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Comment by NegativeLatency | Hacker News Reader

Crosses fingers for a general purpose laundry folding bot

We've come a long way from watching 50x speedups [1] to real-time [2] videos of watching robots fold clothes, student-style.

[1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=gy5g33S0Gzo

[2] https://www.pi.website/blog/pi0

Off-topic, but even though it was 16 years ago, the robot looks so beautiful and well-designed. It looks so aesthetic!

It's the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willow_Garage PR2 (according to the paper linked in the description.) It definitely had a design style - which mostly expressed "we have a lot of money to sink in to robots" rather than "anything we are doing has a market" though to be fair they had a lot of interesting spinoffs - just not from the robot itself :-)

To me it does not seem like progress that, on a stressed and finite planet, humanity might "need" an energy- and resource-intensive machine to complete a task as physically undemanding (and even frivolous) as folding a sheet. But here we are.

I see people taking cars for distances that would take 10-15 minutes to walk. If we're hunting to cut down on inefficiencies, there is a lot of stuff we could attack before a robot arm becomes impactful enough to care about.

I genuinely don’t understand this binary thinking. You could easily turn it around: if we’re cutting down on inefficiencies, laundry folding robots will give people more time to exercise.

Or, why bother going to the gym if you don’t eat healthily? Or, why bother eating healthy if you don’t go to the gym.

Not trying to give you a hard time specifically, it’s just a pattern that I feel left out of. If A and B are both improvements over status quo, why does one obviate the other?

True, but both of you are missing my main point.

>if we’re cutting down on inefficiencies, laundry folding robots will give people more time to exercise [...] going to the gym

Exercising while a machine folds one's laundry is akin to running on a treadmill instead of running in the park. The technology is the inefficiency.

Have a couple of kids and then revisit this comment =). Laundry folding is probably family's most disliked trivial chore, and becomes a non-trivial chore if you have a large family with lots of activities that generate a constant stream of dirty uniforms and gym clothes.

People are consuming useless plastic toys at an unfathomable rate. It's one example, but it likely contributes so much more to the stress on our planet than actual robots capable of providing actual utility by a huge margin. I'll question the use of humanity's resources once we reel in behaviors like that a bit.

You leave my Lego collection out of this.

I just want my laundry folding robot to run slower than me, and not be able to do karate backflips etc in the event of some undesired scope creep happening one day.

House scale Faraday cages and an airlock for fiber optics. Should be sufficient until maybe 2032.

I've got a collection of socks needing darning!

Oh great now you’re outsourcing the “where the hell did the other sock go and why are there always odd numbers coming out of the dryer” existential crises to AI. Is there no aspect of the human experience you won’t cede to machines?

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