Funnily enough my Roomba is the ONE thing I rely on to argue against the “robotic uprising”. When people fawn over 1X’s Neo or Tesla humanoid I can happily testify that as relatively long term mobile robot owner… it sucks! In theory it’s amazing right, in theory you program it, go out while it clean the place, go back to charge itself, etc. So much free time for you now, right?
No… you need to make way for it. You need to actually setup the place for such a basic task. Think you can just “wing it” and let it work while you sip on a cocktail outside? Sure, come back to find it in an enraged BDSM session, rope all over it as it pulls over a char with cable entangle deep inside.
Honestly it’s like AI more broadly : the concept is so simple to understand and the result is something we ALL want… that every single time there is an improvement, no matter how small, we love to speculate that truly this time we are getting “close” to make it work. Truth is, we have no idea of the complexity of the problem.
I often use scanner / printers as an example. Its like a robot with a very specific and easy job - feed the paper through one sheet at a time. They’ve been around for 40 years, mass produced, they still cant reliably do that one thing.
With a lot of tech, it seems like solving the first 90% of a problem is easy, then the next 5% very hard and expensive, but the last few percent is impossible.
We see this with so many things - printers, roombas, self driving cars.
My best buy ever was a $ 20 “dumb roomba”: It was just a little ball with a battery inside that made random movements, and you could put it in a little “cage”.
It did a horrible job, like a 5 year old half-assing it, put hey - $ 20, 0 effort for a little help? Everything was slightly less dusty and hairy, and it pushed most of it into the corners. Saved like 3 minutes per day.
No, it was also quiet. More quiet than the < $ 100 cheap sweep robots with rotating brushes that actually attempt to capture dirt in a compartment inside.
Sad end, though: One day, it decided to just roll away and we never found it again. We thought it’d be under something, but when we moved out a few years ago, it became clear that it decided to find a new home long ago.
Funnily enough my Roomba is the ONE thing I rely on to argue against the “robotic uprising”. When people fawn over 1X’s Neo or Tesla humanoid I can happily testify that as relatively long term mobile robot owner… it sucks! In theory it’s amazing right, in theory you program it, go out while it clean the place, go back to charge itself, etc. So much free time for you now, right?
No… you need to make way for it. You need to actually setup the place for such a basic task. Think you can just “wing it” and let it work while you sip on a cocktail outside? Sure, come back to find it in an enraged BDSM session, rope all over it as it pulls over a char with cable entangle deep inside.
Honestly it’s like AI more broadly : the concept is so simple to understand and the result is something we ALL want… that every single time there is an improvement, no matter how small, we love to speculate that truly this time we are getting “close” to make it work. Truth is, we have no idea of the complexity of the problem.
Related https://rodneybrooks.com/why-todays-humanoids-wont-learn-dexterity/ who did make Roombas and more.
It sucked you say?
While it cuts?
I often use scanner / printers as an example. Its like a robot with a very specific and easy job - feed the paper through one sheet at a time. They’ve been around for 40 years, mass produced, they still cant reliably do that one thing.
With a lot of tech, it seems like solving the first 90% of a problem is easy, then the next 5% very hard and expensive, but the last few percent is impossible.
We see this with so many things - printers, roombas, self driving cars.
My best buy ever was a $ 20 “dumb roomba”: It was just a little ball with a battery inside that made random movements, and you could put it in a little “cage”.
It did a horrible job, like a 5 year old half-assing it, put hey - $ 20, 0 effort for a little help? Everything was slightly less dusty and hairy, and it pushed most of it into the corners. Saved like 3 minutes per day.
Is ot noisy though? My cheap robot is so fuckyn noisy!
No, it was also quiet. More quiet than the < $ 100 cheap sweep robots with rotating brushes that actually attempt to capture dirt in a compartment inside.
Sad end, though: One day, it decided to just roll away and we never found it again. We thought it’d be under something, but when we moved out a few years ago, it became clear that it decided to find a new home long ago.