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Comment by ForHackernews | Hacker News Reader

I'd be mad if washing machines were marketed as a "robot maid"

"Washer" and "dryer" are accepted colloquial terms for these appliances.

I could even see the humour in "washer-bot" and "dryer-bot" if they did anything notably more complex. But we don't need/want appliances to become more complex than is necessary. We usually just call such things programmable.

I can accept calling our new, over-hyped, hallucinating overlords chatbots. But to be fair to the technology, it is we chatty humans doing all the hyping and hallucinating.

The market capitalisation for this sector is sickly feverish — all we have done is to have built a significantly better ELIZA [1]. Not a HIGGINS and certainly not AGI. If this results in the construction of new nuclear power facilities, maybe we can do the latter with significant improvement too. (I hope.)

My toaster and oven will never be bots to me. Although my current vehicle is better than earlier generations, it contains plenty of bad code and it spews telemetry. It should not be trusted with any important task.

[1] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA

A woman from 1825 would probably happily accept that description though (notwithstanding that the word “robot” wasn’t invented yet).

A machine that magically replaces several hours of her manual work? As far as she’s concerned, it’s a specialized maid that doesn’t eat at her table and never gets sick.

19 century washing machines were called washing/mangling machines.

They were not called maids nor personified.

Machines do get "sick" though, and they eat electricity.

Negligible cost compared to a real maid in 1825. The washing machine also doesn’t get pregnant by your teenage son and doesn’t run away one night with your silver spoons — the upkeep risks and replacement costs are much lower.

They do and will randomly kill people

Mostly from dryers. I assumed mostly from failure to clean the lint but the following link suggested that that was the cause only 27% of the time.

https://www.nfpa.org/education-and-research/research/nfpa-re...

In the table from the Pdf link failure to clean was the only category that resulted in deaths.

Dawg what kind of washing machines are you using?

In 1825? Certainly not one that ran on electricity, much less something that had meaningful safety features.

I used to play with a Maytag machine machine motor. It had a single cylinder, ran on gasoline, and had a kick-start. It was from, IIRC, 1926.

The exhaust would have been plumbed to the outdoors, but other than that the expectation was that there would be a gas-fired engine running in the house while the washing was done.

Samsung?

In 1825 both electricity prices and replacement costs would have been unaffordable for anyone, though. Because there was literally no prize you could pay to get these things.

Shame we are in 2025 huh? Ask someone today if they accept washing machine as robot maid.

The point is that, as far as development of AI is concerned, 2025 consumers are in the same position as the 1825 housewife.

In both cases, automation of what was previously human labor is very early and they’ve seen almost nothing yet.

I agree that in the year 2225 people are not going to consider basic LLMs artificial intelligences, just like we don’t consider a washing machine a maid replacement anymore.

I get mad at semantic arguments that distract from creative output.

Aside from the obviously humorous content the rest is useless allegory (I want a recipe not a story and need some code, not personal affection for software engineering) and no true scotsman (no true adherent of my native language would call it a robotic maid!)

As social creatures humans are pretty repetitive.

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