People occasionally whine about how robots are going to take all of our jobs and leave everyone shivering in the cold. Well, look at history: Back in 1600, what job did most people have? Farming. Practically everyone farmed, and of those who didn’t, a substantial number hunted-and-gathered in regions the Europeans and/or Chinese hadn’t colonized yet. These days, practically nobody farms. The number of farm jobs collapsed in the 20th Century. Therefore everyone has been unemployed for a hundred years and nobody has a job, right?
Nope. We invented jobs. Not deliberately, but jobs kinda fell out of things we did invent deliberately, like trains and cars and aircraft and computers. The majority of the jobs we have now would have been unimaginable to people living in 1900, let alone 1600. Jobs live and die, but new ones do keep getting made; trying to predict precisely which ones will be made is a fool’s game, but saying it’s going to stop is even more foolish.
So that’s another strike against do-everything robots: Humans are going to take the jobs those robots would do, unless you’re Japan and so rich you can afford robots and so xenophobic you can’t abide Vietnamese and Cambodians coming over and polluting your homeland with their dirty foreign presence.
Seems it would be better to have a fridge that can select certain items and pass them out through self-opening doors in the front, and pass them to basically a self-driving table on wheels.
Ignoring the privacy concerns, very little of the computing power needs to be in the robot itself. The processing can be mostly done in the cloud.
One can and should assume a built environment that facilitates the robot being able to perform the specific tasks. The location of glassware is a given, the fridge opens in response to a signal, beverages are in standard sorts of containers, etc.
A cooking robot prototype exists, but it is still expensive. However I’m guessing it’ll be under a few grand in a decade or so.
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There is already a fully automated burger restaurant in San Francisco, as well as a mostly automated place which serves quinoa called Eatsa. I read something saying that the fully automated it, but what is on-line isn’t clear. However it seems to have been closing places left and right.
Homes would require major changes before robots could be used.
We already see that with Roomba. You have to have the floor cleared of clutter and you could vacumn it yourself in just minutes. Instead of Roomba taking forever.
Asking a robot for a beer means that beer must be kept in the exact place the robot expects to find it. Even a few inches off, would mean the robot returns empty handed.
Rather than a robot that irons clothes, would you settle for clothes that don’t need ironing?
And you can already get your food prepared by robots, the frozen food aisle of your supermarket is full of it.
Everything you want can be done, it just won’t be done by your anthropomorphic robot buddy. You won’t even perceive that it was done by “robots”. It will be done by constantly removing the need for human labor from the countless goods and services you consume.
Nah, I work around robotic machinery all day. There are some that have to “find” the object before they can grab it.
I don’t think we’ll ever have a single robot that does all the household chores. I think each task itself will become more and more automated.
The washing machine itself is a robot*, and getting more sophisticated every year. But the programming that gets added is incremental and doesn’t involve extra moving parts. Being able to separate clothing by type and color or to fold it requires new sensors and new moving parts.
In fact it’s the robot which replaced my great-grandmother’s job, although by the time she was driven off the market she was ready to retire. She also thought washing machines were the bee’s knees. Her business went from washing by hand, to buying a manual washing machine (rollers she had to move with a turnwheel), to buying an automatic washing machine, to retirement.
Why would you need one? There are plenty of machines available to do housework already. Do you really need a device to turn on your dishwasher and Roomba?
The point is, you will never ever have an anthropomorphic robot that will walk to the closet, get out the vacuum cleaner, plug it in, and go around the house vacuuming. Then the robot walks to the kitchen, fills the sink with soapy water, grabs a scrub brush, aND washes the dishes by hand.
Also the robot will not grab a bucket, head out to the well, and bring back water. Nor will the robot tend the horses or shine your shoes or polish the silver, or any of the other thousands of tasks that servants used to perform every day for their employers.
All these tasks will be done, but they won’t be done by general purpose anthropomorphic robot maids. Your vacuum cleaner will run itself. You will pile the dishes in the dishwasher. You will use a washing machine for your clothes. A pipe will bring water to your home. You will drive a car instead of a horse drawn buggy. You will have stainless steel utensils that don’t need to be polished. Instead of candles, electric lights. Shoes won’t need to be shined. People will stop wearing hats. Clothes won’t need ironing. Inexpensive pre-made meals will be available at marketplaces and public houses.
And all these labor saving modern conveniences are available today, with not a single anthropomorphic robot in sight. We don’t live in the Victorian age, only with robots taking the place of the working class. And we won’t live in the Reagan era, only with robots to program our VCRs for us.
I actually had an idea of how this could work. We develop gut bacteria that our bodies can use for food. The pill is actually there to feed the bacteria.
Not necessarily, in my view the difference between a robot and automation is that a robot has sensors which allow it to percieve its world in some way. This allows them to alter their actions to match reality. They don’t necessarily need to be human senses like for example the beer you order could have an rfid tag or even a qr code that the robot could read and take action on.
Even if we do perfect a “home robot” at some point, they will be absurdly expensive for a very long time. That alone would mitigate against them being “commonplace”.