No way to know it's everything the OP posted without comparing to a logged in view and no replies from others. Information on there is commonly shared via a thread of posts rather than a single one.
Maybe - $20k is a bit steep, but I would certainly pay a large premium to have my housework done without needing to employ a stranger to actually work in my home.
I'd rather have specialized robots that do a particular thing well, rather than some crappy humanoid robot that can't do anything well. Being humanoid shaped just limits them to being worse than humans at human things.
I already have a dish washing robot. And one that washes and dries my clothes. Can you imagine if you had a humanoid robot that was in your laundry room scrubbing your clothes manually in a tub and then taking them out and hanging them up on clothes lines? That is what you get with humanoid robots.
Would you rather have a tiny vacuum that parks itself in the corner and disappears, or some 6 foot tall thing with arms and legs pushing your Hoover around all day?
That seems to me to be a limited vision. The existing, specialized robots (dish washer, vacuum, etc) would be controlling by a master AI, which would potentially be within or also coordinating the humanoid. The humanoid robot itself would actually help with things the others can't handle, such as loading the dishwasher or carrying the vacuum up/down the stairs. And waiting humans at a party/bar/dinner for example, instead of inventing even more specialized robots for each.
Folding, sorting, and putting away clothes is a time consuming daily task in a house with young kids, that cant be done by any robot that isn’t humanoid.
Clearing the table, scraping dirty plates, putting condiments back in the fridge, packing away uneaten food as left overs, rinsing the dishes, loading the dishwasher efficiently, then unloading the dishes and putting them all away in the arbitrary places the go, are all tasks to that cant be done by any robot that isn’t humanoid in nature in some way.
The amount of pen caps, dropped food, discarded clothes, school bags, shoes, partially assembled legos, couch cushions, books, and other random bulky items that end up on the floor of a house with young kids makes the idea of robotic floor cleaning being a solved problem laughable.
My assumption is that an Optimus home assistant will be an order of magnitude cheaper than manual labour, which means it will be accessible to people who can’t currently afford a cleaner/maid but whose lives would be improved by having help with the daily workload of life.
This brings up two thoughts, I wonder if the advent of robots will lead to more gender equality as women currently bear the a significantly higher percentage of the domestic work load.
Also, autonomous robots are going to make even harder to convince my kids to clean up after themselves :)
> "Folding, sorting, and putting away clothes is a time consuming daily task in a house with young kids, that cant be done by any robot that isn’t humanoid."
I don't understand what about that task needs it to be humanoid?
It obviously needs various abilities that humans have - being able to move around, being able to control multiple "limbs" to manipulate the clothes, etc. But why couldn't it look like R2-D2 rather than C-3PO? Why couldn't it be a flying drone that has 4 clothes-folding arms? Or... whatever non-humanoid design could be conceived that works best?
The only "need" for it being humanoid would be if the kids (or adults, or animals) found it more acceptable to be around.
The human world is generally designed for the human form. You don’t need four arms to do most tasks, but you often need two. You often need fingers to manipulate objects in specific ways. You can’t realistically fly while safely doing mundane tasks. You probably need legs to traverse areas. You generally need your hands at the height level of a typical adult.
The limitations of R2 are pretty obvious if you try to imagine it. there’s probably some optimizations that could be made but it’s a sensible start imo
You've described reasons that a humanoid is a good form factor for creating a general use robot, but still nowhere close to the claim I replied to that sorting/folding/putting away clothes "cant be done by any robot that isn’t humanoid".
But even your reasons for preferring a humanoid are all reasons why humans are better than current-technology non-humanoid robots, not unarguable facts that humans are the ultimate design. As a couple of examples:
> "You probably need legs to traverse areas."
Even if legs are definitely needed, the animal kingdom shows that human legs are far from the only choice. Why only two? Why not legs that are 90% of the height of the robot rather than human proportions? Why not legs with the equivalent of 20 knees rather than 1 knee, or legs that feature wheels that are sometimes used, or...
> "You can’t realistically fly while safely doing mundane tasks."
Not if you were to take any existing consumer drone and add robot arms to it, sure, but there's no scientific reason it can't be made with future improvements to technology. We already have drones that can automatically avoid bumping into things, and that can counter the effects of wind to stay in the same position, and we have drones that would be safe to walk into (ones with covered blades, where the only injury risk is it flying into you hard enough). There's no reason that a future version couldn't be just as stable hovering in the air while doing something as being on the ground - it just needs to extend its stabilisation algos so that it's not just countering the wind, but also pushing in whatever directions required to counteract forces caused by whatever its doing. And it also doesn't even have to be flying while doing the task, it can fly to the clothes, then unwind its leg (or legs) and stand there while doing its work, or...
Humanoid is obviously appealing for the simple fact that, if it's developed to the point that it has the same (or better) physical abilities as a human (including balance etc) then we know it can fit into anything humans do because we already do it, and because we've built a world around us for human-shaped people. But thinking there couldn't be alternative form factors that are just as good if not better is just lacking imagination on the subject of what technology will be able to do in the coming years - especially when not talking about a general purpose "can do anything a human can do" robot but about specific tasks (such as the clothes sorting & folding that we're discussing).
That claim is pointless. People are not going to purchase a dedicated clothes folding robot. The point of a humanoid robot is general problem solving. That is the whole value prop.
Obviously you can design better forms for specific tasks, but people don’t want some zany futuristic world populated by dozens of task specific robots.
Nobody was arguing there should or shouldn't be a robot that only folds clothes. The subject you replied to be about was whether or not a robot for the purpose HAS to be humanoid to work or not. You've just been arguing different points.
But even for general purpose robots, my points above stand that future tech will mean plenty of non-humanoid shaped robots could be just as effective as general purpose robots as humanoid ones.
You would rather employ 1k strangers - who are on the other side of an Internet connection - but still control a physical robot in your home that can observe and carry out any action that a human could do?
In what way is it actually better?
The robot can’t take anything out of the home or bring anything into it. The operators are not locals with any connection to the local community. They don’t need a key to my property.
You could geofence the robot with indoor positioning so that even if the operator tries to open a window or a door for accomplices, the robot would not be able to reach any doors and windows. You could also have separately controlled curtains and blinds, and before the operator connects to your robots all of those are closed. Now the remote human has no way to even see out of the windows to tell where your house is at.
Vs a real life human stranger in your house that could steal stuff and let accomplices into the house.
Far easier to have activity monitoring and logging, alerting and pausing on anything suspicious. The rogue operator will then be investigated and terminated, or even arrested, if need be.
Why would a yacht with experienced crew suffer such a disaster near to port? Surely they would have life jackets? Radios? How unusual is this as a boat accident? (regardless of the other irregularities)
After years of dismantling Solarwinds, a ubiquitous network management software, Thoma Bravo and Silver Lake dumped $286 million of shares in December 2020, the day before the company disclosed a staggering malware breach. The “Sunburst” cyberattack exposed data from California hospitals, the Department of the Treasury, the U.S. nuclear weapons agency, and dozens of other agencies and major companies. While the root cause is still under investigation, multiple lawsuits and reports describe a culture of cost-cutting and frequent security lapses. “Typically Thoma Bravo raises prices and cuts quality, but the affected constituency group—corporate IT managers—don’t have a lot of power or agency,” Stoller writes of this precarious stalemate, with potential geopolitical implications. “Their superiors don’t want to think about a high-cost but low-probability event, especially if every other big institution would be hit as well.”
The 'hook' of Pale Fire is this: ostensibly you're reading a long-form poem with a foreword and footnotes and editing by a friend of the poet (a poet of some eminence), but it soon becomes apparent that the editor is trying to jam his own life story into those footnotes.
If you like that idea, I think you'd like the book.
Other books I know of that play with part or all of the text itself being an artifact of the fiction:
- The Third Policeman, Flann O’Brian. Fictional scholar of a fictional esoteric philosopher weaves his commentary on same philosopher into an account of his… journey.
- If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Italo Calvino. You(!) embark on an adventure to find the book you believed you purchased, which was If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino.
- The Princess Bride, William Goldman. This has a very different framing narrative from the film, and is very much worth a read.
_House of Leaves_, Mark Danielewski. This one has at least two layers of meta story. The body of the text is a long-form analysis written by a blind man of a fictional film. The extensive footnotes are of the guy who found the manuscript after the blind man died.
S. by Doug Dorst and J.J. Abrams is a book called Ship of Theseus with hand-written back and forth marginal notes from two college students who take turns borrowing it from a library. It comes with loose pieces of literature stuck in the pages. It's not on the literary level of Pale Fire or anything but it was definitely enjoyable.
Other good book series that put the book into the story, by one of my favorite authors, Gene Wolfe:
The Book of the New Sun
Soldier of the mist
In both, the author presents himself as a translator for a text he came across which was written by the main character of the story. In the first, the text came from the distant future. In the second, ancient Greece. They are both incredible.
Book of the New/Long/Short Sun were absolute masterpieces at telling a story within a world where the books and authors themselves exist.
Gene Wolfe really outdid himself, it's always incredible to me to reread the series and find that the books are written in a way that's not only engaging and interesting on a first read through, but equally captivating and enjoyable in new ways when you reread them and appreciate all the subtleties.
I'm reminded of Canada's first weird tale (probably), 'A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder' by James De Mille.
The narrative structure of Strange Manuscript is that of a story within a story. The frame story has four characters. Lord Featherstone, a British aristocrat, has fled the boredom of society to cruise the south seas in his yacht. He is accompanied by Dr. Congreve, a medical doctor who is knowledgeable in such fields as geography, botany, and paleontology; by Noel Oxenden, a Cambridge scholar who is an expert on philology; and by Otto Melick, "a littérateur from London". The four are becalmed in mid-Atlantic when they discover a copper cylinder containing a letter and a manuscript written on an unusual material which the doctor later identifies as papyrus. To while away the time, they take turns reading the manuscript aloud, pausing between turns to discuss its contents and debate its authenticity.
The author seems to have been a rather cool dude
Among the books from his library presented by the family to Dalhousie College are hymnologies of the Greek Church, a beautiful set of Euripides, works in modern Greek, Sanskrit, and Persian showing signs of use, as well as French, German and Italian classics with pencilled marginalia, all attesting the breadth of his intellectual interests. Since his death, his best book, A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder has been published by Harper's. It anticipates such romances as King Solomon's Mines, being a tale of wild adventures in an Antarctic Topsy-turveydom where lovers fly about on tame pterodactyls, and utter unselfishness is the chief aim in life of the highly civilised (but cannibal) inhabitants. [...] De Mille was a tall, handsome, dark man, an excellent teacher, a good conversationalist, best in monologue, an amateur musician, an adept at caricatures and comic verses; in short, a most unusual personality.
Another interesting variant of "annotations are the star" is "But What of Earth?" by Piers Anthony. It's an old school sort of sci fi story, but the publisher rewrote it in the publishing process. Eventually Anthony got the rights back and published the first draft with the editor's changes and his commentary on it. I think it was intended to be commentary on the publishing business, but as a way of knowing an author, you come away feeling like you know the guy in a way you don't get from carefully crafted stories.
It's one of those old paperbacks I know I wouldn't have tossed, but darned if I can find my copy to reread. Maybe I loaned it and it found a new home. Maybe you have it.
(Do remember, he is a 55 year old man writing this in the '80s. Some of his world view is… archaic?… in the greater society today.)
You want the Tor version from 1989, not the Laser version from 1976.
Yeah, strangely enough I never connected Pale Fire to House of Leaves until this article and thread. Puts a slightly different spin on House of Leaves for me.
reply