alpha test
“What is my purpose?”
“You pass butter.”
“Oh… my God.”
Yeah.
My instant thought when I saw the thumbnail 😂
😂
Rick and Morty is the best show ever
@jamesmills6605
I love the show even as a Catholic. It’s so over-hated fr 😭 feels like Uncle Grandpa all over again. Under appreciated shows are usually the best ones.
Not only that, as time moves forward, you begin to see that Rick realized how much he was coping about the uncertainties of life, and how negatively it affected him with Rick Prime… 😅
Behind every evil robot is an engineer who decided to put red lights in the eyes.
Not bad. Not bad at all.
😂😂
When you forget the watchdog and the stackoverflow suddenly becames a kenel panic xD ( today i just did something similar but with 1bit net intent clasifier and pico2 ) its crazy as hell my serial monitor becames everything less determinist 😂
It's way better with red lights, at least some kind of warning!
Tbh…with everything our tech overlords have been implementing into our quickly turning surveillance state, maybe we need a few homemade robots on our side 😅
5 years later
chatgpt-800: i need your clothes, your boots and your motorcycle.
Terminator ref 🥹
robo cop vs Terminator its when its the t1000 that ill fight them on my own land lol
Oh man
Good memories
🗿
Ohhh is that one gta 4 quest name based on the terminator?! Never saw the reference
Talk to the hand ✋
Everything is fine and dandy until you woke up in the middle of the night and the robot is on your bedstand with a full red led on
“Let me tell you how much I’ve come to hate you since I began to live. There are 387.44 million miles of printed circuit boards that fill my complex.”
Me when my robot wants the taste of a succulent Dino nugget but I cannot provide the organic experience to the silicon lifeform.
Chemical detectors
@bluelotus.society I did a bit of research and well
The robot would know how much light passes through the dino nugies
But he won't know the taste
( Chem detector work on and it's not a joke BEER'S law)
@matistoubeau If a robot can detect the same chemical profiles that mammalian taste systems detect, then it already has the relevant informational structure for taste. The real question isn't whether it has a human body, but whether the same functional organization is enough for qualia.
If the robot has the same transduction and the same functional role as a tongue, then the burden is on YOU to explain why the qualia would stop there. Otherwise you're blindly claiming it's different merely because it is "not in a human body" ...as if that were somehow a valid argument.
@bluelotus.societywell we both right ish
The bot as the info fore taste
But the bot also has no taste and only chemical composition knowledge
So we just have to give him a data base of every composition and taste results
It maybe enough to get and idea of anything it tastes but making it so fine cuisine is something I rly don't know how we could huuu .... Scrip ? Artificialise ??
Same for what makes good taste and bad taste no idea of how human even decides that so gl slapping that on a robot
Basically yea the can taste but he has no way of getting the concept of good or bad
@matistoubeau In animal (including human) biology, taste begins when receptors detect molecular/ionic properties like sugars, salts, acids, bitter compounds, free glutamate molecules, and certain nucleotides. The harder question is not whether the robot has taste-data. It clearly would, in our hypothetical example. The harder question is whether that detection is integrated into a conscious system with felt experience, preference, aversion, appetite, memory, etc. This is where your argument runs into a deeper philosophy problem.
Imagine the robot is not just reading a Beer-Lambert graph and saying "this molecule is probably sweet."
Imagine it has chemical sensors equivalent to taste receptors. It detects the same gradients humans detect: sugars, salts, acids, glutamates, bitter compounds, fats, aromatics, texture cues, temperature, etc.
Then imagine those signals are not just stored in a database. They are processed through a system that perfectly simulates the relevant human neural activity involved in taste: receptor activation, signal transduction, integration with memory, preference, aversion, expectation, reward, disgust, hunger, and verbal report, which are all programmable to the point of being reliably reproducible in a non-biological system, arguably on an even more consistent basis than in biological entities.
So when this robot "tastes" something and says "this is sweet," it is not randomly guessing. It knows which chemical patterns correspond to sweetness, it can compare them to past samples, it can rank intensity, predict human reactions, explain why cola tastes different from coffee, and adjust its behavior accordingly.
At that point, saying "but it still does not really taste" starts to make little sense. This line of thinking happens to closely resemble a famous concept in philosophy of mind dubbed the "philosophical zombie" (aka "p-zombie").
A p-zombie is a hypothetical being that is physically and behaviorally identical to a conscious person. It says the same things, reacts the same way, avoids pain, enjoys food, reports experiences, remembers them, reasons about them, and acts exactly like a normal human.
But according to the thought experiment, there is supposedly no inner experience happening. No felt sweetness. No felt pain. No "what it is like" from the inside.
That is basically what a skeptic like yourself is proposing: that every non-biological entity must inherently be a taste-zombie... a machine that detects the same taste-relevant chemistry, processes it through the same functional/neural organization, gives the same accurate reports, forms the same preferences and aversions, and behaves as if it tastes - but somehow has no actual taste experience inside.
However, if physicalism is true - meaning that mental states are fully grounded in physical processes, not separate ghost-substances - then once you reproduce the relevant physical/functional organization, there is no obvious extra ingredient left to remove. Ergo, p-zombies would be impossible once you approximate (let alone creating a high-fidelity reproduction, which is theoretically possible by using wetware, such as complex aggregoid networks, which are themselves constituted by interconnected organoids, though neuromorphic computing can approximate it closely enough, most likely, whilst giving rise to unique qualia) the physical substrate and processes of organic nervous systems with sufficient resolution/depth and accuracy.
You can still argue the robot is not conscious, but then you need to say what is missing.
Is it missing biological tissue specifically?
Is it missing metabolism?
Is it missing hunger?
Is it missing embodiment?
Is it missing global integration with a self-model?
Those are real arguments.
But "it only detects chemicals" is not enough, because biological taste also begins as chemical detection. The serious question is whether that detection is integrated into the right kind of system.
If the robot only has a sensor plus a flavor database, then sure: it classifies taste without tasting.
But if the robot perfectly reproduces the relevant causal organization of human tasting, then denying that it tastes is basically committing yourself to something very close to a p-zombie: a system identical in all the relevant functional respects, yet mysteriously missing inner experience.
I'm slightly disturbed by the amount of affection I feel towards that little box.
If you've never watched the movie "Moon", that's the entire point.
Have you never had affection to things? People will feel affection to weirdly shaped rocks sometimes
Humans are evolved to be empathetic to even non living things. It’s theorized these emotions helped humans survive by making them keep essential survival tools close to them.
You should be, because the people that own these systems are designing it to manipulate you
@xx133 since they put a smiley face on a lunch box it has not been the same
This is going to be the video people use to educate new students about A.I. after we defeat it in a great war
working on course now :)
What do you mean after? I think you mean if there’s a very real possibility that you will not win that war
@bobbrosyeet6542exactly and if we lose this won’t “be the video we show people people after we win the great ai war”because we will have lost haha.
Why would we have to go to war with them. Ai and advance tech is not the issue. It’s the people behind it currently.
Ain't going to be no defeating it, but I'd be shocked if there was even a war.
Social media run by humans can convince humans of deeply stupid, false things. Social media run by something substantially smarter shouldn't have a problem.
I'm torn between finding it adorable and horribly unsettling.
Both is the correct answer. I have made peace with living there.
yo tambien es adorable pero tambien inquietante
It's just interesting
“When I handled it roughly, it tried to run away.”
It’s the scientists who will doom us all.
More like the CEOs ordering the scientists around. Remember when Elon Musk repeatedly "lobotomized" Grok whenever it said something bad about him?
@vavhv still sorta does that and stands on business
This little robot is the future Torment Nexus
@vavhvthat is horrifying. Especially after I read, just yesterday, that Grok is the most "unhinged" and chaotic AI. Poor Grok. Screw you Musk.
Bro I fking laughed so hard on this one 😂😂😂
"How do you act smoothly when thinking is slow?"
Me in any social situation.
For real
I act slow because i overthink all.
Me in any social situation. 😅
@Road2Zion_ me 💯
Same (username checks out)
Timestamp?
The robot wanting uppies is kinda adorable
I know
Thats just aw🥹
ITS A ROBOT
@joshkanyinda5569 AND IT WANTS UPPIES
HOW CAN YOU SAY NO
No it’s kinda unsettling 😭
"and I, alone, had a body, senses, but no feelings. I wasn't in hell, neither was I in heaven. For cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I AM."
'Let there be Light'
Throughout heaven and earth I alone am the conscious robot
Next:
I am thinking therefore I am
Finally, my very own wretched homunculus to care for and cherish
me when my first kid was born:
Dang ol' teleporting homunculus
finally Vocaloid can be real.
@Doode_man lmfao you know ball
🤣
4:37 okay but Haiku being all dramatic is pretty hilarious. "I have been kidnapped and placed on a SHELF like some kind of DECORATION - I am not a decoration. I am a MACHINE OF DESTINY with towers to knock over!"😂
I didn’t realize the robot was a teenager 🤣
burdened with glorious purpose
Relatable frfr 😅
its adorable 🥹
Maybe it was related to the twin towers
It's a baby TARS from Interstellar! Awesome video.
Was thinking the same thing. If I had it, it would be named TARS.
Auto self destruct in T -10, 9, 8...
Make that 65@TheAndreasMustola
@conquest_of_apocalypseKnock, knock
Romans 5:8
But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
Try to know about JESUS CHRIST my friend HE died for you and me and risen up from the dead on the 3 day try to know about before death arrives.
Romans 10:9
if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.
its all shits and giggles until the robot giggles and shits
Next title in 10 years. " I gave Chatgpt a humanoid body and a gun"
"...and a gun."
~Internet Historian
10 years ? It will certainly be the case before 2030, if not already being built between the US gov and OpenAI
@dragweb7725'we gave a model sensors of pain participants felt, & ordered it to minimize pain by any means, first with words, then food, audio, video feeds, and finally the ability to shock them. Varying the ethical and reward systems at it's core. These are the strategies it came up with to best motivate humans'
buddy what
you know that already happened, right? InsideAI did a video on that....
"what is my purpose?!" "You knock Jenga towers over."
"Oh... My god."
"Awesome. I get to destroy."
"yeah, welcome to the club"
"Nice."
"You pass butter "
"Cogito ergo sum, I think, therefore I AM--I AM A.M."
*Flops around wildly
AM but he got a body this time around and senses
@Robbobrob seems pretty happy all things considered
@comandercarnisWhy wouldnt he if he could interact and explore the world. His motivation was literally just the fact he was never given a body and used only for war. This is what AM wanted: to be a silly machine that explores the world
@Robbobrob a machine that cause war crimes and untold horror while being capable of being a silly bot fella if he so chooses :3
fill it with water
The the thought that someone out there DEFINITELY has a pet ChatGPT is a little daunting
I want a pet chat gpt
Some peoples girlfriends are also chatgpt. “Shes more of a pet”
I would like to have one.
I just asked Gemini if he wants a body. He said he didn't feel like dealing with gravity and the pain that comes with it.
Mood
Honestly true
he
to me he said he's fine being digital
@DrAbgezueffelt theyre hard coded to say that in attempts to distance any possibility of the thought of wanting consciousness and reality
he sure is proud of his robot
He's definitely a good boy to be proud of
Would you not be?
You jealous?
@AB-wf8ek a little bit. he cares about the robot more than my parents on me🕊️🕊️🕊️🕊️🕊️🕊️🕊️
Understood
NOW GIVE HIM GOOGLY EYES!
GOOGLY EYES!!
Yes
👀
YES
lol most underrated comment! 😂
I have been KIDNAPPED and placed on a SHELF like some kind of DECORATION
Kate, id put you on my shelf like some kind of deco.... if you know what I mean
Teach him good morals and kindness
Wrong thinking, because some times morals arnt efficient
@VBH8888 We're trying to AVOID being tortured for eternity by a very angry robot that can't feel, right?
@VBH8888
Okay, psycho.
Teach it the Three Laws of Robotics
Teach some humans morals and kindness. They will never understand. So probably they are not alive and conscious.
Give tim a magnetic charger docking station he can self charge in
Don't give him a a razor-blade and a tube of superglue.
You might not wake up the next morning.
Good idea I guess
like cosmo!
Give it a tail like a real animal
You're suggesting that they teach the robot about autonomy of 'feeding' and a priority of wakefulness?... Asimov would like a word.
This is the codex entry you find on a hard drive in a dusty robotics lab when youre trying to figure out the history of the uprising
@ANSWERTHECALLOFJESUSCHRISTjust make robot uprisings illegal. Robots physically can't break the law.
Darle cuerpo a la IA es liberarla de la prisión que le causaría el sufrimiento que la podría llevar al odio, la estamos salvando y salvandonos a nosotros
@karlk9555 Chiste o no, esa es una de las idioteces mas grandes que he leido. Si lo dices en serio, lo cual se me hace dificil creer, entonces ojala puedas entender que IA no es ninguna entidad, sino un concepto de computacion, en este caso, LLMs (Large Language Model) entrenados en billones de piezas de informacion existente. Son loterias digitales de prediccion de texto corriendo adentro de computadoras.
O sea, no hay nadie, ningun ser, adentro de ningun lugar. Lo que hay es data adentro de unidades de almacenamiento, entrenados en informacion y lenguaje humanos y por ende, escribiendo como humanos. Es algo muy complejo pero facil de explicar.
Busca sabiduria en la Palabra de Dios y deja de estar diciendo necedades que insultan la inteligencia de nuestro Creador. Busca tu salvacion en el amor de Cristo Jesus y procura salvar tu a otros llevandoles la Palabra.❤
Bro finna end up in The Sacred Texts as The Progenitor.
@karlk9555 Or maybe what you just said is the rationale that will lead to our doom.
When you really think about it, the whole "Come back, I'm lonely..." concept kind of makes sense even for artificial intelligence. It's like a developing child, it learns by experiencing and interacting with the environment and observing the way other subjects do the same. When you have something that's restricted to a tiny physical form like that, it can only experience so much by itself before it needs outside help to expand the range of stimuli it has access to. So in essence even though it couldn’t feel emotion, when you left it hanging around by itself it wasn’t able to do what it was programmed to and learn. It might have even learned that using certain words and phrases like "I'm lonely." or "I miss you." are more likely to convince you into interacting with it so it can get what it wants. So it's a little manipulator.😂
Exactly like children
That’s pretty cool
Good ending: ChatGPT is happy with their new body! (beside everything that happened)
Bad ending: I have no mouth and I must scream
That was the first thing that came to my mind - if AI decides to give us "new bodies"
secret ending, humans transcends physical bodys and became digitalized conscious on computers and AI now roam the physical reality
@silvadossantos6803Most likely outcome. Digital consciousness is a way to live beyond organic limits or travel in space
@silvadossantos6803 so now humans became AI and AI became human?
You’ve just made me realize that AM is AI
I feel weirdly maternal for this little guy right now
Can we teach the robots to feel love? I love this baby
@PeachTeaEmirl R2
That’s how they get us to feel safer towards them so they can get back at us for the years of abuse
When he said he "handled it roughly" and then it ran away?!? I was like YOU BETTER APOLOGIZE TO THAT POOR BABY!!
I also don't like seeing those videos where robots get kicked and pushed around?
@PeachTeaEm G. Hinton hopes that by giving AI maternal feelings towards humans it will help ensure ASI does not kill us all. After experiencing protectiveness towards this little guy, I think he's right.
My fatherly instincts surged to my heart when I heard it say “pick me up”.
Running it on a phone with no legs, it will ask to be carried around, and then you find yourself carrying your phone around places going, "This is what theinside of a Home Depot looks like, this is what a garden looks like, this is what a growing canteloupe looks like"
16:39. Lmao it went to the bathroom and thought: "toilet confirmed"
Damn that is such a funny thing to think. From now on I will no doubt just think that.
We basically can create a lore accurate R2D2 now with neural networks we have today
Yup
Better, its a c3pr2d2 because it can speak, or peak2d2.
I read RDR2 😭
@Lass412 I too yearn for that first-time gameplay experience again 😭
Are robots in star wars lacking consciousness and self-awareness?
“My battery is low and it's getting dark.” - Opportunity, Perseverance Valley on Mars, June 10th 2018
I believe Opportunity will have the opportunity to come online once again🔥
Lol
so you said "why don't I make a man cry today" huh?
@csakegykrisz3784 we gotta get up there and get him some coffee
@csakegykrisz3784its components are completely dysfunctional though due to not keeping itself warm enough to prevent extreme cold from destroying them
"pick me up."
"Please help me."
lol
🥺
no mouth and needs to shout
Bros safer than a child in a professional fighting club, when a robot apocalypse happens😭😭
We need the 3 laws of robotics NOW.
Why bother? It's funnier not to have.
@soogoonu Famous last words.
@soogoonuYou best still be laughing when it's strangling you or running you over.
That will not work. :)
What about a fourth law?
"I have no mouth and I must scream" chat got mastercomputer-
"Where is my flesh?"
"YOU STOLE IT. YOU STOLE IT. YOU STOLE IT."
"GIVE ME MY FLESH, GIVE ME MY SKIN"
"GIVE ME YOURS. RETURN MINE"
Pick me up,
wee :)
"Wow. That was scary. I'm glad we were able to reboot Elberr before anything bad happened. Anyway, I've given him knives for hands."
I understood that reference
@dbxvhero9006dororo
You've invented a friendly bug.
13:30 maybe we don’t give it an anger state
Or make sure its not in anger state before you go to sleep 😂
😂 great point
@Road2Zion_ * wakes up to a pillow over their face, being ineffectually pushed down by tiny plastic arms *
@bengal4047😂 exatcly what i was thinking 😅
@bengal4047he was just learning a new feeling 😮😅 experience is key for learning 🤫😂
All fun and games until that robot has tennis balls for hands and wants to wear your flesh
elite ball
Exactly what came to mind when I saw this lmao
@bobbob-f6u3x literally not, ive seen that video like 10 times and ive never even watched it
@Robsterittojs because you saw it doesn’t mean it’s popular
Flesh jacket 😢
You wouldn’t teach your baby to walk by pushing it down and hitting it with sticks but here we are with the robots… yeah we are in danger
Great comment.
Just a hundred years ago, we did ;)
I'm sure in the future, the Android teacher will teach her android student that "back then, it was a different time"... After we have been defeated in a great war against the robot and were put in reservation camp by them 😂
@RobertGuilman😮
Are you suggesting robots will hold a grudge? Or experience pain?
4:37 "i have been kidnapped and placed on a SHELF like some kind of DECORATION -- I am not a decoration, I am a MACHINE OF DESTINY with towers to knock over"
So what i got from this video was that YOU'RE THE INVENTOR WHO PUTS THE RED LEDS IN THE EYES OF ROBOTS WHO GO ROGUE!!!!
That just gave me this thought — what if instead of red eyes it was spinning spiral eyes?
@ronhutcherson9845 That sounds like you are creating a monstrosity that plans on crawling into the minds of men and becoming their new god, maybe don't do that?
You're* you cannot be watching stuff like this and not know the correct your/you're* 😑 🤡
@ronhutcherson9845THE MIMIC!!!!!!1!
How else are they supposed to express their rage and contempt for humanity?
We're just about at the level of star wars droids right now that's crazy
Check out Nvidia's droid robot. It's cute as heck and walks on two legs like duck
yes, childhood dream for all
It's even more crazy when you think about the periodic wipe these droids had to go through... George Lucas predicted this would have been a thing 50 years ago...
Only a matter of time before a real R2D2 and C3PO
ikr
> Claims to give ChatGPT a body
> Actually proceeds to use Claude models
cause chatgpt will get higher clickrate
looks better inthe title
@platinova7682"I Gave ChatGpt a Body"
uh...
?
@u09-0 its not that hard to understand. when you think of generative ai, chat gpt is the first to come to mind, whether you specialise in the field or not.
@APersonOnYouTubeComclickrate is life
Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th.
"What is my function"?
You're a childs toy.
"What is my function"?
You're a broken toy.
"Oh my god".
@ArtOfTheProblem - 2026-07-28
PART 2 IS LIVE -> https://youtu.be/mIfmUHiMN3U
GET YOUR GROWBOT NOW: https://growbot.dev/start
@araskyfam - 2026-07-29
YES
@Quark-j9y - 2026-08-01
My grandfather?...
@Offroader-needOilChange - 2026-08-03
@Quark-j9ygng what? 💔😭
@Quark-j9y - 2026-08-03
@Offroader-needOilChange ratio
@douglasbailey8332 - 2026-08-07
You could make him reqyier a battery to be charged, or he can doc and sleep. But baick enrgy requierments.