If A.I. can't fold my laundry, I wouldn't trust it with my car.
The next bit would be converting private trips into automated rides; replacing car ownership. The unit profits will decrease as part of this effort, but the opportunity is again huge.
How will you monetise laundry folding automation? At best you can replace just some of the people at all the commercial laundries and turn that into profit, but many laundries may hire one person who does everything. For home use you could sell a machine, but how much would you need to charge for it for that to equal recurring revenue from autonomous vehicles and how much are people willing to pay for a laundry robot? (even robotic vacuums are still quite niche despite probably being more convenient and costing less than LaundryBot)
I would certainly, without any hesitation whatsoever, have been willing to pay $5000 or even a bit more for one that, instead of just washing and drying all our clothes, took a pile of dirty clothes as input and output a few stacks of washed, dried, folded, and sorted clothes.
Anybody with children would want this; those who also have sufficient money would buy it.
* Is the barrier higher and value lower because they have laundry in their unit or does the value increase marginally because they have in the building, or is it more lucrative because they don't have laundry at all?
* And does a solution scale easily across these different use cases?
* The ability to provide continuity on even a pure software scale makes this a particularly pricey arena to enter because a person is required to fulfill this service. To find ways to make this economical, we'd have to consider co-opting existing behaviors or economic patterns. Are there _multiple_ existing patterns that we can enhance?
That's not how it works, because your competitors will undercut you. Then you will undercut them, and continue the race to the bottom until the natural price is reached.
Care to elaborate? Is folding laundry harder than driving? Doesn't both involve following visual cues and making corrections continuously based on that...
>It's a pithy put-down if you already don't like the idea of driving AI for other reasons
And your comment can be seen as a pithy attack on criticism of something you are overly enthusiastic about "for other reasons"...
>nobody who's looking to objectively evaluate a technology for use in cars would say, "Hang on, let's first try to make it fold laundry."
That is not the point. Point is to evaluating how capable the current AI/visual processing technology is.
And why not test advancement in AI with something much safer, like folding laundry? Instead of putting it in a car that can actually kill people...
It is a good point.
Also, self-driving cars are not new, they're being developed for over thirty years, and they've logged millions of miles, many in public streets. The problems remaining will be in edge cases, and you definitively can't use your "folding AI" to test for that.