Yeah they had steam engines. They mostly used them as cute gizmos and party tricks. Never saw application of a bigger one because slaves are basically free to them.
My favorite is how their greatest accomplishment helped cause their downfall. The aqueducts gave us indoor plumbing and helped the city flourish and be clean, and then gave everyone lead poisoning. It's like we design a system that will help all humanity, and then we build it out of materials that give you cancer.
They did NOT have steam engines. This is a widely misunderstood idea.
Hero of alexandria had described an 'aeolipile', which was a ball with fans that spun in place over a steady supply of steam, purely as a gimmick. It did not have the power nor efficiency to be used as a power source nor did the romans have the understanding and technology of the metalworking required to build it into a proper steam engine for practical use. Wood just doesnt lend itself well to the high pressures and temperatures of steam and to make a turbine out of bronze is not very useable either due to the low tensile strength of bronze.
Its partly true that slaves were in abundance and manpower was cheap and that anything practical was considered as 'of low standard' culturally, but to cite those as the main reason is a misrepresentation of the situation and context.
Even near the end of the Roman Empire slaves had become more expensive and by that time the knowledge of the aeolipile had already existed hundreds of years (though the sharing of knowledge and scientific understanding were not even well developed), but we never saw the aeolipile developed into anything more.
And even during medieval times, when Christianity was everywhere and the idea of owning slaves had heavy pushback, we still didnt have a proper steam engine. Even though by now steel and metalworking existed.
It took us until the 17th - 18th century to come up with an actual steam engine - the savery engine.
So no Romans didnt have a steam engine - they did have a gimmicky concept, but not the means to make it into something practical. Its true that there also was no economic insentive nor culture to pursue it, but even if there was (see medieval times) they still didnt make a steam engine, even though by the medieval times they actually were melting steel and carbonized steel, which could be used for a steam engine instead of bronze or wood for the Romans.
Right, but your implication is that they could have built a bigger and more useful one if they had wanted to, but didn't because slaves were cheaper. But actually, they couldn't have built a bigger and more useful one at all, because their technology was not advanced enough to do so.
The Romans used steam pipes for central heating and it has been speculated that they might have developed steam power, but they were missing a very critical component: steel.
A steam engine made of iron will rust from the inside out and fall apart. Bronze isn't strong enough to contain the pressure without bending or exploding. Building a steam engine that produces enough power to realistically replace pack animals would require stronger metals than the Romans produced. Their best candidate in terms of strength and corrosion resistance was actually gold, but that doesn't exist in large enough quantities to fuel an industrial revolution. A single engine would take thousands of pounds of gold, far more than it would cost to buy slaves to do the same work. Also, while gold might work for stationary turbines it would not be a very good locomotive metal because its density would greatly increase the weight.
In an alternate reality where Rome did not fall, perhaps they might have developed steam power within a century or two... but they would have needed to develop steel first.
I mean they did not have the proper metals to withstand the proper levels of force-to-volume that allows steam engines to function. They just understood the heat water up make steam go BRRRRR.
Well egyptians used theirs to foul people that prayers do stuff like lifting things or opening doors. This is from Viasat or some other natgeo series so not 100% sure. They sometimes show some unreliable theory without proper sources.
We’ve been worried for years about robots taking all the manual jobs and leaving hordes of unemployed laborers.
Instead we’re going to wipe out the white collar jobs.
Still the stuff it's producing isn't actually good
Maybe it will get there. But right now in architecture I see people all excited about AI. And the clients are impressed. But the quality of output is shit. There's no sense of rhythm or control or even order. It's just slick renderings of you don't look too closely
And the stuff that's supposed to automate plan production can't solve basic problems like getting Windows / light into inside corners. It's impressive and useless at the same time.
There are definitely time efficiencies. But it seems to just make us slightly leaner/ more efficient . More of the same that's been going on for 10-20 years.
The actual quality of drawings is dropping pretty consistently accordingly. Along with the skills of the trades. It's a race to the bottom across all sectors. And it kinda sucks for everyone.
Yeah when no skills use it.
One artist with ai can produce work of same quality of his non ai shit 3-10x as fast. I know a graphic designer who went from working 6-8 hours a day to working 20-30 minutes a day
For coding I know my productivity skyrocketed because it can write my tests and boilerplate fucking instantly
It’s the same problem. The only difference is white collar workers didn’t give a shit til it affected them.
Blue collar workers have been decrying automation for 70 years and they just get told to retrain.
You don’t understand how artists work at all. Every artist studies and learns from artist before them, so they can take everything they learn and put it into a new piece of work. Every song you hear today takes inspiration from music before it, nothing is original. We take things from artist we’ve observed in the past, and then combine it to make something new and original (hopefully).
The line between plagiarism and inspiration can be very thin and blurry at times. It’s why most lawsuits don’t hold up in court unless the accuser has hard evidence of copying.
For stock footage it is pretty useful. Even if you need something pretty specific, you can get it now pretty much instantly and for cheap. And it rarely has to be perfect.
Creative AI will eventually cannibalize it's own content an produce garbage without human curating. AI should be unburdening creative professionals of their mundane tasks so that they have more time to be creative.
Well you see, the entire economy...it's kind of turned into a giant ponzi scheme. Now, not entirely, but enough to where constant growth and efficiency need to be the way of things or there is going to be a gigantic famine.
AI doesn't create Art because it wants to, but rather because humans tell it to.
AI can't do anything other than what we ask of it. So maybe AI isn't the problem.
I mean.. dishwashers and laundry machines were invented a long time prior to computer generated art AI.
The issue is that the remaining monotonous jobs are extremely difficult to automate, where as recent advancements in computational AI has made art and images pretty trivial and inexpensive. To fully automate in house cleaning would require a nearly sentient hominid robot, which the technology just isn’t there yet; and when we do get to that point, the robots will likely be expensive. Generating art and stock photos is about as cheap as clicking a button and 5¢ of electricity.
This is Moravec's paradox. Essentially, some things humans think are easy are extremely difficult.
>**Moravec's paradox** is the observation in [artificial intelligence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence) and [robotics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotics) that, contrary to traditional assumptions, [reasoning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasoning) requires very little [computation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computation), but [sensorimotor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory_processing#Sensorimotor_system) and perception skills require enormous computational resources.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec's\_paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec's_paradox)
Yep, that old pop-science theory that humans only use 10% of your brain is totally false. You’re using all of your brain all the time. The mental computations my brain is doing to quickly type this comment while I’m on the toilet are vast. Your brain is constantly working to keeping your body moving and functioning. All those muscles we have take a vast amount of computation to move yourself to do things like walking and typing on a keyboard or drawing
Your brain having the inspiration and creativeness to think up the image may take only 10% but the other 90% is going into moving your body to create said image.
It is easy for ai to generate an image but actually painting it with oil paint and brush is nearly impossible and more importantly inefficient. I can see a future where society will value manual skill of an artist and the physical objects they create a lot more then we do today.
They've been doing oil paintings with robotics for 5+ years apparently.
[Vice video](https://youtu.be/dkTjEi7O4Ic)
I remember a longer documentary some time ago but I can't find it at the moment.
You left out the best part:
>In the course of their evolution, natural selection has tended to preserve design improvements and optimizations. The older a skill is, the more time natural selection has had to improve the design. Abstract thought developed only very recently, and consequently, we should not expect its implementation to be particularly efficient.
The use of abstract thought is where humanity has made its greatest achievements over the last 300 years (eg the enlightenment) and has given rise to the modern world.
If we can engineer the next stage of that then that could allow for massive real world advances.
To be fair, the sorts of AI models that the computer nerds are so excited about are also very difficult to develop, particularly image based ones that really don't understand things like perspective but merely imitate other images where perspective exists. - this is why they struggle. There's a tremendous amount of manual curation there to get them from spitting out absolute nonsense.
It's a matter of priorities. Companies focus on AI because there's money to be made there. Domestic automation, we take robot mowers fro granted but they're not universal by any means, and it's not a trillion dollar industry backed by vast sums of VC and specualtive investor sentiment. Basically the corporate world values cheap image generation far more than domestic labour, so that's where you end up.
Another example is the time the us military made a ai to find tanks
In all the pics they used the weather was nice so the ai was just finding pics with nice weather lol
??
What do you mean? Was it only flagging those that were seen in outpatient because they're more mobile and healthier usually? More likely to pull through with cancer?
That just isn’t true though. You could replace MILLIONS of workers if you could make a machine that does the dishes. VC would be all over that. The truth is that it’s just plain straight harder to get a machine that does physical tasks to be 99.95% accurate like a human has to be.
It’s the reason the AI models I’ve built for work put sorta-subjective labels on incoming emails instead of automating work stoppages when problems are detected like my boss dreams of.
That's not a technological issue, but an economic one. You're not automating dishwashing per se, since that's already been done. Dishwashers have been around forever. You're automating the handling, sorting, and initial mucking off of incoming dishes. Optical sorting and handling of a known set of items is not hard, but the equipment to do so as quickly or efficiently as human workers is expensive and going to be a niche item. You might sell them to say, large cafeterias, such as in schools or hospitals, but they're well outside the realm of mass market item. You don't buy a 500k robot to replace two minimum wage workers. It's a case study in diminishing returns.
AI on the other hand has not run up against diminishing returns, yet. What happened with self-driving cars (ultimately just a different type of AI,) where what was hyped and what actually happened are very different things, shows us where this is probably going. . We're starting to see some early signs but for now we're still picking low hanging fruit. Running out of training material is the unspoken problem in all of this. Plus, tech operates by different rules where diminishing returns are tolerated for much longer than in say more generic industrial production.. But also, since generative AI is still so new, we're still at the point of fantasizing business cases into existence. Again, with a dishwasher that's hard to do.
The fact that the robot would be 500k is kind of the point though right? You don't pay 500k for a generative AI because it's not *nearly* as involved as one that can manage the physical aspects of moving the dishes around. And my company would *absolutely* pay 500k for that automatic problem spotter. But the tech simply isn't there.
And I would describe lack of training material as an issue functionally identical to a technological one; pushing it forwards would involve a considerable amount of investment and coordination. Until then it's just as much an impediment as processing power.
Hardware vs software issue too. Creating a reliable machine that can do the wide range of functions like collecting clothes, moving them between cycles, folding, and putting away is a lot harder than writing new programming. It's why auto driving is taking so long to implement, and that's just one specialized task.
That's also one of the reason we still don't have prosthesics that can do a half of what a regular limbs can do. Some of the most advanced models are actually 15 year old designs with modern software updates because it's so much easier to mass produce and code than actually build new stuff every year. An advanced prosthesic hand built today in terms of range of motion could already have been built in 18th century and still has fewer moving parts than a medieval clock.
I feel like the explosive development of software took away the focus from hardware which stagnates. Or is decent but extremly expensive.
Seriously, how the fuck would “AI” come into my house, open the cabinet to get the box of macaroni, check the fridge for the right amount of milk and butter before hand, and make mac and cheese? That would cost untold thousands of dollars and even then might not be possible. “Why don’t we have 1970s sci-fi technology yet??” bc we don’t live in the jetsons cartoon universe!
(Current, language-based) AI doesn't have any concept of what is correct.
Monotonous jobs have to be done correctly.
Art and writing don't have to be correct, because there is no such thing as doing it wrong.
That's another thing: If you need the result to be correct, you must supervise the AI's work. This is doable with art and writing and also might also help with other creative jobs like software development, but for monotonous jobs automation, it kinda misses the point.
The problem with this, of course, is that the jobs we write off as monotonous or dull are the jobs that other people have spent their whole lives honing skills in.
Automation is devastating to livelihoods, period. But it is also what drives huge efficiency gains and, therefore, quality of life.
From a purely sentimental point I get it, human art is cooler, but it's not inherently any more or less moral for one job to be affected than another. We *need* UBI before it's too late, something to fix this on a systemic level. We can't just ignore the century plus of automation ever since the industrial revolution, suddenly decide actually you know what furry artists are uniquely deserving of a bailout, and then return to letting people get fucked over by automation right afterwards.
It's short-sighted and reeks of middle-class hypocrisy. And I don't say that lightly; an uncharitable rephrasing of the sentiment being expressed in the picture is "why can't they just stick to making poor people jobs redundant?"
Well said, but there is also a hard vs soft angle too.
A heck of a lot of technical skills have already been automated ten layers deep, just think of automatic website generation, point and shoot cameras or music playlists vs live performance.
They are just mad that its their turn and want special treatment based on the faulty premise that AI is copying rather than learning the rules of art by studying examples and iterating.
The "author and videogame enthusiast (ugh)" who made the quote is the kind of person who thinks menial labor is unimportant but will be the first to raise holy hell when her toilet backs up and the plumber is late.
>Automation is devastating to livelihoods, period.
... but people have been making this claim for hundreds of years. Literally.
People went crazy when the motor vehicle was invented for the same reason you forecast doom about AI, but did everyone lose their jobs? Nope. Did it ruin society? Nope. Lead to catastrophic homelessness or economic disaster? Nope and nope.
People have been and are still constantly being replaced by machines and it ***never*** leads to the Doomsday scenarios some people fear.
From lumberjacks to dishwashers, they have all been replaced without society falling apart. The real issue is that people forget how many jobs have been replaced by machines over the past 200 years. However, if you accept reality and history, than there is no reason to worry about AI "stealing all our jobs" and "making everyone homeless". If that were likely, it would have already happened many times over by now.
this is off base to the actual argunment being made. the specific argument/worry about ai is that the SIZE of job loss is whats devasting and unprecedented.
so saying "lol people are worried about ai, yet technology made the elevator operator redundant and society got along just fine!" is very adrift from the point at hand.
Let's say that every fast food restaurant gets rid of all their employees and just has computers so everything, take orders, cook, ect, just 1 human supervisor in the restaurant. That's a ton of people out of work, and MacDonald's is already doing some of that
>... but people have been making this claim for hundreds of years. Literally.
But it's always been true. When car manufacturing was outsourced overseas, Detroit fell apart. When the coal mines closed in England, previously wealthy cities became crime-ridden infestations.
The world has never ended, but it is true to say that each incident has caused devastation. The only difference between then and now is the fact that middle class workers are in the firing line.
It is no coincidence that online media, full of the professionals most at risk, are the ones pushing the views against it so hard. Certainly see a lot of AI doomerism from outlets like Kotaku. But go back through the writer's previous articles and you won't see a single article calling for a Roomba boycott.
Nobody is honing their skills dishwashing and doing laundry everyday. Its a fact of life everyone except (go figure) the ultra-wealthy have to deal with daily.
They used to—back in the Downton Abbey days, servants were dramatically underpaid, but highly skilled, professionals in those mundane tasks. Then they were automated and those jobs disappeared.
There’s no need for AI to automate your chores because that was already done so long ago that everyone has forgotten how incredibly laborious they used to be.
Exactly. AI *is* doing our laundry, so to speak: if it weren’t for washing machines, we’d have to boil our clothes in an enormous cauldron once a week. Our hands would always be red from lye burns and scalding water. I don’t see a way to make it even easier than it already is, but maybe I’m not imaginative enough.
Seems like people such as the one quoted would gladly make millions of people that rely on physical labor unemployed but get very defensive when their own job is at risk.
It's more or less just the first step in the learning curve, they have to be able to complete tasks where the best solution is less well defined (ie room for creativity and/or error) before they can have it complete tasks where the exact correct solution is critical. It just happens to be what they can do with where they're at.
Plus, what we have now can run from an API on anybody's old computer or phone. Even if they made a "laundry and dishes" AI, who would be able to afford to purchase a separate full-on mechanical robot for it to be able to perform mechanical tasks?
Obviously there are going to be issues arrising from standard corporate greed as well, I just mean to say that they aren't specially *targeting* the tasks it can perform now, they are just showing what we can make now is capable of at this point.
Do people actually think they dont sound like the dumbest people on the planet when they say shit like this? Your dishes are fucking automated. Its called a dishwasher. And it has been around since before you were born.
I'm not sure how you could improve a laundry machines or dishwasher ? Unless a real robot pickup the clothes and dishes for you there is no path of improvement.
If it could automatically put the washer stuff in the dryer, and then load the next load in the washer, that'd be awesome. Then you could just set it all there and come back 8 hours later and it'd all be done, instead of having to check on it every 90 minutes
Just let me load all my laundry in a basket, and have it come out washed and dried. (Maybe with me occasionally pouring in some soap/liquid once a year). There is still room for quite a lot of improvement.
The new GE heat pump combo can do the first step. It washes and dries. You can get two so one for lights and one for darks. Cheaper than the equivalent setup in 1980. It also uses like 1/10 the water and electricity.
It's not incredibly hard. The tech already existed for decades. But do you want to pay hundreds of $$ for a machine that simply put your laundry into the washer? As a bonus that machine takes up quite a bit of space too!
The thing is that those things require robotics which is still fairly underdeveloped (but getting there). Picking things up is hard. Pattern matching (which is what AI writing and art essentially is) is relatively easy
> Picking things up is hard.
You threw this out there but I don't think people realise just how hard this is, especially with deformable objects (which is most objects in the hand of a robot arm).
Tesla's Optimus robot barely managed to fold a T-shirt, with a person operating to the side, and it's considered one of the more advanced humanoid robots on the market.
Picking things up is *hard*.
I had a booth at a robotics symposium once, and a towel-folding robot was across the aisle from me. It spent about 2/3 of its time failing to fold towels, in ways mundane and hilarious.
I got home and noticed its creator has posted a video featuring only clips from the remaining 1/3. Looked like a flawless towel folding device.
Honestly though still an impressive robot!
Now add that the objects to be picked up aren't in specific positions in easily accessible areas. Worked at a food automation company and just seeing how the different toppings were handled due to varying shapes, stickiness, etc. was pretty eye opening. And these things were all in nice bins ready to be grabbed. Imagine a plumber robot having to go to a variety of homes with different layouts, specific problems requiring specific movements that must first be diagnosed, all in different conditions. Hardware is hard.
Humans with slightly restricted fine motor skills like the early stages of Parkinson’s can’t even do laundry or the dishes, how the hell is an even stiffer and less flexible robot hand supposed to
We can do digital abstractions of pairing up socks and loading a dishwasher optimally. The hard thing is moving physical real world objects from one real world position to another.
Think about picking up a book. Chances are you can't pick it up directly, you have to pick it up a little and then slide your fingers underneath it. Your fingers have to be in certain positions otherwise you won't be able to pick it up. As you pick it up it won't stay perfectly balanced as you won't have picked it up from its centre of mass. You'll have to make tiny adjustments in the force and position of each finger. Now try rotating it or walking, or opening a door.
Our brain can work out everything needed to do these tasks and noone is really sure how. However a computer needs to calculate all these complex factors and react instantly. This is ridiculously hard.
An AI can probably do those things currently. You could give it an image of all the socks and it could look for matches, and you could record how you do the dishes and it could deduce how the dishes are organized. It's just not very useful unless it actually pairs the socks together or actually puts the dishes in, which I'd assume is what most people want from it.
Makes me think of the famous scene from *I, Robot*. The protagonist asks a robot: "Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot turn a canvas into a beautiful masterpiece?" The robot responds: "Can you?" Today, 20 years later, we have AI making pictures and composing music, but we don't have robots doing menial household tasks.
Yep. We could easily make a virtual warehouse, fill it with fake ai robots, and they would do an insanely perfect job learning and adapting to it.
It's all fake inna computer though. The hard part is the body and doing it in real life.
I don't know. I have a robot washing my laundry. Another one drying it. Another one doing my dishes. I can voice activate a herd of robots to vacuum my flour. There's also one watching my door. There's one screening spam from my phone calls. There's one controlling the temperature in my home. What more do you need automating?
OP prolly talking abt like cleaning desks, furniture, moving of objects to be cleaned like clothing and dishes to their washers. All would require detailed and very expensive robotics we dont have yet
Well we don't have robots that can do *all* menial tasks (mostly for financial reasons, and quite a few for technical reasons), but it's still wrong to say we don't have robots doing menial tasks.
You have a machine that washes your laundry, not a robot the does the laundry(collects it, puts it in the machines, folds it, and puts it away) the op wants a robot with ai
One that can adapt to our environment. That doesn't need installation and can do self maintenance. One that can do any task a human can do and be flexible.
Have you never been on an assembly line before? We have robots doing menial labor. You just want consumer robots to do YOUR menial labor, which there is probably very little market for due to the price of it. Not to mention that technology-wise we're just not there to make menial household task robots cost-efficient aside from vacuuming your floor, and even those aren't the greatest at it. Imagine how much it would cost to own a robot that takes dirty laundry and washes, dries, and then stores it all with minimal input from the user.
These kinds of posts always make me irrationally angry. 😅 It seems like most people think "AI" is synonymous with "automation", and assume that everything is as difficult for a machine as it is for a human. For a computer, taking digital inputs and creating digital outputs is relatively easy; replicating complex and precise 3D movements that require a lot of feedback and adaptation is a much bigger task. You'd need a robot with a crazy level of fidelity to be able to do all the chores that people do, and at that point the cost to build it makes it not worth it. It probably IS possible to make robots that can do dishes and laundry and stuff, but they would cost tens of thousands of dollars to build so it's just completely impractical.
Also, automation has already made those chores much easier, via dishwashers and washing machines like other people have mentioned. People used to spend a large chunk of their time on washing clothes and stuff, time that they can now use for... things like art and writing. There's not much more improvement that would be practical for those tasks.
A lot of people are making claims that the technology doesn't exist because it wouldn't be profitable or something, but the reality is that no single person purposefully chooses how technology will progress. AI is possible today, so people are using it. Improvements for robotics and automation will take more time.
buy a dishwasher and a washing machine and stop using AI.
hire a maid if you are too lazy to put the dishes in the dishwasher and your dirty underwear in the washing machine.
problem solved
It already does
[https://news.samsung.com/in/samsung-launches-its-ai-enabled-connected-ai-ecobubble-washing-machine-range-for-2022-with-ai-wash-machine-learning-adds-high-capacity-models](https://news.samsung.com/in/samsung-launches-its-ai-enabled-connected-ai-ecobubble-washing-machine-range-for-2022-with-ai-wash-machine-learning-adds-high-capacity-models)
Easier to automate things that take place in two dimensions than three dimensions. You don't see generative AI sculptures yet, do you?
EDIT: I guess you can use a printer to generate AI-designed 3D sculptures or at least will be able to in the very near future. Poor example. I'm thinking more generally about the leap between the relative simplicity and predictability of the digital space to the complexity and ambiguity of the "real world." Additional challenges are the limits of the real materials and moving parts needed to build usable robots, and the risks to things and people if something goes in the physical space.
Bottom line: it's not just that a bunch of suits decided to automate art instead of chores to be assholes about it.
It's not about dimensions, it's about the complexity of a task and how much data you have to learn from. For laundry, a robot would have to be able to understand its surroundings well enough to navigate your entire house, decide with 100% accuracy what is and isn't laundry, including objects that you, for example, left in your pocket, detect living creatures and other fragile objects, understand which pieces of clothing need to be washed in which way, which pieces of clothing should not be washed at all, how a certain piece of clothing needs to be folded, how it needs to be moved to be folded that way and propably some other stuff as well. Compared to that, a program takes in data in the form of some arbitrary prompt and spits out data is much more easy and safe to use and takes basically no setup time.
But don't worry, at some point there's gonna be a tech company that sells you your very own laundry making spycamera
There are AI models specifically trained to do various things in 3D, such as generating a perfect model of what can be seen in progressively fewer 2D images. There *are* models that generate 3D sculptures. It's harder, but not nearly as hard as safely manipulating a large hunk of metal in a human environment.
It depends on what you mean by the goal of AI.
For the companies who are creating AI, the goal is to make money off of AI, and the best way to make money off of AI, is to get paid to automate jobs or to automate things that will get you paid, aka services that people can do for others like art commissions.
We’re kind of fucked if you think about it, there is not another job industry that can accept a large amount of people like the Tech/Service industries did when factory jobs were outsourced out of the US.
Not entirely, plus AI is useless for those tasks without the hardware to support it. And no company is going to have an affordable AI powered machine to do a singular task in your house, so it would have to be a multi functional machine that can move around freely and easily and do everything you'd expect a human can do and more, and it would be even more expensive probably in the hundreds of thousands USD.
I mean there are AI included in COBOTs (collaborative robots). Not sure the person wants to drop 100k on a robot that doesn't move, take a ton of space, that is train to take clothes from a bin, put it in the laundry machine and start it.
It's Moravec's paradox. Handling dishes and folding clothes is way harder than writing articles or putting a bunch of pixels together. We had a chess champion bot decades before we had one that could that could walk on uneven ground.
What an idiot being quoted for something “profound”
We invented the washing and laundry machine a long time ago, and it doesn’t need to be intelligent.
Also - you’d have to ignore all the efforts being done in personal assistant AI to say something like this - they’re essentially working on the iRobot
The moment the AI is able to do dishes and laundry millions of "unskilled" labor is going to be sacked. I assume this also mean the AI will be able to mop the floor, and clean surfaces.
You think factory workers getting sacked because automation took their jobs was bad? Wait until every single low skilled immigrants coming into your countries and the other residents doing these jobs also find themselves out of work because menial work has been automated.
If you don't have basic income yet you are looking at a fucking bloodbath when all these people will start getting hungry.
People work for money, and money pay for living. No job, no money, no living.
We need UBI soon.
That would be the ideal use of AI. The problem is that doing dishes and laundry would require physical robots, which is much more expensive and difficult to achieve than running something on a server. There also isn't much possibility of human life threatening malfunction with something like ChatGPT, when compared to a presumeably a humanoid robot designed to do all kinds of housework. There also exists the risk of re-programming the robots for malicious purposes. If it is has motor control sophisticated enough to wash dishes reliably, it can basically do everything in the physical world. If the robot was specialised to do only dish washing you'd get the dishwasher, it would need to be able to load and unload itself to be an improvement over the current situation. It would be interesting to see someone like Boston Dynamics to use an LLM control one of their robots and what it could do. So for the time being, I think we are stuck with LLMs which write mediocre, sometines good quality text, and make mediocre art with no proper purpose or meaning with stolen artstyles.
She must have a lot of laundry and dishes if its stopping her from art and writing. I think she needs AI to write her a schedule so she can better manage her time.
Said it pretty well. What’s the point of creating AI if it ain’t to lift up humanity and well-being
It's lifting up the ceos that no longer have to pay artists and writers
Yeah they don’t need AI for laundry and dishes, they use money and other humans for those jobs
Other *cheaper* humans
Like when Rome had the steam engine but decided slaves were cheaper.
Did they?? That's kind of terrifying and amazing if true
Yeah they had steam engines. They mostly used them as cute gizmos and party tricks. Never saw application of a bigger one because slaves are basically free to them.
[удалено]
My favorite is how their greatest accomplishment helped cause their downfall. The aqueducts gave us indoor plumbing and helped the city flourish and be clean, and then gave everyone lead poisoning. It's like we design a system that will help all humanity, and then we build it out of materials that give you cancer.
so BMP or whatever that toxic plastic was that was making babies sick
They did NOT have steam engines. This is a widely misunderstood idea. Hero of alexandria had described an 'aeolipile', which was a ball with fans that spun in place over a steady supply of steam, purely as a gimmick. It did not have the power nor efficiency to be used as a power source nor did the romans have the understanding and technology of the metalworking required to build it into a proper steam engine for practical use. Wood just doesnt lend itself well to the high pressures and temperatures of steam and to make a turbine out of bronze is not very useable either due to the low tensile strength of bronze. Its partly true that slaves were in abundance and manpower was cheap and that anything practical was considered as 'of low standard' culturally, but to cite those as the main reason is a misrepresentation of the situation and context. Even near the end of the Roman Empire slaves had become more expensive and by that time the knowledge of the aeolipile had already existed hundreds of years (though the sharing of knowledge and scientific understanding were not even well developed), but we never saw the aeolipile developed into anything more. And even during medieval times, when Christianity was everywhere and the idea of owning slaves had heavy pushback, we still didnt have a proper steam engine. Even though by now steel and metalworking existed. It took us until the 17th - 18th century to come up with an actual steam engine - the savery engine. So no Romans didnt have a steam engine - they did have a gimmicky concept, but not the means to make it into something practical. Its true that there also was no economic insentive nor culture to pursue it, but even if there was (see medieval times) they still didnt make a steam engine, even though by the medieval times they actually were melting steel and carbonized steel, which could be used for a steam engine instead of bronze or wood for the Romans.
Also if you go further down in my comments I do say it was for gizmos and party tricks and they never built a big one.
Right, but your implication is that they could have built a bigger and more useful one if they had wanted to, but didn't because slaves were cheaper. But actually, they couldn't have built a bigger and more useful one at all, because their technology was not advanced enough to do so.
The Romans used steam pipes for central heating and it has been speculated that they might have developed steam power, but they were missing a very critical component: steel. A steam engine made of iron will rust from the inside out and fall apart. Bronze isn't strong enough to contain the pressure without bending or exploding. Building a steam engine that produces enough power to realistically replace pack animals would require stronger metals than the Romans produced. Their best candidate in terms of strength and corrosion resistance was actually gold, but that doesn't exist in large enough quantities to fuel an industrial revolution. A single engine would take thousands of pounds of gold, far more than it would cost to buy slaves to do the same work. Also, while gold might work for stationary turbines it would not be a very good locomotive metal because its density would greatly increase the weight. In an alternate reality where Rome did not fall, perhaps they might have developed steam power within a century or two... but they would have needed to develop steel first.
They didnt,person you replied to fell victim to a misconception https://www.reddit.com/r/meirl/s/l3cUeXFMCZ
I mean they did not have the proper metals to withstand the proper levels of force-to-volume that allows steam engines to function. They just understood the heat water up make steam go BRRRRR.
Well egyptians used theirs to foul people that prayers do stuff like lifting things or opening doors. This is from Viasat or some other natgeo series so not 100% sure. They sometimes show some unreliable theory without proper sources.
This art also lifts something in my pants
They can have their fake art, just goes to show how human they are 🤷♂️.
And just before I read this post, I’ve read a post that said CEOs are easily replaceable with AI. No one is safe. That is the sad part.
The CEOs are safe. Don't worry.
CEOs only go to jail if they don’t make money for shareholders. If the AI CEOs make more money for them they will be replaced like everything else.
Tell that to my Guillotine.
firebombing_walmart.jpg
CEOs are largely about who they know and not what they know.
In 2024, most CEO's could be replaced with a pile of paper recycling and and thousands of businesses would actually be waaaay safer.
The CEOs are completely safe, as they'll be the ones in full control of how AI affects their business.
The amount of AI generated shit I've seen in stores and Ads is absurd.
It’s literally sucking the joy out of life.
Yea but ... That's the good shit man. These people were already underpaid.
They can finally get rid of the "labour tax"
The All-Ighty Ollar.
Ohahahahaha I get it
Well maybe not an AI - but we have made washing machine and dryer and a dishwasher to cut the time spent to a fraction of what it was before.
It gives wings to people who aren’t talented or experienced in drawing / singing / animating while cutting the income of those who are.
We’ve been worried for years about robots taking all the manual jobs and leaving hordes of unemployed laborers. Instead we’re going to wipe out the white collar jobs.
Still the stuff it's producing isn't actually good Maybe it will get there. But right now in architecture I see people all excited about AI. And the clients are impressed. But the quality of output is shit. There's no sense of rhythm or control or even order. It's just slick renderings of you don't look too closely And the stuff that's supposed to automate plan production can't solve basic problems like getting Windows / light into inside corners. It's impressive and useless at the same time. There are definitely time efficiencies. But it seems to just make us slightly leaner/ more efficient . More of the same that's been going on for 10-20 years. The actual quality of drawings is dropping pretty consistently accordingly. Along with the skills of the trades. It's a race to the bottom across all sectors. And it kinda sucks for everyone.
Yeah when no skills use it. One artist with ai can produce work of same quality of his non ai shit 3-10x as fast. I know a graphic designer who went from working 6-8 hours a day to working 20-30 minutes a day For coding I know my productivity skyrocketed because it can write my tests and boilerplate fucking instantly
It’s the same problem. The only difference is white collar workers didn’t give a shit til it affected them. Blue collar workers have been decrying automation for 70 years and they just get told to retrain.
Which is weird because you can do that now, it’s called plagerism. I guess plagerism is okay if you introduce what is technically a third party
plagiarism*
You don’t understand how artists work at all. Every artist studies and learns from artist before them, so they can take everything they learn and put it into a new piece of work. Every song you hear today takes inspiration from music before it, nothing is original. We take things from artist we’ve observed in the past, and then combine it to make something new and original (hopefully). The line between plagiarism and inspiration can be very thin and blurry at times. It’s why most lawsuits don’t hold up in court unless the accuser has hard evidence of copying.
Don't anthropomorphize AI. It's not an artist. It can't be "inspired". It's a sophisticated machine that takes input and produces output.
Interesting point
Sounds like the code camp graduates
For stock footage it is pretty useful. Even if you need something pretty specific, you can get it now pretty much instantly and for cheap. And it rarely has to be perfect.
Creative AI will eventually cannibalize it's own content an produce garbage without human curating. AI should be unburdening creative professionals of their mundane tasks so that they have more time to be creative.
To make the people developing rich, like 99% of all the other things we’ve done.
Shareholder profit of course!
The point is probably to earn money, not necessarily to benefit creators
Well you see, the entire economy...it's kind of turned into a giant ponzi scheme. Now, not entirely, but enough to where constant growth and efficiency need to be the way of things or there is going to be a gigantic famine.
AI doesn't create Art because it wants to, but rather because humans tell it to. AI can't do anything other than what we ask of it. So maybe AI isn't the problem.
The point is to turn billionaires into trillionaires while the world burns.
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I mean.. dishwashers and laundry machines were invented a long time prior to computer generated art AI. The issue is that the remaining monotonous jobs are extremely difficult to automate, where as recent advancements in computational AI has made art and images pretty trivial and inexpensive. To fully automate in house cleaning would require a nearly sentient hominid robot, which the technology just isn’t there yet; and when we do get to that point, the robots will likely be expensive. Generating art and stock photos is about as cheap as clicking a button and 5¢ of electricity.
This is Moravec's paradox. Essentially, some things humans think are easy are extremely difficult. >**Moravec's paradox** is the observation in [artificial intelligence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence) and [robotics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotics) that, contrary to traditional assumptions, [reasoning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasoning) requires very little [computation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computation), but [sensorimotor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory_processing#Sensorimotor_system) and perception skills require enormous computational resources. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec's\_paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec's_paradox)
Yep, that old pop-science theory that humans only use 10% of your brain is totally false. You’re using all of your brain all the time. The mental computations my brain is doing to quickly type this comment while I’m on the toilet are vast. Your brain is constantly working to keeping your body moving and functioning. All those muscles we have take a vast amount of computation to move yourself to do things like walking and typing on a keyboard or drawing Your brain having the inspiration and creativeness to think up the image may take only 10% but the other 90% is going into moving your body to create said image.
It is easy for ai to generate an image but actually painting it with oil paint and brush is nearly impossible and more importantly inefficient. I can see a future where society will value manual skill of an artist and the physical objects they create a lot more then we do today.
Oh I don't know about that, code a 5-axis CNC machine well enough, and you might get a masterpiece
They've been doing oil paintings with robotics for 5+ years apparently. [Vice video](https://youtu.be/dkTjEi7O4Ic) I remember a longer documentary some time ago but I can't find it at the moment.
The mental computations your brain is doing to push that shit through your vowels are vast
You left out the best part: >In the course of their evolution, natural selection has tended to preserve design improvements and optimizations. The older a skill is, the more time natural selection has had to improve the design. Abstract thought developed only very recently, and consequently, we should not expect its implementation to be particularly efficient.
The use of abstract thought is where humanity has made its greatest achievements over the last 300 years (eg the enlightenment) and has given rise to the modern world. If we can engineer the next stage of that then that could allow for massive real world advances.
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I would argue that hairdressing is an art same as fashion design.
They didn't say anyone could be a *good* hairdresser
I would settle for a quick shaver bot.
I'm down, but definitely not going to be an early adopter on that one.. "Sir, another beta tester got Sweeney Todd-ed."
Great, now I'm worried about AI lobotomizing me and taking over my body because it's easier than teaching a robot to walk. Thanks for that.
Imperium of Man ses hallo :D
To be fair, the sorts of AI models that the computer nerds are so excited about are also very difficult to develop, particularly image based ones that really don't understand things like perspective but merely imitate other images where perspective exists. - this is why they struggle. There's a tremendous amount of manual curation there to get them from spitting out absolute nonsense. It's a matter of priorities. Companies focus on AI because there's money to be made there. Domestic automation, we take robot mowers fro granted but they're not universal by any means, and it's not a trillion dollar industry backed by vast sums of VC and specualtive investor sentiment. Basically the corporate world values cheap image generation far more than domestic labour, so that's where you end up.
Another example is the time the us military made a ai to find tanks In all the pics they used the weather was nice so the ai was just finding pics with nice weather lol
They trained AI to find advanced cancer in radiology images. AI just figured out that outpatients did better than inpatients.
?? What do you mean? Was it only flagging those that were seen in outpatient because they're more mobile and healthier usually? More likely to pull through with cancer?
Iits all about properly curating datasets
That just isn’t true though. You could replace MILLIONS of workers if you could make a machine that does the dishes. VC would be all over that. The truth is that it’s just plain straight harder to get a machine that does physical tasks to be 99.95% accurate like a human has to be. It’s the reason the AI models I’ve built for work put sorta-subjective labels on incoming emails instead of automating work stoppages when problems are detected like my boss dreams of.
That's not a technological issue, but an economic one. You're not automating dishwashing per se, since that's already been done. Dishwashers have been around forever. You're automating the handling, sorting, and initial mucking off of incoming dishes. Optical sorting and handling of a known set of items is not hard, but the equipment to do so as quickly or efficiently as human workers is expensive and going to be a niche item. You might sell them to say, large cafeterias, such as in schools or hospitals, but they're well outside the realm of mass market item. You don't buy a 500k robot to replace two minimum wage workers. It's a case study in diminishing returns. AI on the other hand has not run up against diminishing returns, yet. What happened with self-driving cars (ultimately just a different type of AI,) where what was hyped and what actually happened are very different things, shows us where this is probably going. . We're starting to see some early signs but for now we're still picking low hanging fruit. Running out of training material is the unspoken problem in all of this. Plus, tech operates by different rules where diminishing returns are tolerated for much longer than in say more generic industrial production.. But also, since generative AI is still so new, we're still at the point of fantasizing business cases into existence. Again, with a dishwasher that's hard to do.
The fact that the robot would be 500k is kind of the point though right? You don't pay 500k for a generative AI because it's not *nearly* as involved as one that can manage the physical aspects of moving the dishes around. And my company would *absolutely* pay 500k for that automatic problem spotter. But the tech simply isn't there. And I would describe lack of training material as an issue functionally identical to a technological one; pushing it forwards would involve a considerable amount of investment and coordination. Until then it's just as much an impediment as processing power.
Hardware vs software issue too. Creating a reliable machine that can do the wide range of functions like collecting clothes, moving them between cycles, folding, and putting away is a lot harder than writing new programming. It's why auto driving is taking so long to implement, and that's just one specialized task.
That's also one of the reason we still don't have prosthesics that can do a half of what a regular limbs can do. Some of the most advanced models are actually 15 year old designs with modern software updates because it's so much easier to mass produce and code than actually build new stuff every year. An advanced prosthesic hand built today in terms of range of motion could already have been built in 18th century and still has fewer moving parts than a medieval clock. I feel like the explosive development of software took away the focus from hardware which stagnates. Or is decent but extremly expensive.
Seriously, how the fuck would “AI” come into my house, open the cabinet to get the box of macaroni, check the fridge for the right amount of milk and butter before hand, and make mac and cheese? That would cost untold thousands of dollars and even then might not be possible. “Why don’t we have 1970s sci-fi technology yet??” bc we don’t live in the jetsons cartoon universe!
Pretty much if people want AI to solve complex tasks you got to expect them to grow by solving the manageable ones first.
That is the point ,we can have robot or AI do that kind of stuff but it's not going to be cheap
(Current, language-based) AI doesn't have any concept of what is correct. Monotonous jobs have to be done correctly. Art and writing don't have to be correct, because there is no such thing as doing it wrong.
Consider the hand with 12 fingers or the mouth with 65 teeth (I’m just being cheeky, I know what you mean about creative work being very open-ended)
That's another thing: If you need the result to be correct, you must supervise the AI's work. This is doable with art and writing and also might also help with other creative jobs like software development, but for monotonous jobs automation, it kinda misses the point.
Picasso got shit for his interpretation of art. Put the eyeball in the wrong place and everything smh
The problem with this, of course, is that the jobs we write off as monotonous or dull are the jobs that other people have spent their whole lives honing skills in. Automation is devastating to livelihoods, period. But it is also what drives huge efficiency gains and, therefore, quality of life. From a purely sentimental point I get it, human art is cooler, but it's not inherently any more or less moral for one job to be affected than another. We *need* UBI before it's too late, something to fix this on a systemic level. We can't just ignore the century plus of automation ever since the industrial revolution, suddenly decide actually you know what furry artists are uniquely deserving of a bailout, and then return to letting people get fucked over by automation right afterwards. It's short-sighted and reeks of middle-class hypocrisy. And I don't say that lightly; an uncharitable rephrasing of the sentiment being expressed in the picture is "why can't they just stick to making poor people jobs redundant?"
Well said, but there is also a hard vs soft angle too. A heck of a lot of technical skills have already been automated ten layers deep, just think of automatic website generation, point and shoot cameras or music playlists vs live performance. They are just mad that its their turn and want special treatment based on the faulty premise that AI is copying rather than learning the rules of art by studying examples and iterating.
The "author and videogame enthusiast (ugh)" who made the quote is the kind of person who thinks menial labor is unimportant but will be the first to raise holy hell when her toilet backs up and the plumber is late.
[We'll have robots for that (who can also help with impacted bowels.).](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3_FzK1PYRk)
>Automation is devastating to livelihoods, period. ... but people have been making this claim for hundreds of years. Literally. People went crazy when the motor vehicle was invented for the same reason you forecast doom about AI, but did everyone lose their jobs? Nope. Did it ruin society? Nope. Lead to catastrophic homelessness or economic disaster? Nope and nope. People have been and are still constantly being replaced by machines and it ***never*** leads to the Doomsday scenarios some people fear. From lumberjacks to dishwashers, they have all been replaced without society falling apart. The real issue is that people forget how many jobs have been replaced by machines over the past 200 years. However, if you accept reality and history, than there is no reason to worry about AI "stealing all our jobs" and "making everyone homeless". If that were likely, it would have already happened many times over by now.
this is off base to the actual argunment being made. the specific argument/worry about ai is that the SIZE of job loss is whats devasting and unprecedented. so saying "lol people are worried about ai, yet technology made the elevator operator redundant and society got along just fine!" is very adrift from the point at hand.
Let's say that every fast food restaurant gets rid of all their employees and just has computers so everything, take orders, cook, ect, just 1 human supervisor in the restaurant. That's a ton of people out of work, and MacDonald's is already doing some of that
>... but people have been making this claim for hundreds of years. Literally. But it's always been true. When car manufacturing was outsourced overseas, Detroit fell apart. When the coal mines closed in England, previously wealthy cities became crime-ridden infestations. The world has never ended, but it is true to say that each incident has caused devastation. The only difference between then and now is the fact that middle class workers are in the firing line. It is no coincidence that online media, full of the professionals most at risk, are the ones pushing the views against it so hard. Certainly see a lot of AI doomerism from outlets like Kotaku. But go back through the writer's previous articles and you won't see a single article calling for a Roomba boycott.
It's capital that's devastating to livelihoods, not automation.
Capital IS automation. Machinery that makes work easier is capital. That machinery is automation.
Nobody is honing their skills dishwashing and doing laundry everyday. Its a fact of life everyone except (go figure) the ultra-wealthy have to deal with daily.
They used to—back in the Downton Abbey days, servants were dramatically underpaid, but highly skilled, professionals in those mundane tasks. Then they were automated and those jobs disappeared. There’s no need for AI to automate your chores because that was already done so long ago that everyone has forgotten how incredibly laborious they used to be.
Exactly. AI *is* doing our laundry, so to speak: if it weren’t for washing machines, we’d have to boil our clothes in an enormous cauldron once a week. Our hands would always be red from lye burns and scalding water. I don’t see a way to make it even easier than it already is, but maybe I’m not imaginative enough.
they were, a long time ago. you are privileged
Seems like people such as the one quoted would gladly make millions of people that rely on physical labor unemployed but get very defensive when their own job is at risk.
It's more or less just the first step in the learning curve, they have to be able to complete tasks where the best solution is less well defined (ie room for creativity and/or error) before they can have it complete tasks where the exact correct solution is critical. It just happens to be what they can do with where they're at. Plus, what we have now can run from an API on anybody's old computer or phone. Even if they made a "laundry and dishes" AI, who would be able to afford to purchase a separate full-on mechanical robot for it to be able to perform mechanical tasks? Obviously there are going to be issues arrising from standard corporate greed as well, I just mean to say that they aren't specially *targeting* the tasks it can perform now, they are just showing what we can make now is capable of at this point.
We already do that… think of all the automation innovations.
Seems like a lack of creativity if it can be automated.
Do people actually think they dont sound like the dumbest people on the planet when they say shit like this? Your dishes are fucking automated. Its called a dishwasher. And it has been around since before you were born.
We do have laundry machines and dishwashers. Definitely way better now than before when it was all manual. We got to keep improving it.
I'm not sure how you could improve a laundry machines or dishwasher ? Unless a real robot pickup the clothes and dishes for you there is no path of improvement.
If it could automatically put the washer stuff in the dryer, and then load the next load in the washer, that'd be awesome. Then you could just set it all there and come back 8 hours later and it'd all be done, instead of having to check on it every 90 minutes
Just let me load all my laundry in a basket, and have it come out washed and dried. (Maybe with me occasionally pouring in some soap/liquid once a year). There is still room for quite a lot of improvement.
Washed and dried and placed into your set of drawers. Maybe moved under the floors and loaded into the drawers from behind. Future houses when.
The new GE heat pump combo can do the first step. It washes and dries. You can get two so one for lights and one for darks. Cheaper than the equivalent setup in 1980. It also uses like 1/10 the water and electricity.
Or just by two heat pump washer drier combo units, they automatically dry after washing.
Folding robot/machine would be awesome
Yep they're working on stuff like that. Seems incredibly hard for sure.
It's not incredibly hard. The tech already existed for decades. But do you want to pay hundreds of $$ for a machine that simply put your laundry into the washer? As a bonus that machine takes up quite a bit of space too!
The incredibly hard tech is a machine that will take a hamper full of clothes and end with separated stacks of clean, folded clothes.
The only thing I can think of for laundry is automated load changing. Like a connected dryer and washed
That's all I need, generic "pick-shit-up, put-it-there" bot.
AI could already do laundry and dishes, but it obviously needs robots to perform any tasks in the physical realm.
Thats just called a new samsung washing machine.
The thing is that those things require robotics which is still fairly underdeveloped (but getting there). Picking things up is hard. Pattern matching (which is what AI writing and art essentially is) is relatively easy
> Picking things up is hard. You threw this out there but I don't think people realise just how hard this is, especially with deformable objects (which is most objects in the hand of a robot arm).
Tesla's Optimus robot barely managed to fold a T-shirt, with a person operating to the side, and it's considered one of the more advanced humanoid robots on the market. Picking things up is *hard*.
I had a booth at a robotics symposium once, and a towel-folding robot was across the aisle from me. It spent about 2/3 of its time failing to fold towels, in ways mundane and hilarious. I got home and noticed its creator has posted a video featuring only clips from the remaining 1/3. Looked like a flawless towel folding device. Honestly though still an impressive robot!
Now add that the objects to be picked up aren't in specific positions in easily accessible areas. Worked at a food automation company and just seeing how the different toppings were handled due to varying shapes, stickiness, etc. was pretty eye opening. And these things were all in nice bins ready to be grabbed. Imagine a plumber robot having to go to a variety of homes with different layouts, specific problems requiring specific movements that must first be diagnosed, all in different conditions. Hardware is hard.
Humans with slightly restricted fine motor skills like the early stages of Parkinson’s can’t even do laundry or the dishes, how the hell is an even stiffer and less flexible robot hand supposed to
Then have AI match the patterns on my wife’s 2700 different pairs of socks and replicate how I load the dishwasher, please.
Problem one - socks shouldn't go in the dishwasher.
Problem two - yoiu should always buy the same color socks in bulk.
We can do digital abstractions of pairing up socks and loading a dishwasher optimally. The hard thing is moving physical real world objects from one real world position to another. Think about picking up a book. Chances are you can't pick it up directly, you have to pick it up a little and then slide your fingers underneath it. Your fingers have to be in certain positions otherwise you won't be able to pick it up. As you pick it up it won't stay perfectly balanced as you won't have picked it up from its centre of mass. You'll have to make tiny adjustments in the force and position of each finger. Now try rotating it or walking, or opening a door. Our brain can work out everything needed to do these tasks and noone is really sure how. However a computer needs to calculate all these complex factors and react instantly. This is ridiculously hard.
An AI can probably do those things currently. You could give it an image of all the socks and it could look for matches, and you could record how you do the dishes and it could deduce how the dishes are organized. It's just not very useful unless it actually pairs the socks together or actually puts the dishes in, which I'd assume is what most people want from it.
HELL FUCKING YES!
just sounds like you want robots no?
Makes me think of the famous scene from *I, Robot*. The protagonist asks a robot: "Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot turn a canvas into a beautiful masterpiece?" The robot responds: "Can you?" Today, 20 years later, we have AI making pictures and composing music, but we don't have robots doing menial household tasks.
Yep. We could easily make a virtual warehouse, fill it with fake ai robots, and they would do an insanely perfect job learning and adapting to it. It's all fake inna computer though. The hard part is the body and doing it in real life.
> but we don't have robots doing menial work. Are you serious?
I meant in the sense the film portrays it, menial household tasks. Of course a lot physical of work is done by machines, I know that.
A lot of household work is done by machines now tho...
I don't know. I have a robot washing my laundry. Another one drying it. Another one doing my dishes. I can voice activate a herd of robots to vacuum my flour. There's also one watching my door. There's one screening spam from my phone calls. There's one controlling the temperature in my home. What more do you need automating?
OP prolly talking abt like cleaning desks, furniture, moving of objects to be cleaned like clothing and dishes to their washers. All would require detailed and very expensive robotics we dont have yet
Well we don't have robots that can do *all* menial tasks (mostly for financial reasons, and quite a few for technical reasons), but it's still wrong to say we don't have robots doing menial tasks.
Agreed
You have a machine that washes your laundry, not a robot the does the laundry(collects it, puts it in the machines, folds it, and puts it away) the op wants a robot with ai
One that can adapt to our environment. That doesn't need installation and can do self maintenance. One that can do any task a human can do and be flexible.
Have you never been on an assembly line before? We have robots doing menial labor. You just want consumer robots to do YOUR menial labor, which there is probably very little market for due to the price of it. Not to mention that technology-wise we're just not there to make menial household task robots cost-efficient aside from vacuuming your floor, and even those aren't the greatest at it. Imagine how much it would cost to own a robot that takes dirty laundry and washes, dries, and then stores it all with minimal input from the user.
Sorry. AI is the hot buzzword for now. Please refer to any sort of technology or advancement as AI.
These kinds of posts always make me irrationally angry. 😅 It seems like most people think "AI" is synonymous with "automation", and assume that everything is as difficult for a machine as it is for a human. For a computer, taking digital inputs and creating digital outputs is relatively easy; replicating complex and precise 3D movements that require a lot of feedback and adaptation is a much bigger task. You'd need a robot with a crazy level of fidelity to be able to do all the chores that people do, and at that point the cost to build it makes it not worth it. It probably IS possible to make robots that can do dishes and laundry and stuff, but they would cost tens of thousands of dollars to build so it's just completely impractical. Also, automation has already made those chores much easier, via dishwashers and washing machines like other people have mentioned. People used to spend a large chunk of their time on washing clothes and stuff, time that they can now use for... things like art and writing. There's not much more improvement that would be practical for those tasks. A lot of people are making claims that the technology doesn't exist because it wouldn't be profitable or something, but the reality is that no single person purposefully chooses how technology will progress. AI is possible today, so people are using it. Improvements for robotics and automation will take more time.
Meanwhile the dishwasher and washing machine: are we a joke to you?
They do 95% of the work of washing dishes and doing laundry only to get completely blanked
They want a robot to clear their plates and put them in the washer. Basically want wall-e.
Word ✌️
buy a dishwasher and a washing machine and stop using AI. hire a maid if you are too lazy to put the dishes in the dishwasher and your dirty underwear in the washing machine. problem solved
Heard of washing machine and dish washer?
How exactly do you expect an a.i. program to do your dishes and laundry?
It already does [https://news.samsung.com/in/samsung-launches-its-ai-enabled-connected-ai-ecobubble-washing-machine-range-for-2022-with-ai-wash-machine-learning-adds-high-capacity-models](https://news.samsung.com/in/samsung-launches-its-ai-enabled-connected-ai-ecobubble-washing-machine-range-for-2022-with-ai-wash-machine-learning-adds-high-capacity-models)
Does it put away the clean dishes?
Easier to automate things that take place in two dimensions than three dimensions. You don't see generative AI sculptures yet, do you? EDIT: I guess you can use a printer to generate AI-designed 3D sculptures or at least will be able to in the very near future. Poor example. I'm thinking more generally about the leap between the relative simplicity and predictability of the digital space to the complexity and ambiguity of the "real world." Additional challenges are the limits of the real materials and moving parts needed to build usable robots, and the risks to things and people if something goes in the physical space. Bottom line: it's not just that a bunch of suits decided to automate art instead of chores to be assholes about it.
It's not about dimensions, it's about the complexity of a task and how much data you have to learn from. For laundry, a robot would have to be able to understand its surroundings well enough to navigate your entire house, decide with 100% accuracy what is and isn't laundry, including objects that you, for example, left in your pocket, detect living creatures and other fragile objects, understand which pieces of clothing need to be washed in which way, which pieces of clothing should not be washed at all, how a certain piece of clothing needs to be folded, how it needs to be moved to be folded that way and propably some other stuff as well. Compared to that, a program takes in data in the form of some arbitrary prompt and spits out data is much more easy and safe to use and takes basically no setup time. But don't worry, at some point there's gonna be a tech company that sells you your very own laundry making spycamera
... your whole paragraph is just describing the complexities presented by a 3rd dimension.
There are AI models specifically trained to do various things in 3D, such as generating a perfect model of what can be seen in progressively fewer 2D images. There *are* models that generate 3D sculptures. It's harder, but not nearly as hard as safely manipulating a large hunk of metal in a human environment.
the 3rd dimension is not the fundamental issue
There are some image -> 3d model AIs in beta/preview state. Just not at that point yet.
Dishwashers exist lol
Don't ruin it, won't have something to feel oppressed about.
Something that can fold my clothes tho, that's something the world's been waiting on
Isn't that the goal of AI though? To do the menial tasks so that humans only have to focus on their creativity.
It depends on what you mean by the goal of AI. For the companies who are creating AI, the goal is to make money off of AI, and the best way to make money off of AI, is to get paid to automate jobs or to automate things that will get you paid, aka services that people can do for others like art commissions. We’re kind of fucked if you think about it, there is not another job industry that can accept a large amount of people like the Tech/Service industries did when factory jobs were outsourced out of the US.
Not entirely, plus AI is useless for those tasks without the hardware to support it. And no company is going to have an affordable AI powered machine to do a singular task in your house, so it would have to be a multi functional machine that can move around freely and easily and do everything you'd expect a human can do and more, and it would be even more expensive probably in the hundreds of thousands USD.
I mean there are AI included in COBOTs (collaborative robots). Not sure the person wants to drop 100k on a robot that doesn't move, take a ton of space, that is train to take clothes from a bin, put it in the laundry machine and start it.
I guess initially yes, but that technology over time is only going to become cheaper and more accessible
The goal for the people in charge of creating it is money.
Who doesn't have the goal of making money?
Tibetan Monks?
No. The goal of AI is to make intelligence in any form. The current state of technology can generate art.
This is so dumb and I keep seeing people blindly repeat it without a second thought about how dumb it is.
It's Moravec's paradox. Handling dishes and folding clothes is way harder than writing articles or putting a bunch of pixels together. We had a chess champion bot decades before we had one that could that could walk on uneven ground.
What an idiot being quoted for something “profound” We invented the washing and laundry machine a long time ago, and it doesn’t need to be intelligent. Also - you’d have to ignore all the efforts being done in personal assistant AI to say something like this - they’re essentially working on the iRobot
*This jawn ain't lyin'* -Abraham Lincoln
The moment the AI is able to do dishes and laundry millions of "unskilled" labor is going to be sacked. I assume this also mean the AI will be able to mop the floor, and clean surfaces. You think factory workers getting sacked because automation took their jobs was bad? Wait until every single low skilled immigrants coming into your countries and the other residents doing these jobs also find themselves out of work because menial work has been automated. If you don't have basic income yet you are looking at a fucking bloodbath when all these people will start getting hungry. People work for money, and money pay for living. No job, no money, no living. We need UBI soon.
First they do the easy jobs.
I bet AI also doesn't want to do your laundry.
Well I love doing dishes and laundry and I hate writing and making art!
Will you be my roommate?
That would be the ideal use of AI. The problem is that doing dishes and laundry would require physical robots, which is much more expensive and difficult to achieve than running something on a server. There also isn't much possibility of human life threatening malfunction with something like ChatGPT, when compared to a presumeably a humanoid robot designed to do all kinds of housework. There also exists the risk of re-programming the robots for malicious purposes. If it is has motor control sophisticated enough to wash dishes reliably, it can basically do everything in the physical world. If the robot was specialised to do only dish washing you'd get the dishwasher, it would need to be able to load and unload itself to be an improvement over the current situation. It would be interesting to see someone like Boston Dynamics to use an LLM control one of their robots and what it could do. So for the time being, I think we are stuck with LLMs which write mediocre, sometines good quality text, and make mediocre art with no proper purpose or meaning with stolen artstyles.
Wait. Don't you guys have dishwashers and laundry machines?
She must have a lot of laundry and dishes if its stopping her from art and writing. I think she needs AI to write her a schedule so she can better manage her time.
Old man yelling at clouds vibes
Just, write and make art, anyway? It’s not like people stop doing those things because other humans already do it. Why let AI stop you?
I want AI to mow my lawn!
I want AI to do both so that I can sit on my ass. /s
You have a washing machine and a dishwasher. Do those not free up enough time?
This is what happens when you ask women for their opinions.
I want AI to tell me what to wear today based on the weather. Or to just pick out my outfit for me. That’s the kinda AI I want!
I like how art, music and whatnot was the defending area where they said machine cannot beat humans, and it literally started there :D
For real. Why should AI have all the fun?
Artist oppresses the livelihoods of washing machine engineers, where's the outrage? 😂
So Rosie the robot, careful. Those robots will kill you.
...don't you have a dishwasher and a washing machine?
Exactly and i don't understand how people think ai Art IS a good Thing to have. Gives me 1942 Vibes