Comment by ziofill

2 days ago

There’s nothing I want more than a robot that does house chores. That’s the real 10x multiplier for humans to do what they do best.

I'd pay $2k for something that folds my laundry reliably. It doesn't need arms or legs, just like my dishwasher doesn't need arms or legs. It just needs to let me dump in a load of clean laundry and output stacks of neatly folded or hung clothing.

It's called a "house cleaner" and they only cost ~$150 (area and all varies) bi-weekly. I'll shit a brick (and then have the robot clean it up) if a robot is ever cheaper than ~$4000/yr.

Hopefully in the next decade we’ll get there.

Vision+language multimodal models seem to solve some of the hard problems.

Yeah, except that future doesn't need us. By us I mean those of us who don't have $1B to their name.

Do you really expect the oligarchs to put up with the environmental degradation of 8 billion humans when they can have a pristine planet to themselves with their whims served by the AI and these robots?

I fully anticipate that when these things mature enough we'll see an "accidental" pandemic sweep and kill off 90% of us. At least 90%.

  • I'd expect Musk and Bezos to know about von Neumann replicators; factories that make these robots staffed entirely by these robots all the way to the mines digging minerals out of the ground… rapid and literally exponential growth until they hit whatever the limiting factor is, but they've both got big orbial rockets now, so the limit isn't necessarily 6e24 kg.

  • Oligarchs would use the robots to kill people instead of a pandemic. A virus carries too much risk of affecting the original creators.

    Fortunately, robotic capability like that basically becomes the equivalent of Nuclear MAD.

    Unfortunately, the virus approach probably looks fantastic to extremist bad actors with visions of an afterlife.

To me this is such a weird wish. Why would you not want to care for your home and the people living there? Why would you want to have a slave taking these activities from you?

I'd rather have less waged labour and more time for chores with the family.