>There's still no AI that can fold laundry

We're actually really close to general robot agents that operate in your home. Check out googleAI's saycan & RT-1 systems

https://ai.googleblog.com/2022/12/rt-1-robotics-transformer-....

Also: https://kottke.org/10/04/the-robot-who-considers-towels

That's gonna be great until someone hacks it and has it stab me to death in my sleep.

More worried about government backdoors.

Much like my fears about bluetooth connected cars being hacked to crash on the highway, it turns out that - by and large - nobody wants to kill me (or at least, not badly enough to do anything about it).

Ah yes the nobody wants to do it to me excuse. Until you piss off the wrong person and you suddenly crash into the railing and die in an 'accident'.

In a more Orwellian world. It can be used to assassinate dissidents or individuals who speak out against authoritarian regimes. It's just a tool in a box, but it's one that's simple, easy to use, and leaves no evidence.

Oh, Ada Palmer’s ‘Too Like The Lightning’ has this as an element.

> leaves no evidence

For a “car crash” I agree.

But if my laundry folding robot stabs me to death in my sleep, I hope that at the very least it raises some eyebrows :^)

I always felt like the HL7 interface is a huge vector for this. Change someone's medicine allergies, blood type, etc.

But that’s true with or without the AI. Anyone could decide they want to kill you. Most of the time we rely on “not everyone wanting to kill everyone else” to get by.

The thing about black swan events is they never seem likely to happen until they do.

Truly the most evil hacker is the one that leaves you to live out your life until old age and decrepitude catch up with you.

They can't get bluetooth to connect.

just unplug the robot before you go to sleep, an easy solution

cars are great until someone deliberately runs into me

No way would I bring some company's robot into my house, especially not one that has anything to do with Google. Maybe it does your laundry and dishes for you, but you can bet that it'll be recording everything that it sees and hears and sending all that data back to the people it actually works for so that they can use that data against you or sell it to someone else who will.

Unless I can find a model I can verify has zero networking ability and isn't gathering and storing data for somebody else, no thanks!

I just want some AI that can cut my hair, exactly the way I want it.

Or cook a meal.

Much more useful than driving a car, because in a car you're mostly idling anyway so you might as well drive.

But if the car drove itself, we could cook meals in the car...

Unfortunately, doing stuff while being subjected to random accelerating forces makes many people feel nauseous, and physical tasks become more difficult.

why? in what world are you so busy that you dont have "enough time" to go to your home, take time to unwind, clean up after a day's work, cook a meal for you and your family and enjoy a family dinner/lunch/breakfast?"

replace cooking with laundry/cleaning/bathing/repairing/small fixes around the home?

is life REALLY SO FAST AND TOUGH that you have to do multi-tasking basic human social/personal proceses?

These are much more robotics problems. The “AI” is probably sufficient as long as it has the correct sensors and dexterity

If this were true, restaurants would already have these robots.

Also, I'm talking about real cooking, not some mechanized approximation that produces meals akin to fast food, or the microwave stuff you can already buy in the supermarket.

As a robotics engineer I don’t think it’s true that “if it were a robotics problem it would be solved.” Robotics for non industrial uses are basically in their infancy.

Also I am of the opinion that the best way to make a meal is a purpose built series of small machines to perform different tasks. So you have an onion preparation machine which peels and cores the onions and maybe also performs onion-specific slicing. You have a vegetable washing machine to wash potatoes and carrots and zucchini etc. You have various cutting chambers that feed in to various cooking systems.

Doing all of this is possible today and I don’t believe it has to be limited to the low quality food you mention. But developing all of these specialized systems is extremely expensive. I actually really hope to work on all of this stuff as a massive open source project once my open source farming robot project gains enough traction. I literally obsess over this problem.

Otherwise you could imagine something like a pair of robot arms and a vision system on a track in a normal kitchen, but again robotics really hasn’t been able to produce functional or affordable human like hands, and the software to handle them is also in its infancy (that part is an “AI problem” though.

Anyway robotics is extremely expensive and low minimum wages means it’s cheaper to abuse migrant workers in the kitchen than pay for all the R&D necessary to really solve these problems.

But my hope is that an open source project could get the ball rolling and then the costs required to finish everything could be spread among many different groups once the basic concept is proven.

Interesting . I agree that arms and hands are probably not necessary and that custom tools are better suited. One think that came to mind when you mentioned many chambers and cooking systems; these must be easy to clean to avoid food waste getting stuck.

Oh absolutely. My view is that integrated automatic cleaning must be part of the system design. Such a system would be a huge pain if it was not self cleaning.

> Also I am of the opinion that the best way to make a meal is a purpose built series of small machines to perform different tasks.

But these machines take a lot of space and require cleaning. Much better to have a robot with two hands that can perform more generalized tasks.

They can stack vertically such that they take up less space than a commercial kitchen, which cannot stack vertically (at least not on the scale of multiple separate operations in one vertical meter) and requires space for humans to move around. An onion prepping machine might be 30cm x 30cm x 100cm. You could fit 11 mechanisms of that size in one cubic meter.

My view on cleaning is that the systems must be automatically self cleaning. Otherwise yes cleaning would be a pain.

What for, you can use AI to make it look like it on any picture, no scissors required!

Oh, not sure I want an AI that can bring sharp tools near my soft flesh. Long-term future, please, don't need it yet that badly.

I worked on this for a year :)

It was called buzz robotics and had a couple posts make it to the front page here. Even got a YC interview.

I haven’t gotten around to writing a post mortem but I’ll just say - it’s a very hard problem to solve given the dexterity and safety requirements.

Maybe one day.

One of my first hardware|software projects was a hair cutting robot, that was the early 1980s.

[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=V1l3QgAACAAJ

https://www.elizabethsbookshop.com.au/shop/fauna-and-flora/a...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZAh2zv7TMM

> saw a great toot yesterday

> toot

This is why I will never use Mastodon. It feels degenerate. All this talk of tooting has my disgust reflex permanently triggered.

From what I see, most people are just calling it "posting" now. So, time to identify another reason not to use Mastodon!

To avoid the smugness of Mastodon advocates

Well. You will be missed

Tootles!

That’s because folding laundry is way, way harder.

I think it’ll be a long time before automated laundry folding is commercially viable at household scale (factory scale is another matter) simply because as other, easier, more lucrative activities are automated, the cost of “unskilled” human labour will be driven down faster than the cost of the equipment required to fold laundry.

One interesting idea I saw somewhere on the internet was that we might see a return to more mechanical/hands on professions while low level white collar jobs get destroyed in the same way old factory jobs did.

You put AI to create some shit for you. Sell it. Hire a cleaner, lawnmover whatever. Or better yet, make AI to sell that shit and let it hire those people.

We’re not very far from some Satoshi putting it all together.

If you can just tell the AI to create something, so can all of your customers, and they know exactly what they want from it.

I was impressed with FoldiMate's approach here and really liked the CEO, Gal, but unfortunately the founder foundered and FoldiMate folded, mate.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FoldiMate

From Wikipedia:

FoldiMate was a California-based company developing a robotic laundry-folding machine founded in 2012. Their clothes folding machine was aimed to enter the market by the end of 2019. *In 2021, the company folded*.

Emphasis is mine. Great Pun!

Yes, but I want an AI that tells me what kind of laundry folding machine to build, or better yet designs it for me. That's where we're going.

that's what I'm talking about. I think AI would approach "laundry folding" in ways we never thought of, using simpler machinery than would have been expected in novel ways. this is pretty specific to something very geometric / topological like folding things.

I'd be happy just to have the moving of wet clothes from the washing machine into the tumbler automated. But not even this science can provide. :(

I've had a combo washer dryer ever since moving out of my parents place lol

You gotta also buy the things science provides!

I prefer the Unix approach - single function appliances that do a single job well.

Aye sorta like how we all use a separate PC per app :P

Each to their own, I had plenty of folks saying they're bad and break often but I've never had one do a bad job assuming it's being maintained - cleaning lint traps, not overloading it, descaling the system now and then (hard water area)

So damn convenient to chuck a load in before bed and come back in the morning to nicely clean and still toasty warm clothes ready to go

I want AI that separates the trash into plastics, metal, etc. so we do not have to do it (or for the people that cannot be bothered to do it).

In a big city in the Netherlands we stopped collecting plastic, metals separately. This because there are better machines now that reach higher accuracy levels.

There’s not much profit in hardware. Mechanics and robotics are expensive.