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It almost feels easier to disassemble and resew the shirt from recycled fabric. I’m mostly joking, but my point is that physical AI probably implies a complete rethink of every individual routine from first principles: why fold the shirt at all? Why not just-in-time-ironing? We’re focusing on the hard problems because we’re imitating how a human with limited resources would approach the issue.

If you asked a robot to provide you with a fresh and clean shirt every morning - would a home washing machine come into the equation? My best answer is “maybe”, which implies some huge portion of our normal routines will disappear instead of being automated.

If restaurants require no staff, why even have a home kitchen? We’re heading towards a cultural revolution as much as a technology one.

It’s time to find out what value our values really have.

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That could just as easily be turned on it's head too - if you don't need skilled (or any) staff to shop, cook, serve, and then washup, why would you ever NOT eat at home?

Especially if it can operate very quietly, one fairly slow robot could do probably all the housework, and could do it at night when it's literally out of sight and out of mind. It would feel like magic. You'd wake up every morning to a clean house and hot breakfast.

Most people go to restaurants because of the social benefits, not the labour savings.

The idea of people or groups of people siloing themselves into their ultra-convenient homes and never interact with others is a dystopia and a sure sign of an already broken community.

Isn't that the predominant trend already? Since like, the 70s.

Well, that feels like a rather extreme jump to conclusions, and was certainly not something I thought the GP comment was even suggesting.

I don't see any reason why people couldn't adjust from meeting friends at restaurants to hosting friends at home instead. (Unless, of course, your living space is limited)

If you aren't cooking and cleaning up after, what's the difference between that and meeting someone at a restaurant?

I can think of some differences:

1) You get out of your house.

2) You don't have leftovers from a big meal to deal with.

3) You can duck out early without having to kick everyone out..

4) you can fit a LOT more people at a restaurant.

> If you aren't cooking and cleaning up after, what's the difference between that and meeting someone at a restaurant?

I wonder if you realise how dystopian your life already is to consider this question reasonable.

There is a difference between a co-located set of siloed people and a community. The inability to recognise this means your community is already broken.

I don't understand the distinction you are making: two couples (4 people) meeting at a restaurant is, to me, equally social as one couple going to another couple's house to eat dinner.

Four people in a public space interacting with the rest of the community is fundamentally different to four people in an isolated silo.

Having to listen to some drunk two tables over matter away is not desirable community interaction.

It’s nice to be able to carry on a conversation somewhere there isn’t a constant din.

I suppose our restaurant-going experiences must significantly differ. If I'm going to a restaurant with friends for social interaction, it typically doesn't involve the other people in the restaurant who just happen to be there at the same time as me.

If I wanted that, I would go to a bar instead, which is a separate conversation from the one we were having.

However, I don't think I would be so bold as to call either of our lifestyles 'broken'. That feels like a needless attack.

It's not an attack, and there's no ill will here.

It is accurate, though, and is said with sympathy.

Perhaps that's true in your country, but not in the US. That said, the logic doesn't fully hold up. I can see it making sense if the goal were purely for the restaurant experience, but if I could replicate the food at home using a bot, I'd be inviting all my friends over to eat at my place instead.

In the US, I think it would be hard to say that most people go to restaurants for social benefits.

> I'd be inviting all my friends over to eat at my place instead.

Ironically, this reads to me like a rather American thing. Simply based on typical dwelling size. There's a lot of nights at a restaurant (or cheaper: some venue specializing in space + some catering for groups instead of the full restaurant experience) I could buy for the cost of keeping a dining room able to host a non-tiny group of friends around all year. In American sprawl, with those hardly-more-than-cardboard construction standards? Sure, no problem.

> "hardly-more-than-cardboard construction standards"

You are a silly person, what does this even have to do with cooking? Sorry America has got you so upset.

Do you even have a counterpoint to what I said beyond your weird hate for America? Most of the places I have traveled and lived in around the world, most people are not going out to eat for socializing but for the elimination of the labor and time it takes to cook the same meal at home. Sure socialization can play a role but thats not the prime value.

It's a dystopia all right, but one that is already very real. WFH is a reality for many, groceries to the door hasn't become mainstream yet but the supermarket might well be on the trajectory taken by book stores two decades earlier and people who don't attend outdoor or team sports can have surprisingly few occasions to leave home unless they go out of their way to find an excuse.

Although this is your reality most of thr time, people need to go out with family/friends, from time to time. So when they disappear where people are going to go?

I'm in this dystopia: WFH, delivery groceries, delivery meals when I'm feeling lazy. If I didn't have a dog, I'd probably only leave my house on the weekend.

IMO it's not so bad. I don't miss grocery shopping. I do miss walking to work up Powell St.

I do know my neighbors though, and talk to them on a pretty regular basis. I don't like sports especially, but I also do have some recreational hobbies that get me outside.

That's more or less my life, except that I don't live somewhere walkable, and do still buy groceries in person (although I will, especially when my mobility/fatigue/general health issues acting up, use their curbside service), but that store is a 2 minute drive from my house. As I mentioned, I have medical issues that are currently rather sucky and limiting, and being chronic, largely irreversible conditions, well, they aren't gonna get better. Maybe with stem cells one day... Anyway, point being that these sort of services (which, in my case, can also be stuff like... buying the pre-cut fruit rather than whole) can be a pretty big deal for the disabled.

Just because I can order everything I need for home with a couple of taps (which I can, BTW), work from home time to time, and can cook and clean by myself doesn't mean that I don't need to leave home.

Taking a long tour along the neighborhood, to see what I want to buy first hand before pulling the trigger, or seeing an old friend and getting a nice coffee at that café are all valid reasons to go out.

Getting fresh air, regularly walking, seeing a couple of different and unknown faces are regular maintenance tasks for the body and brain.

I don't think humans should hole up at their homes and work/doom scroll/eat/doom scroll/sleep/repeat just because they can. That's unhealthy for every aspect of your body and life to begin with.

That's why I called it a dystopia. After a year of working fully remote I now have the option of walking to an office and I haven't skipped on that a single day. The WFH had its benefits, but all in all it felt like COVID lockdown going into overtime. As in enjoying those few seconds of interaction at the supermarket checkout.

I think there's an episode about this in Love+Death+Robots

hey now, some of us are fed up being around other people.

Alternatively the idea that people don't entertain at home is a sign of a completely broken housing market where you get a human storage unit rather than a home.

A tiny bit of this is already here: our robot vacuum & mop vacuums and mops the living room, kitchen, and dining room every night at 01:00.

Coming downstairs in the morning to a completely clean floor is definitely a tiny bit of that magic.

Having a mop-capable robotic vacuum myself I have a completely different experience. It is simply too stupid(despite being a smart model with camera and room mapping LiDAR) and get stuck at carpet edges and under chairs.

If I want to use it on schedule I need to perpetually have all areas I want it to clean adapted to robotic vacuuming. Which I don't, meaning I have to manually go over the entire area and pick up objects, move chairs, move the small carpets and then empty the all too small storage bin on the robotic vacuum after it have done its rounds.

And don't even get me started on the mopping function.

The end result being that if I take a regular vacuum in my hand and do the pre-robot screening round, I've managed to already vacuum the entire flat with a much more powerful machine in less time than the robot vacuum process would've required.

Yeah, I demand more info about the mop from the OP. What model do you have and are you completely satisfied? I was under the impressionthat most of wet mop models just smear dirt everywhere instead of really cleaning a dirty floor.

Our robot vacuum gets stuck under the bookcase and tangled up with my laptop charging cable.

Bonus: if you never need to leave home, you don't need ironed shirts, either.

> It’s time to find out what value our values really have.

Which is exciting, as long as the net results are better for human beings. I really don't want to see us make human experience worse to ensure that AI is able to be more successful. That defeats the purpose of any technological invention.

Touchscreens in cars is a great example of making the human experience worse for the sake of tech.

Everyone prefers physical tactile buttons for a set interface, but that stands in the way of progress for cars! Guess where the industry is going...

I think that saying this phenomenon is change "for the sake of tech" or for "progress" elides the fact that it is good for some people. Specifically, it is good for auto executives and their shareholders (in their capacity as executives and shareholders, though presumably many of them are drivers as well). It's a cost measure that makes customers' lives worse (and more dangerous) for the entire life of the car in exchange for pennies in their pocket now. This isn't technology getting its way or anything, but people using their power to further their own interests with indifference to the interests of others. That's not new, just the details are.

That's a marketing issue "look OUR car has this shiny big touchscreen now!" which car manufacturers think -- or thought -- users would prefer and buy (with Tesla leading the way). That may change if there is user blowback. (Just drove a new BMW Series 4 the other day and it had the big touch screen but retained the buttons/controls because they're better for settings you change often or while driving. Touchscreen is better for settings you change less frequently or while not driving (like charging).

Personally I really love the combination of both. I want to use physical buttons for things like signalling, lights etc. And I want to use software on screens for things like navigation, music, analytics etc.

I’m sure for _some_ people there’s _some_ truth to what you say.

Why fold clothes? Because they take up less room when you fold them.

Why have a home kitchen? Because some people actually enjoy cooking at home.

I think the bigger point here is a robot that conforms to the way humans work. You seem to be implying that if we just had better focused processes, we could do away with some vestiges of our old way of living, which seems to be the exact opposite point of building an AGI robot.

Like the old (apocryphal?) saying from Ford that if they asked the customers what they want, they would have requested a faster horse.

You can find similar statements people have found from old "man on the street" TV interviews about mobile phones. You have people saying they can use them to call a friend to ask for directions. Or call to ask if a store is open, or if they have an item in stock. Or to make last minute dinner reservations. Turns out they didn't really need to want to "call" to do these things, that was just the previous tech-generation way to get that info and having a mobile app works much better in (many) cases.

Home robotics is going to enable us to reconsider other patterns, that still serve the same outcome. Some will be worse, some better, but on net things will settle out over time.

Even more radical, why keep the same clothes at all? If you can 3d print exactly what you want on demand, with perfect fit, and recycle it after wear, do you even need laundry? Maybe what you need is instead of a closet is some kind of 3d imager of your body / fabrication room.

>we’re imitating how a human with limited resources would approach the issue

in particular the robots with only 2 hands when it could be 3 or 4 and not necessarily the same - say 3 of the same from 3 directions in the horizontal plane and one from above, with probably different "fingers". More hands allows say pipelining the tasks execution, like staged clothes holding or shooting an RPG while one of the hands already ready to put another warhead into the barrel (generally 2 persons job for RPG or mortar) - again our imagination is severely limited by 2 hands and even in such case we've evolved minimal specialization, ie. right/left-handedness.

>If restaurants require no staff, why even have a home kitchen? We’re heading towards a cultural revolution as much as a technology one.

that seems already underway, with Uber[Eats] drivers being the "robots".

>It almost feels easier to disassemble and resew the shirt from recycled fabric.

shred and 3d reprint in a new style. Again, we are already having it in the 0.3 version - the "fast fashion". So we already can preview and project how it would look like in the version 1.0. No kitchen, no washing machines, flat displays or better AR glasses - small urban apartment is enough, a cell like in 5th element, basically a cell in beehive, ... a cell, still more than in Matrix :)

> that seems already underway, with Uber[Eats] drivers being the "robots".

One of the primary benefits of automation is actually a reduction of costs. Uber eats did reduce delivery costs a bit, but probably not to the same order of magnitude true automation could achieve. Historically, you could always "automate" by having some guy do it, but the difference between having a bunch of people copy a book and a mechanical printing press do it is revolutionary.

> shred and 3d reprint in a new style. Again, we are already having it in the 0.3 version - the "fast fashion"

Or bioengineering living clothes.

I've heard several hypotheses for which evolutionary pressures took away our natural body fur and how we got clothing in the first place, but for all the ones I've heard, if we are so resource unbounded that any of the other options makes sense then we may well also be so unbounded as to return to the absence of clothing entirely.

> I’m mostly joking, but my point is that physical AI probably implies a complete rethink of every individual routine from first principles: why fold the shirt at all?

You may have skipped over how clothes are stored and organized in your first principle exercise. Clothes are folded because it saves space and makes it easier to find and select an individual piece of clothing.

It likely depends on the quality of the clothing. If we are talking about a fairly standardized and utilitarian outfit like a t-shirt and straight leg jeans then that would make automated sewing easier.

On the other hand, if someone wants to wear clothing that flatters their body type and sense of style, then the robot is going to need to be able to make different patterns. Things like different types of yokes, pleats, princess seams, collar types, etc.

The next step is clothing that is tailored for an individual. In this case the robot would need to be able to add darts and other modifications in order to adjust the fit. Note that this and the previous step may need to take into account the behavior of the fabric; e.g. how does it stretch.

Finally, in the realm of high end tailoring you have features that are used precisely because they must be done by hand.

That being said, there is precedent for what you are suggesting: traditionally kimonos are unsewn when they are washed and then reassembled.

If robots are doing everything, people will have bigger kitchens...

So long as the robots didn't eliminate their job (and make it very difficult to get another job), in which case they'll have a smaller kitchen (or no kitchen).

Typically, as society has gotten wealthier, the average standard of living has increased. That's just thousands of years of history though.

Washing and folding clothes won't become obsolete. But washing machines might. The robot can "hand" wash your clothes while you sleep. You can reclaim the space that your washing machine took up. Same with the dishwasher. No need to save labor means no need for labor saving devices!

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