To quote the lyrics/meme, we used to pray for times like this. This is what robotics should be used for.
Unless something is from Japan, then it's perfect and any criticism is because you don't appreciate its unique cultural heritage.
That being said, >95% of the world lives outside US and in recent times (culminating with orange man's second term but started way before) US has alienated literally every single other country, democratic or not. This is what happens when reins are firmly held by unstable people full of pettiness and mental issues, plus visibly corrupt too.
So division deepens as seen also here, and as much as 20th century was a century of US, 21st century is and will be one of China. Every move US makes now just pushes whole situation further into that direction. So folks cheer for their own camp, not some larger common group of aligned friends.
That sounds like a good thing and it is. But it’s not a US story. In fact, other wealthy countries didn’t just already have a higher baseline life expectancy pre-COVID, they rebounded to it post-COVID sooner than the U.S. was able to its already lower level.
So what this actually is, is a story of “global modern medicine good”, and unfortunately, even within that, the U.S. is among the worst performing.
i have one good example: the rare earth probelm. i saw many artices on this topic in reddit/x, and many times, it comes with a pic of an old farmer/dude in a dirty environment doing it's work. so it implies this is just a dirty work, western countires dont want to do it is because it's dirty and they dont want to harm the environment. only china dont care about this,
exmaple link: 1. https://www.channelnewsasia.com/world/us-china-rare-earths-d... 2. https://www.thenationalnews.com/business/economy/2026/07/16/...
but in reality, its not true. its only true long time before, assume china didn't have advanced tech on this is totally insane, consider china has joined this indsutry for decaseds and lead in the tech. but in most comments area, people still assume it's dirty so only china is doing it.
if you dont know your 'enermy', you will keep lose. This happens so many times.
HN has lots of hellbanned bots lately (I have showdead on [1]) but I never notice ones pushing a political slant. But I suppose nation states conducting a campaign on Hacker News would be much too cunning to make the bots obvious
[1] because many posts get wrongly flagged, apparently in part by trigger-happy users who will flag anything with incidental similarities to AI prose (everyone, PLEASE STOP DOING THAT), in part because HN's automoderation is severe for new users, and in part because plenty of people get hellbanned either unfairly or although they do still write plenty of worthwhile posts. I even rescued someone who it turned out had been hellbanned by a mod by accident.
I'm simply asking who are these people being genocided?
But last I checked the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a few thousand years older than our sitting president.
Lets be frank, every single issue we have with the CCP is either also being done by the west or in the works.
chinese oppression of the uighurs is nothing compared to whats going on in Gaza.
china forces prisoners to peel garlic while american prisoners are paid pennies a day to fight wildfires while being prohibited from being paid for those very same skills as firefighters when rehabilitated.
america is quickly workin on legislation to to make criticism of certain foreign governments illegal with very real reprucussons (revoking passports).
At least china has a working power grid and high speed train network.
Making some kind of equivalence of the two in terms of the rights of the individual is so ridiculous that nobody is going to take anything you say after that seriously, you do your arguments a disservice by doing it.
Yet.
During my undergrad I worked on a project where we set off a bunch of walking robots, recorded their walks, and then used the data as the basis for a learned walking controller. I see this Xiaomi model as pretty much like that.
It's a nice technology and maybe could lead to better folding one day but unfortunately it's not "finally we have robots that can do our laundry" (yet).
Open Source is a good thing, regardless of where it comes from
If we want open source technology we should recognize that the current arrangement is non sustainable - the moment china doesn't have an american AI industry foil to play against it'll immediately close. It's up to the US to build more open source models. We already own the content used to train them, collectively. We should own the results as well. Make the big AI companies release weights.
It is Robotics! Finally doing my dishes and laundry for pete sake! And hopefully help me to find stuff I keep forgetting where I put it.
Technology got weaponized against the average citizen.
It has become a synonym for unemployment, enshittification, mass surveillance and social erosion.
If this video appeared in 60's or 70's, people would be in awe imagining the future where robots do everything.
People are and should be skeptical of this. The natural response would be
a) It will put me out of a job
b) I won't be able to afford it anyway.
And that's the real value - you don't have to burn the candle of your life away to get what you want. You'll have so much more time now that you aren't AST wrangling.
Opportunity cost is vanishing (or at least the cost is multiple orders of magnitude smaller). And that's the most exciting thing that's happened in tech since the internet.
I'll probably be able to make my own phone operating system.
I'll probably be able to decompile N64 games, port them to Rust, combine them, extend them. In a weekend.
I'll probably be able to make my own music management platform while simultaneously working on a few robotics projects.
A find my phone button.
Automate everything.
And that's maybe a month of projects.
So much time because you were fired and have nothing to do. Nothing is as good as oodles of quality time worrying about funding your family's needs. It's amazing.
AI will take jobs from a massive amount of avg and high income people.
The disruption ahead is getting pillowed right now due to physical limitations of progress like amount of energy, building DC, doing research, training models (its still takes 1-3 month).
Also a massive buffer will be the boomer going into retirement.
Depending on the speed of all of this, we might get a lot poorer before we get abundance everyerwer
Also: you can literally make incredible software that would take half a year right now for $200/month. Or free if you run local open weights.
You can do branding, marketing, design. You can create comics and movies and video games.
You can make an AI tool right now and get customers today. You have no idea how wildly popular this segment is. How much people willingly engage with this stuff and want it.
Yet you choose to disengage and complain about a future that hasn't happened.
It's more likely that firms will need to hire more to stay competitive. Or that workers will fire their old jobs and break out on their own.
Something I used to think was impossible: competing with Google, Apple, Stripe. Not anymore. I think you can compete with anyone.
Right now we have massive investment into AI and Compute. So massive, its basically unseen. We are adding more compute than ever before.
This compute can do work and it can do now very arbitrary work. Insurance case work, software development, image generation etc. Everything it can't do today, it will be able to do tomorrow.
Now we as humans are getting steamrolled already. I have a handful of work collegues which are worse than an LLM and I would prefer to have them gone just because its easier for me to explain to an LLM what I want/need instead of doing the same thing with these collegues.
But AI is not stopping, every single day we use AI and we give AI hints like a thumbs up or down or complain to the AI that this is not what I wanted, the AI companies get a signal they can train for. We already today have build the biggest global Reinforcement Loop every. We share it with a handful of companies, but every company gets enough RL signals.
If that AI model has learned something, a billion people can use it. So the investment in teaching an AI model a new trick, is a 1000x cheaper than teaching this trick every human.
You might say "okay but i don't want to use AI" but then someone else comes along and does it.
And AI tokens are not cheap. They are expensive and now work has a money value. If I'm a boss and the AI is 10x faster and 10x chceaper than a human, its very easy what i will do: I will reduce my workforce to optimize for AI usage.
While all of the Soft AI stuff is happening, the robotics are leapfrogging progress. Automatisation in self driving trucks also progresses.
We are now in a timeline of full automatisation.
And my personal assumption is, that this hasn't even really started yet because we are 5-15 years away from the real AI AGI progress.
I don't think people will be able to compete with Google, Apple and co. They already have jumped on AI. Google is market leader. And these companies do have the money for a full AI transition.
Besides that, Google has physical infrastructure around the globe, they have their own undersee internet cables.
But for sure it will disrupt software and plenty of companies one way or the other. And if these companes and we as humans are not acting upon fast, we are gone.
Industry is slow and even if disruption means, that the market will still be there but will look very different, disruption hurts a lot for an economy.
not "might", will
and it's a hell of a leap to assume massive abundance will follow -- for someone, perhaps, but not the average person
But yeah lets see what going to happen.
No, we don't.
I wish we did, that would be amazing.
There have been demos like this over a decade. But they are just that, demos. Demos done in a controlled environment.
If there was a robot I could buy that could effectively fold laundry or do dishes, I would gladly drop 50-100k on it, but such a thing doesn't exist and likely won't for a long time.
Also dishes are the easiest chore to do around the house, especially if you clean them after use instead of letting them pile up.
Except for people who grew up rich and are used to having "help" in the home, most regular folks find having paid help in their home more than a bit awkward.
And not to move the goal posts, because my original post did only mention laundry and dishes, but I assume once a robot reached a point where it could do laundry/dishes effectively without supervision, that it could do a variety of other tedious household tasks. 50-100k would be well worth it IMO.
I quite enjoy doing laundry myself though, it's a routine I do at night and find relaxing.
The whole thing where the chef has every single ingredient ready to go in a separate bowl? (which in real life would be an insane amount of dishes to do) You could do that for real and let the robot worry about the dishes.
What will you do pray tell with that extra time? I doubt it will be spent on loftier pursuits. In fact I'm quite certain that for the vast majority it won't be.
Wall-E was a documentary - just shot in the past.
By your logic, why shouldn't I get rid of my dishwasher and laundry machine?
Agricultural technology feeds the people we have around the globe (arguably we have too many people for the planet's capacity but that's a separate topic). Meanwhile some technologies just feed the hedonistic instinct.
Of course the line is blurry in places but cleaning up your messes is definitely the top end of the hedonism treadmill. I may be radical in my views here as I consider a personal automobile one such hedonistic luxury that the society would be better off without. Consider the Netherlands here. By just about any metric you care to measure it's one of the best flourishing societies in the world handily beating the US and Canada on an array of well being stats. Yet they are actively shunning cars and pushing their society towards the "inconvenience" of walking, cycling and public transport. Their society as a whole benefits in many ways.
Most of the world (with the USA leading the pack) is conveniencing itself into an early grave.
I think what I'm struggling with is what criteria (or who) determines which inconveniences are acceptable to remove and which ones aren't. For example, why is a standard kitchen dishwasher acceptable but a robot that saves you 5-10 minutes a day of loading/unloading the dishwasher not? Is a regular Kenmore dishwasher acceptable, or does it push too far towards the top of the hedonism treadmill, and people should have to do dishes by hand?
> What will you do pray tell with that extra time? I doubt it will be spent on loftier pursuits. In fact I'm quite certain that for the vast majority it won't be.
I actually agree with you here. Judging by how most people spend their time, the majority will fill 10 minutes of toil saved with Youtube shorts and Instagram, but there are still a minority of people who will put that time normally spent on toil towards higher aims.
For the former category, if they were just doing mindless toil anyway, what does it really matter if they waste that time some other way?
As for who decides what is hedonism and what is a necessity? I think the society does - in a soft way. When people see others adopt more discipline and shun convenient doodads for slightly more physical work the society as a whole becomes a bit more badass.
I personally would rather bike and walk everywhere. Even if it takes longer and exerts more effort. If some day the majority sees it my way the society as a whole starts to soft push in that direction by altering the city infrastructure to be friendlier to bikes and pedestrians and less accommodating to cars. That's just one example.
Doing your dishes in the sink may feel like a terrible chore if you grew up with a dishwasher. I did not. I can live without one just fine. The benefit is that you get a bit of zen time away from the screen and there is no dishwasher to break and leak every few years.
In the age of LLMs and A.I., the real travesty is that computers must be manually controlled at all times, and we must invest manual labor into configuring them, as monkeys at the keyboard, and we must be denied any sort of orchestration or automation that would be available at the enterprise level.
> There is a big difference between automating laundry that would otherwise take hours of hard manual labor every week and automating 15 minutes of light house chores.
It's only a difference of degrees, not kinds. What if the robot only shaved 5 minutes off that 15 minutes? Would that acceptable or not?
To offer some more of my own perspective, I find certain chores like dishes and laundry absolutely unbearable, and would love the choice to have those done automatically so I can spend my time on other things that I actually find enjoyment and satisfaction in. For example, doing dishes and cleaning up after cooking takes up a substantial amount of time, and I've love if I could spend that time doing more productive things in the kitchen instead. I would much more frequently make more elaborate and high-quality meals in my kitchen if I knew I wasn't on the hook for cleaning everything up afterwards. I have an endless amount of lawn and garden work too (much of which I enjoy doing it), so that's another thing that a robotic dishwasher could free me up to do. I'd love the choice to choose the toil that I find more satisfaction in.
I don't want to be held back just because some people will be using the time saved on Instagram. Scrollers going to scroll. It's inevitable that some people will get "filtered" by technology.
You’re supposed to clean as you cook. Every little spill or splat gets wiped immediately. There is no cleaning afterwards.
Dirty dishes don’t go into the sink but directly into a dish washer. The only chore that remains is unloading clean dishes in preparation for the next dirty load. It’s all about organization and planning. It all fits together.
Ah, Calvinism rears it's ugly head again. Life is suffering, God doesn't want it otherwise.
Did you watch it actually fold that shirt? Super slow and bad at it.
How bad do the folds in your laundry need to be for them to be no different then just being dumped in a pile? As long as we are above that point the robot is useful.
Here are some tips:
Plus it’s obvious it will get better.
Eh, this still has value for me if it can do it reliably. Leaving a robot to badly fold my t-shirts overnight and then badly put them in my closet the next day is fine. I don't need my casual wear beautifully folded. But I do need it organised, and that's apparently a chore I'll just never learn to like doing.
Also if this scale anywhere close to LLMs in 2 years they will fold at super human speed and much better than me.
The model is software on a server or in the cloud, so the real question is are there any show stoppers from the hardware for going faster?
Paradoxically, wholesale electric costs are negative during the day here in California[1], especially in the Salinas region. In theory you could get paid to tumble dry clothes.
I’m still waiting for it to peel, slice n dice onions so that I do not have to cry while doing so, and not pay $8k for that robot.
Anyone in robotics can tell you that building an 80% solution is doable, very fast. Covering the last 20% can take your entire lifespan
Until it can check all pockets for tissue paper...
Time and time and time and time and time again, technologists are always naïve to never realize that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
I am expecting the opposite effect to happen with the actual use of robotics. Mass displacement of every sector of labor.
This is not ruled out.
Actually, it seems like 99% of the comments are glazing this with zero skepticism actually. If anything the comments are too enthusiastic and lack the measured discernment that was more common on HN 5+ years ago.
I disagree. We should use robotics to extend our reach into hazardous environments, enhance our physical capabilities, or to provide a steady handling of things where it's absolutely needed - doing laundry in my household is none of these.
Folding laundry takes me 10 mins every 10 days. I organize my closet once in a while according to my sense of fashion, and now I'll just need to keep that structure. I don't always like to do these chores, but I have no issue in acknowledging them as part of my responsibilities. Why would I even automate[0] that?
Robotics is costly, and I see no way how that would change anytime soon. That isn't a flaw of some kind either, it's rather just one of the limitations that needs to be accounted for, neglecting that would be detrimental to the future I envision.
Don't get me wrong, I love robotics with a passion, as engineer I like to tinker, and I'm a big admirer of FESTOs bionic research[1]. It's just that the field suffers from an "overpromised and underdelivered" aura as far as I can remember, and I remember the presentation of ASIMO[2] 26 years ago.
Some people would like to see the field hyped up, focused on the consumer like every other field in tech, probably for financial gain, but I personally see the value in its downplay. To be honest, I love these reality checks, as I see them as a valuable part of the learning process all together - a journey for what it means to automate, and what it means to define as human natural chore.
[1]: https://www.festo.com/us/en/e/about-festo/research-and-devel...
But the downside is that won't we all just turn into the obese, stupid humans at the start of the WALL-E film?
Mindfulness teaches us that we can enjoy the washing up, the laundry, planting seeds, tending the garden. It connects us to something. Without this will we end up with a rise in mental health issues, because for one thing people will just end up on social media in the time they save.
Just a thought.
Maybe if you can shave an hour every day from chores, you will actually have the energy to enjoy physical activities
edit for nuance: Sure, it did for some people I suppose. But they are the exception.
I've got 2 kids. I'm always doing laundry and loading the dishwasher. How much of that is just higher expectations of cleanliness? Back when washing clothes involved going to the river all day, kids would get sewn into their clothes for winter. These days they have 5 outfit changes a day. I'm certain that my dishwasher means everyone just grabs a clean mug/glass/bowl rather than just rinsing a dirty one. I use a computer all day to get stuff done. But that just means my boss expects more stuff to be done. The baseline shifted.
A few hundred years ago people mostly lived near where they were born and didn't travel much. Now we get in our cars to drive a few hours to visit our family and friends. But they only moved far away because the car enabled it.
Obviously there are benefits - especially for those who find dirt upsetting - but have we actually changed the balance of leisure time very much?
People have an extremely rosey view of the past shaped by the fact that period dramas are acted by modern Hollywood actors.
Anything that frees us from labour is good.
Including labour itself? All we're doing is optimising the amount of time we can dedicate to work.
Chill. Your brain is the product of the past. Reread that: your brain is anachronistic and outmoded.
We get to live in the future now. Count yourself lucky. You're one of the few that got to witness the birth of flight culminating in landing on the moon, except in this case your floppy disk became your personal shopper and stay-at-home Michelin star chef and part time driver.
It's okay to feel a bit of discomfort. It's hard to believe this is actually happening in our lifetimes, but it is! And that's so cool.
So sit back and enjoy the future.