It'll be neat to walk through some weirdo mechanics shop that's full of robots in different states of disassembly that have been repurposed to help with whatever mad scientist hacker schemes that they have in mind.
And it will have a Keep Warm option for monthly subscribers.
Dont know how to make toast? Too lazy to clean your own sheets? Everyone wanting one of these robots should have to do a few weeks of army basic training before earning the right to be this lazy. (Actuallty, iirc, we didnt wash our own sheets. But we did make our own toast!)
Once they're able to cook, they'll be in every middle-class household on earth.
A humanoid robot would demand continuous maintenance, especially after planned obsolescence kicks in. No robot has ever worked under dirt conditions.
(I think the legs are stupid because they give your robot the chance to fall over and are not relevant for most environments).
I’ve now moved to a single floor. Problem solved!
Still, I expect it won't matter - by the time we have reasonably priced robots that can reliably do all housework, that's like 90% of jobs eliminated from society and probably society will collapse.
I don't care if it is humanoid or not, but given that our house is built for humans to interact with it seems reasonable that it should fit into that space.
Now the question is is it riskier to have basically a stranger with strong arms in my house near my kids, or a robot with strong arms in my house near my kids?
I feel like a robot has the technical capacity to see behind it and stop (I have many times for example been using the vacuum and moving my arm forwards and backwards and whacked a kid in the face with my elbow on the backswing because they've walked up behind me and I've not known, but a robot with literal eyes and radar in the back of its head would spot that situation and freeze). Similar to self-driving cars: they have lots more eyes than a human has, and can be looking everywhere at once etc.
But do we trust the programming? Do we trust the human cleaning my toilet's "programming" (thoughts, emotions, motives etc)?
There are plenty of manufacturing tasks that are still done by humans because it's too much hassle to make a dedicated robot to do it. Even on high volume car manufacturing it's very common to have human steps.
Sorting is just where they've got to so far; not the final destination.
The fact is we live in a world built for humans. I have a robot vacuum and for it to be effective I had to setup my home in a certain way, and even then it is not fully effective.
People pay for cleaners to come into their home all the time, it shouldn't be hard to think why a humanoid robot would (theoretically, if it worked well) be far better than a purpose built machine in the home. But also in many cases working with those machines.
I think its easier to build a dish washer that can stack plates from first principles than humanoid robots. The cultural shift is the harder part.
I guess a warehouse can be designed in a way that works well for a non-humanoid robot, but an environment designed for people in the first place (like a home) fundamentally needs to be person-shaped.
Also like, loading and unloading the dishwasher is not that hard or time consuming.
For a me a robot to do the dishwasher would be the number 1 reason for me to buy one.
My dishwasher is basically going at least twice sometimes three times a day (household with small kids). If I "miss" a slot to get everything washed before the next meal time then two things happen:
- the unwashed things begin to build up so there are too many things to fit in the next round and its hard to catch up.
- the things to need to use for meal-Y were still dirty from meal-X so you cant use foo etc.
Its "not much effort" true - perhaps 10-15 mins to unload then reload, but you need to do it 3 or 4 or more times a day AND you need to be there to do it on time so that there is time for it to finish it's load before meal-X etc.
If you are exhausted and its already 11pm and you've got to do your 3rd go at the dishwasher for the day so dirty things from dinner are getting washed and things are put away and ready for breakfast in the morning etc its really annoying. Its the last thing you want to do before going to bed. Or its morning and you're trying to get everyone out the door to school/work and the like, and you need to get the dishes going so that they're clean and ready to unload at lunch time (so that you can get the dirty lunch dishes in at lunch time etc).... you can see how this builds up into quite a pain in the ass hamster wheel.
I would 110% buy a humanoid robot for the cost of a decent second-hand car (so lets say about GBP10-15K) that was able to reliably do three or four 1 hour shifts per day doing basic house-keeper duties autonomously. So aforementioned dishes, cleaning down the dinner table, wiping down the kitchen worktops/countertops, picking up toys and cushions and shoes etc, then it can just go fold itself back into a cupboard in the kitchen to recharge for its next shift. Doesn't have to cook or play the violin or anything, basically just pick up crap off the floor and do the dishes every few hours so I don't have to. Bonus points if it can do it while I am working and/or it can do it silently at night
A man can dream.
The first person who has their child injured by one of these things will have a hell of a lawsuit on their hands.
Also the customer will very likely be asked to sign damage waivers and whatnot as part of the sale/rental agreement.
edit: but if the robot could in addition also do dishes in the sink and not need a dishwasher at all, that'd also save up space in the kitchen for something else
If your definition is "it could, at some point, enable me to stop paying humans for their labor and pass along more of the value to major shareholders like myself", then yes, that's a reason to want humanoid robots.
If your definition of "good" is a little more broadly scoped than the above - which it should be if you don't have an MBA and a substance abuse problem - then you're correct.
The potential difference here is that it might eliminate all human labor which would likely force us into some new kind of economy. Hopefully something better than one where humans waste their lives on manual labor.
And I am virtually positive I know what the most popular application for them is going to become, the same way we've somehow decided to legalize gambling and drugs and make them available at a click to everyone everywhere
BTW are people going to be able to hack them to commit crimes? Protest for them?
But eventually everything is used for war to murder undesirables, we're only a decade away from the US or Israel etc. airdropping 1000 armed humanoid robots into a civilian space to hunt for "terrorists"
Currently they just bomb the buildings into the ground, killing everyone indiscriminately, so robots can't be any worse than that.
This is all mature stack, and the value is enormous and largely unrealised at this point - the systems they have for everything from training to implementation to edge inference basically present a complete capture of the ecosystem for robotics, autonomous vehicles, manufacturing, you name it - anything where you’re integrating input streams and acting on it, they’ve got covered, end to end.
I continue to hold a substantial chunk of Nvidia - because while hyperscaler spend may wane once the initial arms race subsides, they are uniquely positioned to pivot to making use of the output of hyperscaler and other GPU product.
It is Humanoid, that will change everything. While we are still someway off, if we had PC - > Internet > Smartphone > AI, what is after AI will be Humanoid.
We still have another 4-5 years to go on current AI, and then Humanoid will further carry AI forward. This is similar to how Smartphone made the whole internet population 5 - 10 times bigger, further increasing demand on internet infrastructure. If anything, Apple should work on this. Perhaps the only thing that will be bigger than iPhone.