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Comment by 0xTJ | Hacker News Reader

I hope it does. It should be a mark against a clothes dryer that it claims to use AI (unless it actually does, wherein I don't see a possible benefit, and wouldn't buy that anyways). Avoid buying products that pointlessly market themselves as "AI"; vote with your wallet to punish companies for bad behaviour. If they're doing it for the investors, make tacking on garbage buzzwords like "AI" hurt their bottom line.

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What's the problem with AI washing machines?

It analyses the laundry type and size to inform itself on how much detergent to use, analyses the laundry during the wash to know when it is clean enough, monitors the moisture level in the clothes to know when the drying is finished.. it's as if a person is there micromanaging the washing machine.. how is that not an artificial agent?

Exactly zero of that is AI. You've described an extremely basic control loop with a few simple sensors, a lookup table, and some if-then statements.

That might be how you would implement it, are you refusing to concede that Samsung could have implemented it better than your strawman implementation?

What is your standard for intelligence?

My washing machine is already better at doing laundry than I am (even if I was in total control of a machine with identical capabilities), why is that not good enough for you?

I think the point was that every new washing machine already does these things (measures how much detergent to use, checks when the water is clean enough etc.) without any AI. It’s not a very difficult problem domain.

We may concede that it could be difficult from an engineering/sensors perspective, but the software side should be about as easy as a traffic light

Honestly those new smart washing machines with large graphic LCD displays full off sensors to detect the water quality, detergent quantity, how soiled the wash is, etc, are annoying me to hell an back with their constant nagging.

"Oh sorry, your drum is a little light , consider putting more clothes in to save the environment"

I throw another towel in.

"Oh shucks, drum weight overload, consider removing some clothes from the wash"

The problem with the new ones is that they're too smart for their own good and instead of using their smarts to make my life easier (I don't know what can be easier than the old washing machines where you throw the was inside, with the detergent, turn the program knob and push start, and why we need smart ones) they instead use their smarts to be annoying and require more user input and more steps just to fucking wash clothes.

Tangentially, we used to have the term "smart" for this. It slowly faded as it became redundant, but now everything is suddenly AI.

It’s not an LLM (and if it is, what a waste) but it is a limited scope AI of the sort used to control units in a classic RTS.

this is the level where pedantry and vagueness seem to coincide -- we can get so pedantic about what is or is not a synonym of "statistical learning" that we end up deconstructing language itself.

Come on man, I know the majority of the time HN can fall into the dropbox launch "I can set that up myself easily" mindset, but this goes all the way back to the other direction. People do not need an AI to "analyse the laundry type and size to inform itself on how much detergent to use", just press a couple buttons. If this is where people's imaginations are going with AI then no wonder some people look at AI like another web3 situation.

The sensor feedback to stop washing is an old feature common for many years. Automatically measuring detergent could be marginally useful if it worked better than human judgement but it’s hard to implement and it’s saving only a few seconds per load, so most people are never going to see a benefit relative to how much more expensive it’d make the machines.

Worse, it’s changing a washing machine from a standalone device to an internet-connected computer which needs to regularly get software updates. That adds not just cost but increases the odds that something unrelated to the core functionality will break and make the machine unusable.

It also makes them much harder to setup and adds privacy concerns: the last Samsung washing machine I used had an amazingly clunky setup process which required a number of ToS prompts allowing them to resell your data and they insist that you need to grant their app all kinds of permissions on your phone (background location tracking, local network access, Bluetooth scanning, etc.) as part of that process. I am pretty confident that the machine will break before I would ever see a net time savings from not having to measure detergent manually relative to their setup process.

I would also be profoundly unsurprised if they get breached or abuse their data collection practices in some way which would be impossible with a regular standalone device. These features are not being added to satisfy user demand and the real customers don’t care about things like privacy or security unless it costs more than they’re making.

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