I'd love to see this be usable as potentially a mower and or vacuum/mop with different swappable components.
Laundry, cooking, dishes, sweeping, vacuuming, and other constantly recurring tasks are what I would love to see automated not just a “robot that sweeps” like the market has been trying to sell me.
Ever since I read the second shift book about the unpaid extra 40 hour week women work doing domestic tasks I’ve dreamed of robots replacing that for humanity. It’s a massive cost to people individually and humanity overall, and kind of a silent epidemic.
It’s crazy but freeing up half of humanity from the drudge work of daily chores is one of the most obvious disruptive technology plays. I rarely hear people put the robot revolution in this context, but I very much think we should start doing so.
Here’s a good overview for the uninitiated:
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/unequal-division-la...
But I worry very much that tools like this will be used primarily to increase corporate profits and reduce money spent on humans, rather than remove drudgery from people’s lives and allow them to do things more aligned with their goals and natures.
E.g., if we make a cleaning robot, hotels will replace half their staff — what will these people do for a living? Work in an AI sweatshop, categorizing images of child abuse?
Old-school science fiction often proposed that we’d be entering a new age of art and leisure, as robots and AI take over menial tasks. In fact today I think we’re seeing AI and robots — in part — taking jobs from humans, and in order to provide entertainment and economic leverage to richer humans.
It’s making me reevaluate all that old science fiction, as it seemed to require an invisible 90% of the population basically working for the AIs so that the AIs can curate a great life for a stratospherically-wealthy minority.
It was also predicted in the mid 20th century that rising productivity would create a shorter work-week; instead we have figured out how to prevent workers from being compensated for higher productivity.
For golden age sci fi theories of human work vs leisure to actually take hold, we need universal basic income, or some other monetary theory that allows us to value other people for being alive rather than solely for being feudal slaves of deranged billionaires.
"Hotel maid" as a job really shouldn't exist when robots can do it better and more consistently (which isn't true yet). At that point, not before, should be considered beneath human dignity. But we definitely need an answer for what happens to the newly undignified human.
I think chores aren't necessarily the terrible boredom. But having a robot as an option, you can do them as a sort of hobby if and when you want. That seems nice.
I think we also will need to develop maturity to deal with our free time, but it's probably not the disaster I've seem many claim (that we lose meaning) -- maybe their way to cope with an unfair world? or my way to cope with laziness.
The main thing is how to protect ourselves from rulers when we aren't necessary for labor. It seems like a difficult but solvable problem. Being able to choose how much to work (and play) is the dream!
I want mini robots cleaning dust and debris, silently and out of my way. I don’t want macro bots getting in my way