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Comment by ziofill | Hacker News Reader

There’s nothing I want more than a robot that does house chores. That’s the real 10x multiplier for humans to do what they do best.

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I'd pay $2k for something that folds my laundry reliably. It doesn't need arms or legs, just like my dishwasher doesn't need arms or legs. It just needs to let me dump in a load of clean laundry and output stacks of neatly folded or hung clothing.

There are many services that for ~$3/lb will pick up, wash, dry, fold/hang, and deliver 10lb's of laundry every week for $1,500/yr.

Laundry folding machines already exist. You can find cheap ones on AliExpress.

https://www.aliexpress.com/w/wholesale-clothes-folding-machi...

It's called a "house cleaner" and they only cost ~$150 (area and all varies) bi-weekly. I'll shit a brick (and then have the robot clean it up) if a robot is ever cheaper than ~$4000/yr.

A robot will definitely cost less than $30/hr eventually. But you'll be running it a lot more than a few hours every other week.

Yeah, but a robot will work 24/7, not 2h byweekly -_-

do you need a robot to work in your house 24/7?

Why not? If it's done with all the chores, I can have it make some silly woodworking / art project for Etsy to earn its keep, or just loan it out to neighbors.

In the same way it's hard to earn money from using AI to make art, I don't see Etsy projects made by affordable domestic robots selling above cost.

Well perhaps not at night, but otherwise there’s always something to clean, something to fix, something to cook, take care of the yard.. heck I might need two robots ^^’

Hopefully in the next decade we’ll get there.

Vision+language multimodal models seem to solve some of the hard problems.

To me this is such a weird wish. Why would you not want to care for your home and the people living there? Why would you want to have a slave taking these activities from you?

I'd rather have less waged labour and more time for chores with the family.

Because it's boring and tedious. And no, a robot is not a slave.

Yeah, except that future doesn't need us. By us I mean those of us who don't have $1B to their name.

Do you really expect the oligarchs to put up with the environmental degradation of 8 billion humans when they can have a pristine planet to themselves with their whims served by the AI and these robots?

I fully anticipate that when these things mature enough we'll see an "accidental" pandemic sweep and kill off 90% of us. At least 90%.

Oligarchs would use the robots to kill people instead of a pandemic. A virus carries too much risk of affecting the original creators.

Fortunately, robotic capability like that basically becomes the equivalent of Nuclear MAD.

Unfortunately, the virus approach probably looks fantastic to extremist bad actors with visions of an afterlife.

I'd expect Musk and Bezos to know about von Neumann replicators; factories that make these robots staffed entirely by these robots all the way to the mines digging minerals out of the ground… rapid and literally exponential growth until they hit whatever the limiting factor is, but they've both got big orbial rockets now, so the limit isn't necessarily 6e24 kg.

What do humans do best?

Everything everything else is worse at.

I mean to use their time to pursue their passions and interests, not cleaning up the kitchen or making the bed or doing laundry...

Given time to "pursue their passions and interests", most people chose to turn their brain to soup on social media.

but most people think they are better than most people.

Browse Instagram, apparently.

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