Replies (50)
The Roomba enalogy isn't exactly fair. If you compare a roomba v.s. a hired maid, they aren't that much better than the other. In both cases you have do to 90% of the work by picking up and organizing before either of them are of any use.
Running the vacuum is one of the few household chores I excel at. Not to mention the fringe benefit of running it when the kids are too loud or to annoy the dog.
Robotics has to over on these aspects too.
Same idea over here
Seems reasonable in the realm of humanoid robots and some non-human ones like the Roomba. However many types of non-humanoid robots have proven quite useful in many settings. Many of them are rooted to one location. Others are used things like bomb disposal or as drones in warfare. Impressive progress has been made in extremely agile robots as well. I expect some of those to be used in emergency situations and yes unfortunately, in military applications.
I think, taking the roombas as an example to measure is logic. Especially cause more people understand it. To me it seems that we'll follow the one special task path for now. I don't think there will be the one robot for many tasks soon. But I'm looking forward to it and plan to do my Landdesigns considering the future influence of robots in the landscape. This will be a dramatic game changer in farming.
They're designed poorly. They aren't easy to clean when stuff gets stuck in them. They're super loud, and why tf is there a camera on it?
Well I have had the cynical opinion for most of my career that 80% of the employees in medium to large companies are there to avoid having them on welfare.
This brings up an important aspect of automation vs human labor: cost. In California we always paid a service to mow and blow the lawn, but in Sweden even well off people mostly do their own lawn care. Robot lawn mowers have really taken off in Sweden because labor costs are so high (mostly taxes tbh). I wonder if reducing imported illegal labor will not create more business for automation products. Even hiring a backhoe operator vs. team of day workers is a win for automation.
it's kinda sad that the most credulous people for this retarded software are otherwise so intelligent
you know why i don't like the AI? because the media says it's good
and i think the tech behind it is cool, i was an early adopter, my friends on IRC were running a markov chain bot fed by our IRC chat that often aped my text because i was the most prolific message writer
but it was gobbledygook, and the GPTs are still hallucinations but they don't sound as retarded as markov chains, they still read the same way
like, you colud give me 100 texts that were either written by humans or AI, and i bet i can beat 90% accuracy at picking out which is which
they are really obvious to me
I've had the opportunity to design novel robotics technologies and witness their first use cases in controlled settings (pre AI boom).
Robots might not be replacing carpenters in variable settings just yet, but they definitely are taking more and more market share in surgical settings where the workflow/steps are well-defined.
Now with AI all bets are off - we're going to see some insane stuff in the next few years.
Making complex thoughts simple is your skill
Never understood why anyone thought a vacuum would be better if connected to the internet especially sending pictures of your household and people in it upstream.
"I'm really excited to see how it's gonna change the vacuum game" 😂
This is the first time I've heard of Markov chains.
The robots I've seen on the market are just not impressive. They exist solely because the tech hub around Shenzhen brought the components down in price, so I'm happy we got some progress out of breaking tech out of the wests's bureaucratic stranglehold, but they really don't seem like an innovation.
And the AI hype is so obnoxious. They just regurgitate what humans wrote. If humans wrote wrong stuff, the AI regurgitates errors. And it seems like that's actually how it works - it adds in errors to the point where it looks unique, but that's just tricking people who don't pay attention to detail. If you do pay attention to detail, and correct it, it apologizes programmatically but refuses to violate the ruleset that caused the error.
Its junk. IMO, we should build systems that explicitly exclude AI and anything similar. How to do that... Well, you'd know better than i.
It’s rEvOlUtIoNarY, I swear! All investors are impressed 😅
I think its a boomer problem... Like most problems. Why they're OK with cameras being on everything is beyond me. Why my boomer relatives add hundreds of pictures to telegram groups that I don't look at __every week__ is beyond me.
younger generation seems more OK with letting it all hang out and blabbing about everything than older. I am a boomer and I don't do that stuff. I know many others that don't either and think it is nuts.
I like cleaning my house and vacuuming. While other people waste time at the gym I am cleaning my house. Outside I do things like cut back trees, power wash my deck, house, sidewalk and help my wife with her gardening.
I even sweep out front of my house, rake leaves and pick up trash around my house too. It's great!
haha, yeah, it would require some kind of gpt thing to recognise gpt things
wasn't it you who posted something, a quote from someone saying that you don't win buy fighting an enemy but by innovating around him? or something to that effect... better to build a new system than to try and destroy an old system
was that you?
Ehhh. Maybe? But that sounds like a typical bitcoiner thing to say, so could've been anyone
And might I mention that all the cars in the car park at the gym seem to be in the bays closest to the door.
I guess its a selection bias then. The boomers in my tribe seem to be reversed with the younger people.
I maintain the view that we will see a robot CEO before we see a robot plumber.
sheeit man i would have said the same thing 20 years ago... i live by that it's not unique to bitcoin it's cypherpunk ethic
My view is that this bull market has
@Lyn Alden so bored that vacuums are the topic du jour.
Lyn Alden
One of the crazy things about AI and robotics is that in the year 2025, most people still don't use Roombas or other robotic vacuum cleaners.
They're useful in many contexts, but they're not clearly better across most metrics than a human with a vacuum cleaner yet. They've been out for a very long time, gradually improving. And that's one *very specific* task with pretty clear visualization requirements and floor mobility requirements and pretty low safety thresholds with high repetition levels, and yet that market isn't dominated by robotics yet.
That's an example of why I continue to view white collar computer-work AI as being *way* ahead of in-the-field blue collar robotic AI in terms of competing with human jobs.
The moment where it's a joke to buy a human-powered vacuum instead of a robot vacuum, rather than a debatable trade-off, is kind of the canary in the coal mine moment for consumer robotics. We can't even nail that yet, but once we do, it's kind of a floodgate moment, considering how long that task has been in the works for, and it will probably quickly expand to other areas following that moment.
That's kind of my basic test for robot hype. Yes, they're getting better and better. Yes, they do backflips now. Yes, it's a big deal. But in-the-field blue collar skilled work is a really high bar, and we haven't fully cleared the "vacuum carpeted areas of the same house floor area over and over" stage of that yet.
Everything is kind of hype until that stage is fully breached. Then it's off to the races.
What's your view of that heuristic?
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I’ll take a dumb as shit R2-D2 that keeps banging against the wall over clean floors under SkyNet.
That I'll vacuum my floor for many years still. Robot will be to expensive and ineffective compared to my.. also, they are not humbling and neither helpin stacking sats.
Maybe a vacuum that will mine also.. but that's like 50+ years from now too.
The reality is robots are already doing tons of blue color work…they are just mostly connected by wire still and not able to “think” (calculate probabilities).
The bigger conversation is one of optimizing before maximizing.
This is where the humans need to uplevel.
Too many people view innovation and processes (in general) in the lens of “how fast can I scale XYZ”.
When, before we discuss maximization, we need to optimize.
Optimization looks at multiple factors to find the path of least resistance, which may not always be the fastest!
The path of least resistance to what? Closer.
Closer over more!
And that’s the Achilles Heel of a lot of people regardless of whether it’s blue collar or white collar.
People chasing more for the sake of more in their business, life, and impact; instead of moving closer.
That’s the best heuristic I’ve seen. One could argue it’s a small sample size or anecdotal, but roombas reached a fairly main stream recognition an awful long time ago. I’m definitely going to have to borrow this the next time someone tells me my construction company is going to be screwed within 10 years because the robots are coming. Once the robots can vacuum floors without accidentally smearing dog shit all over, I’ll take the threat a touch more seriously. Until then, I’ll continue to utilize new tech to my make my company more competitive.
Vacuums might actually be the last thing
The variety of things my kids can spill on the floor exceeds the computational capabilities of all silicon in the known universe.
Few
Cypherpunk ethic best ethic
I wish I had known about them before bitcoin.
Robot vacuums suck.
This is my yardstick for self-driving cars, if we cannot nail a simple task like vacuuming, or mowing grass.
Yep. Roomba is just using the Frisbees with wheels to buy up all the real push vacuums... Then, in a partnership with Boston Dynamics or Honda, either a robotic dog or robotic humanoid will come with an included push vacuum cleaner to vacuum your house the old fashion way... and, of course, spy on you. 😁
True, but it seems we are on the verge of making that breakthrough. Maybe that's the same kind of delusional thinking we've had for the past 80 years, that it's just around the corner, but it feels closer than ever before.
видимо еще не время))) так как это просто ... %
Yes.
I looked into a vacuum robot and quickly realized it takes more effort to constantly clean the floor of all the stuff lying around so it can operate efficiently than to just quickly vacuum myself.
And I can quickly move chairs around from under a table and such which the robot never will.
In short, Moravec’s paradox ….
I'm not surprised things like roombas aren't all that widely used. Vaccuuming isn't particularly dangerous work, and roombas aren't all that cheap. Things like, servicing nuclear meltdown sites and other hazardous locations, however, is a great use of robots that does seem to be fairly widely used. Also, the use of drones. Though, I suppose it depends whether you consider remote controlled machines in the same space as autonomous machines, because drones and things like Vicarious Surgical's "robot" might not be fair to compare to fully autonomous systems that act purely algorithmically.
Maybe at some point we'll look to robots to do things that aren't so difficult for humans to do, in the same way we use dishwashers now, but I think most things we recognize as robots just don't have the best cost:benefit ratio, especially when we consider the inertia of having a routine that already has us doing things manually.
Amazon's roboticization of its warehouses may be something I expect to see sooner than an at home Rosie from the Jetsons for this reason. While the work may not be that hard in individual increments, expecting humans to spend 8-10 hours on their feet with insufficient bathroom breaks is just begging for burnout. Robots do not suffer these limitations.
My local grocery has a roaming bot tondetext spills and other things. It moves slow and gets stuck.
Also, I imagine this rypenof innovation will accelerate in a hard money standard because the tinkerers of the world will have more time and resources to tinker.
I don't think we get a commercial blue collar robot because someone pays for it's R&D. I think we'll get it from someone's garage.
This is an interesting coincidence. This morning in the shower I was thinking that after so many year vacuum robots still don't do a basic thing: remove the dust from the skirting board. And I also planned on my mind a 3D printed accessory for that.
Yes I know, I should spend better my creative energies.
I want to keep cooking for my children, watering my plants, having barbecues, and sweeping my house. Arguing with my wife about who cleans the dishes. That’s life. Everything else, I’m sorry, takes us away from life.
We have a robot vacuum cleaner and we use the crap out of it. It is marginally better than manually vacuuming because you still have to do a bunch of work: clean the filter, move all the furniture off the floor, and put obstacles in the way to block off an area. And then you have to leave those areas for an hour or two and move everything back afterwards.
It's very disruptive and only cleans about half the floors. It saves time but I wouldn't say it's less work. Last year we bought a really nice manual vacuum cleaner for the rest of the floors.
I don't give a shit about backflips. Show me a robot under $1000 that can clean it's own filter and move furniture without breaking it. That would move the needle.
I agree with the conclusion that robots being able to accomplish generalized high-skill trades work is a long way off, however, I think the heuristic doesn't work. There Roomba is like a narrow intelligence, say Deep Blue playing chess. Deep Blue beat Kasparov in 1996. Going on 20 years and still no AGI. So, I don't think that if someone solves for a great Roomba that signals tradesmen robots are around the corner.
I think about this a lot. I am an electrician, mostly working on residences. I would love to be able to hire an assistant bot. But the amount of adaptation that is needed for the specific puzzle of each job seems tough to solve for on the cognitive side. Even more so, the physical side, moving through crawl spaces and crawling over attic rafters, seems very far away for robots. Maybe bots that work in commercial settings building conduit in warehouses that are wide open, but homes have some tight spaces that wires run through!
Honestly, I don't think it'll make sense until it's reliably self cleaning or until you've got another general robot around that can clean it. The maintenance requirements of these machines is a major hindrance to their adoption.
Im just going to build a house that has airhockey substrate floors that self vuccuum down and vibrate to agitate dust down and out.
It is certainly more likely that boomers you find on here are likely to be more privacy aware and more tech savvy. But many I know that are not techie simply grew up in a time where far more privacy was just the norm before much of the tech that can be used for such deep surveillance and profiling existed. They often have a hard time believing it when I share and outline of the many ways those assumtions are not at all the default case today. Many get overwhelmed and retreat to helplessness or "I have nothing to hide". That is not limited to older people of course.
Keep teaching, they need to hear it
call me old fashion but my broom and dust pan work just fine. and if it breaks I'll just fix it in 2 minutes. 🫠
