For factories and closed environments, stuff is getting good fast, but for the rest of the "real world", no robot or AI is practical without human supervision. I automate physical things for a living and have thus become convinced.
The first thing that robot will do is start a dryer that a toddler climbed into because it isn't that aware of the world around it.
And that will be the end of general purpose domestic robots.
That or knocking over candles or fucking up something else simultaneously trivial and terribly dangerous in context.
I dream the same dream of a general purpose machine, but I think it may never be possible, and if it is we're a long way out.
I recall reading many comments on HN confidently predicting that the moment a self-driving car caused an accident that killed someone, that would be the end of self-driving cars. But while they have caused accidents, and there has been resulting lawsuits and investigations by regulators, it hasn't put an end to them. And with the incoming US administration, I'm expecting far less legal and regulatory barriers to greater use of robots and automation.
Dying in a domestic accident like a house fire is as "normal" as dying in a car accident. Robots are a novel element in both, so I don't see why one would be more readily accepted than the other.
The domestic accident is in the home, a far less acceptable place to have a threat.
Furthermore, the threat/cause of the accident is presumably being visualized as a human shaped live-in android a la Bicentennial Man. A human shaped threat can feel a lot more viscerally unacceptable, at least in my experience.
House fire deaths are at least an order of magnitude less common than traffic deaths and houses are the most valuable asset that many people will ever own. They’re certainly similar but I think different enough that people would have very different reactions to robot-caused destruction.
To be fair, many many people die in car accidents every day. Yes, self driving car crashes are still newsworthy but you are up against a baseline that’s pretty bad.
On the other hand, virtually no one dies from laundry, that I’m aware of. So the reaction to a single accident might be quite different.
How about at first if we put camera on it and then someone from overseas checks around before performoning the task? for cheap but it can make it secure.
Sci-fi authors were worried about rebellions of enslaved robots, while the industry figures, why risk jumping into the unknown, when we can fake a smart computer with overseas labor and an Internet connection, and wage slavery we know how to handle...
Anyway, if we're going to fake smart robots this way, why not just honestly call it what it is? Remote household staff. Might as well give them better sensors and actuators, but I guess this is giving humans too much agency and risk; what if the operator decides to hurt the "robot" owners or something? The vendor would not have that. Cannot have that. Humans are too messy to deal with.
Or is this the short-term future of all automation? I look at my robotic vacuum cleaner now, occasionally pausing for a second or two while it figures out where to go, and I wonder - maybe in those moments, it's using some Protein Intelligence Chip to query a bunch of random humans somewhere?
Because you can just have actual local people do it right there and then? The point of a robot is to not interact with other people, presumably they will be much more expensive than having someone come over for a few hours a week to clean - the whole appeal is there's no other human involved to coordinate or be nice to.
I agree. So far I haven't seen production-ready robots doing even relatively simple agricultural tasks, such as picking tomatoes in a greenhouse and taking care of the plants. It's all done by cheap foreign labour. If that's too hard to automate, I'm not yet holding my breath for general purpose household robots either.
Admittedly the videos in this article do seem promising though, would love to see how this tech would perform in a greenhouse.
> So far I haven't seen production-ready robots doing even relatively simple agricultural tasks, such as picking tomatoes in a greenhouse and taking care of the plants. It's all done by cheap foreign labour.
While they aren't widespread, there are production robots being used in many types of agriculture. In fact, it was even trivial to find one working in tomato greenhouses: https://www.arugga.com/technology (this one is used to pollinate tomatoes instead of doing it by hand or using bees).
The first thing that robot will do is start a dryer that a toddler climbed into because it isn't that aware of the world around it.
And that will be the end of general purpose domestic robots.
That or knocking over candles or fucking up something else simultaneously trivial and terribly dangerous in context.
I dream the same dream of a general purpose machine, but I think it may never be possible, and if it is we're a long way out.