AGI and General Purpose robots are both so far off in the future they should be considered science fiction at this point. The "Woz Standard" - a robot is dropped in front of a random house and proceeds without any assistance to brew a cup of coffee - is hard to imagine being met before 2040, if not even later.
I don't see a future where we have AGI but don't have affordable full fledged household robots costing like a car or less. Where are already at the point where you pay more for the programming than the robot itself.
Totally agree, with all this attention to "smart devices" in recent years I wonder where my consumer-sized flying de-duster mini-drone or something like that is? Sure the floor's sorted even with a 100%-non-smart robo-vac (and thusly, a flyer could just wipe or blow the dust down to the ground instead of any complicated gathering acrobatics), but the ground's just approx. half of dust-prone surface area..
I think the problem is largely determining “dustiness” of a given space, and cleaning it appropriately. Humans are good at arbitrary judgements like “this is dusty”.
It suffers the same kinds of problems as robotic pooper-scoopers, and even self-driving cars.
Would you solve with compressed air or a motorized feather duster?
> I think the problem is largely determining “dustiness” of a given space, and cleaning it appropriately.
Not needed. Like a robo-vac running frequently: they don't pick up _every_ single grain of dust perfectly during one given run. You just run them often enough they keep the floor "undusty enough". Or trimming beard / head at x mm every y days, not every hair is a perfect x mm at all times but the repetition / constancy makes it close enough.
> Would you solve with compressed air or a motorized feather duster?
Intuitively, probably the latter?.. But engineers working on such a thing would probably be best off prototyping and validating in both directions and with endless parameterizations =)
> Cleaning my bathroom seems like a better benchmark.
Unclogging pipes full of toilet paper, pee and shit (I have to do that once in a, thankfully, rare while) is mine. The robots must be able to go in the garden, find the manholes, verify where the pee and shit are clogged, and fix it.
When do we have that?
P.S: every time I couldn't fix it myself, I called a company specialized in that sort of thing. Interestingly I never ever saw a woman show up. It was always men. Just as the new automatic registering of 18/26 y/o people for military only concerns men. It's interesting how the sex equality ain't respected in these cases.
> Just as the new automatic registering of 18/26 y/o people for military only concerns men.
I think the people who want to protect the draft have a vested interest in not introducing equality here. Namely, their constituents have a particular mental model of how the world should be. They want to maintain that illusion.
Try 2400. Our current breed of capitalism is always only aiming to pick the lowest-hanging fruit and milk it to death and then beyond. Our current economics do not reward long-running projects with a huge payout in some 10-50 years in the future so I am pretty sure we'll never see general AI in this current phase of the civilization.
