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by yourapostasy 2991 days ago
Where is the AI that can fold laundry (clothes, linen, towels)? Do laundry (sort, pre-treat, load, unload, clean lint filter)? Do dishes (clear table, scrape food into compost or trash as appropriate, separate to recycling as appropriate, load, unload, put up)? Keep a lawn (mow, edge, trim hedges, move trimmings to compost, trim trees)? Put up Legos after a 5 year old? Pick up around the house and tell you where it placed or last saw an object when queried?

And where is the AI in a humaniform that does all of the above?

There are tentative steps towards some of those activities, but we’re still in the early years with imbuing our machine intelligence models with the equivalent of our kinesthetic sense, object recognition and classification, and natural language interaction. And it is far from clear that we can get there with purely current statistical heuristic-oriented technology. We can only try, but the amount of effort required just for folding clothes to date reminds me of the elaborate Ptolemaic models, or as if we’re trying to build Excel by poking ones and zeroes into memory.

More tinkering required, be back later.

3 comments

This is the wrong way to think about it to be frank. Animals can do things humans can't that doesn't mean that humans can't come up with ways to make what those animals can obsolete. Humans don't need wings to fly, we don't need to be able to run faster than a leopard to be able to move faster than a leopard.

AI will not always represent itself in a one to one relationship with humans to be able to compete or outcompete us. Just as an example a lot of things have become digitalized which have rendered many elements that used to exist in physical form into digital form, music is a good example of that.

So sure there are areas that machines aren't as good at yet because they haven't practiced it enough but it's literally just a matter of training and improving not some fundamental problem that can't be solved.

> ...but it's literally just a matter of training and improving not some fundamental problem that can't be solved.

I heard this echoed many before when pawing through the library stacks in my uni days looking through the littered corpses of AI trends in the past. I believe that we will eventually get to strong AGI. But after either reading or seeing in-person the hype machine sprout up and wither around symbolic programming, semantic programming, neural nets, fourth generation, expert systems, perceptrons, Connection Machine, etc., I'm gun-shy around any proclamation that achieving strong AGI is "just a matter of...<insert-single-solution-space>". The results so far seem to indicate pure cognitive processing is very amenable to the toolbox we have built up to-date in AI research, hence the breakthroughs in game playing.

Manipulating and interacting with the material world and humans however, and the results are a little patchier; I suspect we have lots more work and research ahead of us than we currently realize. When we do get some initial results like the laundry-folding machines, they're single-purpose and uneconomic for mainstream middle-class adoption (not to speak of working-class), and often with lots of attached caveats like Tesla AutoPilot. Instead of all these discussions of whether or not we will get strong AGI, I prefer to see everyone assume it will happen, and when we don't get the incremental result we were anticipating, say, hmm, that's interesting, I wonder why...

I want to see the hype tamped down to the point we can steadily chip away at the overall problem space, and accelerate AI research results and organically reach strong, economically-available AGI sooner than continue experiencing the disappointing two-steps-forward-one-step-back our industry seems to so far historically take in this field. The hype says we're a sprint away from unlocking all sorts of benefits promised by strong AGI, when we are better served accepting the organic incremental benefits as they occur during our acknowledged marathon, and using those incremental benefits as stepping stones to greater understanding.

It took billions of years to evolve us. We have only been working on this seriously for less than 100 years and the progress is reminiscent of the Cambrian explosion.

Again humans evolved from dumb atoms why is that easier to believe?

Laundry folding robot with actual smarts to it: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DzK38ylMTXk

Inferior to a human, sure. But a start.

We don't create factories around people. Reinvent fashion, kitchens and house plans to fit the machine. That's very doable. Restrict the solution space to find the answer. (Let Marketing handle the user acceptance issues)