Ask HN: When might we not have to do laundry or fold clothes or cook At this point it feels like in the next decade or two, we might have superintelligence and robots doing most of my work. My question is a bit funny but how soon do you guys estimate robots that do your work become common even in second-world countries? |
I expect robots in unexpected, previously unautomated areas. I don't expect them to look humanoid other than the ones that will look exceptionally humanoid perhaps changing form from time to time.
It really shouldn't take more than a handful of seconds to give a good flap and put any one of these on a hangar.
Likewise folding. A couple of seconds. Shirts don't need folding, they stay n the hangar.
I'm struggling to think why it would take longer. Are you new to clothes?
A few years ago, I saw a talk that made a point about how prosthetics that mimic original human body parts are often designed from an able-bodied point of view. They look inoffensive and are designed for the wearer to blend into what's considered normal.
However, these prosthetics frequently are not all that useful. Once one starts to rethink from first principles in terms of function and efficiency rather than aesthetics this opens up an entirely new space of solutions that might be much more efficient than the original "solutions" they replace - the most famous example probably being Oscar Pistorius' running blades.
The same applies to digital transformation - and by extension AI and robotics. We don't need faster horses. We need to rethink and replace existing processes entirely.
I'd wish we could have robots helping us to produce bionanotextiles4.0 that make folding/ironing optional or obsolete, or microwaves that turn some gunk mix of element in the periodic table an turn them into a salad or a stake, rather than getting a remote controlled clanker harvesting every fart of data I produce.
You can also buy food so that you don't have to cook.
I'd definitely live in the office if given the chance -- i.e. my wife divorces me and company allows.
We urgently need an answer to that question before it happens. The Elon suggestion is so laughable as to be unworthy of an answer.
I’m not a roboticist but I get the core concepts and challenges (and I’ve been in the room with leaders in the space). And I know a bit about LLMs and the current state of AI systems.
the human-form robots out of China unlocking motion based on copying human motion indicate that generally useful human labor replacement robots should be on the market within five years (probably at a starting price of $40k) and really good within ten. (And market forces might drive the price to $20k in today’s dollars)
And given how long it takes to invent, validate and adopt new economic systems we need to predict the failure mode of what happens when 5 rich dudes own all work and everyone else is homeless and hungry (hint the French Revolution was a mini study on what happens when the top gets too heavy and the bottom stops having it)
Like I said, you don’t want this. Nobody wants this. Hopefully some smart billionaires figure that out and solve it soon enough to save their own skins. (Along with everyone else)
I think the billionaire class are deeply invested in the world continuing to exist in a reasonable state as opposed to a post-apocalyptic hellscape, and surely they must know this.
Does it not smell and fester when left for days?
Although this thread has hit on an interesting method of distributing folding into daily tiny sessions - especially for the childfree, who produce just a single dirty outfit per day after all.
The method would be that you don’t own any clothes that wrinkle, and wash a load of laundry each week, then you hang up your towel, and just sit the clean basket by the dresser, and each morning before you get dressed, you also fold and put away (or wear) “n” items where “n” is the average number of items you wear each day. At the end of the week you should have an essentially empty “clean” basket and a new dirty basket. If you were very disciplined about this you could just have the basics in rotation at all times, meaning you only own like 8 pairs of underpants, 16 socks, etc. and those simply come out of the clean basket straight onto your body.