alt Hacker NewsHuman "sense of balance"? Human vestibular system is a sad joke if you compare it against any off the shelf smartphone IMU. Proprioreception is a joke when you compare it against current sensing in every motor and absolute encoders in every joint. Human hearing loses to a half-decent microphone array.
Even human vision, the one perception channel evolution has put an awful lot of weight on, is beat pretty resoundingly by the kinds of camera units that ship in smartphones nowadays.
The two senses robots don't have an edge in are: touch and smell. But I'd struggle to make the case that smell is critical at all, and touch? Hard to beat it directly. In practice, however, it's already partially compensated for.
Sure, a robot with a basic UMI-style gripper doesn't get rich tactile feedback - only a few channels of feedback from arm joints and finger motors. But you know what those actuated UMI gripper get that humans don't? Wrist cams. A robot can see the object it's manipulating - right near the point where the manipulation happens. That matters a lot for precise manipulation tasks.
Humans don't have wrist cameras not because they're undesirable, but because evolution sucks at wiring. We don't suck at wiring.
The fact that humans can pull off general purpose manipulation tasks with the bodies they have, and the best of robots can't? A testament to how much of a gap is there between modern robotics AIs and the evolved wiring of human brains. The intelligence edge is what makes the human body, flawed as it is, work as well as it does. Everything in the human body is half-assed and then salvaged by the brain in post. But that gap is closing as AI tech advances.
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Humans have better dynamic range for hearing and vision compared to any sensor I'm familiar with.
Human vision is also extraordinary sensitive, with some people being able to detect individual photons with their rod cells.
Animal olfactory sensing is more or less just detecting the presence of certain molecules in the air.
We already have devices that do that better than humans and even ones that detect things we can’t smell (carbon monoxide, for example).
Though I suppose you could say that “smelling” is the result of the synthesis of the accumulated signals from the olfactory system in the brain, and more than merely sensing their presence.
You're overstating how well wrist cams can compensate for a lack of touch. It's really hard to get the instant estimate of weight and rigidity we humans get when picking up an object with a wrist camera, especially for rigid end effectors. They can guide a grasp in ways that would require touch for a human and help detect that you've dropped an object but don't compensate for many aspects of grasp that prevent the drop in the first place.