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Comment by runako | Hacker News Reader

I honestly think there's a lot more runway for single-purpose "smarter" appliances than general-purpose robots.

The "iPhone of Robotics" probably looks more like personal ownership of several robots: Roomba, iLaundry, iFoodPrep, iPutAwayGroceries, iPutAwayDishes, etc. iRobot has built a solid business reasonably automating a single household chore. I would bet an all-in-one laundry machine or bathroom cleaning robot could also do compelling sales.

At a minimum, it seems very ambitious to try to attempt to solve via robotics problems that are not well-solved using single-purpose machines.

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Absolutely. Our conception of robot is fixated stupidly on things with arms and eyes.

The toaster is a perfect robot. I mean perfect. A more modern example is my smart pressure cooker that does just about everything in closed-loop control. It's fantastic.

Automation is not only a very old practice, it's actually stagnating relative to the amount of magic miracle appliances that appeared in the first half of the 1900s.

My toaster cooks the bottom part of the toast way faster than the top part so I have to flip it partway through to get it even. Also it accumulates a ton of crumbs which I can never quite clean out, and sometimes some crumbs will get onto the heating element and the kitchen will smell like burning. Plus it's just not at all consistent even though it seems impossible for there to be so much variance with the same machine cooking the same bread on the same time setting.

A lot of folks could probably replace "my toaster" with "my spouse" for most of that.

You have a faulty model, that's not a knock on the toaster as a robot.

>The toaster is a perfect robot. I mean perfect.

Why do I have to put the bread in the toaster? A toaster should load itself.

And half the time I can't get the toast out without using a knife. Why doesn't the bread come up to a level where I can pull it out without burning myself?

Why can't it ever toast the right amount? It's always too much or too little. It should be able to determine everything it needs to about the bread to toast at the correct level, no trial and error and no wasted slices.

In fact, I disagree with your statement so much that I'd ask the question, why are toasters so shitty?

Probably a lot of the answer is cost cutting.

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