Comment by WarmWash
5 hours ago
I think the biggest snag with home robots will be that if it is strong enough to install your air conditioners, it's strong enough to break your ribs.
So the robots will need to be weak, so even weak people can overpower it. But then it loses a ton of it's most promising abilities.
I don't mean this like a "rogue robot" situation. I mean it like the robot gets confused, or someone sees a walking $10M lawsuit in their home.
I think that people will argue around that. Self-driving cars are already strong enough to kill people and even if you only made the robot strong enough to lift 15 pounds of weight, that's probably strong enough to slit someone's throat with a kitchen knife while they sleep... There probably isn't a level of strength that's weak enough to be completely safe but strong enough to be useful.
So at some point you have to trust that the tech is safe. Both in terms of "robot won't go off the rails", but also in terms of hostile actors can't remotely take over your robot while you sleep.
In terms of sleeping, personally, I would like for the law to mandate that robots must have a physical off switch, in a very visible location, that physically disconnects power. The switch should be illuminated while in the ON position. What makes me a bit pessimistic there is that we don't even have laws to mandate webcam indicator lights (e.g. a very tiny red LED) must be ON in hardware.