[browsingonly]

> AI in its current form has limited usefulness for most people.

That's not what I'm seeing. My mom always wanted Google to just answer questions, and now ChatGPT can. She uses it enough in her daily life that she bought a subscription.

Yes, she knows it hallucinates and you have to double check everything, but so far she finds a ton of use for it even with those caveats.

Now, I agree that a personal servant robot would get a ton of business. Even at new-car prices, it's still cheaper than a human caretaker/maid/butler/etc. And the maid usually doesn't also mow the lawn on a hot day, while a robot would potentially do all kinds of different things without complaint.

[calebio]

> That's not what I'm seeing. My mom always wanted Google to just answer questions, and now ChatGPT can. She uses it enough in her daily life that she bought a subscription.

Reminds me a lot of AskJeeves :)

[bluealienpie]

Google summaries from websites mainly did this before “AI” came around. Now I just don’t know the source unless I dig myself. Would rather it went back to before, or at least they implemented the veracity checks better.

I thought it was interested that the movie looper had argidrones, but what inspired that wasn’t part of the training set or discussion online. I get remarkably bad answers and search results which seem misleading at best.

[fullstop]

I have a feeling that humanoid robots will have other, more intimate, tasks first. Our most primal drives seem to drive the advancement of technology.

Also, mowing the lawn on a very hot day is pretty bad for the grass.

[starik36]

I knew someone was gonna go there.

[fullstop]

Yeah, I felt that someone had to speak up about the health of the lawn.

[spockz]

We already have robot grass trimmers and they work pretty well. Why would you want a crude, inefficient, facsimile of a human push or power an inefficient form of mowing the lawn?

[lobocinza]

For when they don't work pretty well and for a thousand other things besides trimming grasss.

[mastazi]

Cameras worked pretty well, but most people take photos with their phones nowadays. Pro photographers still mostly use cameras though.

I can envision a future where people have a humanoid trimming a small backyard but at the same time the maintenance of e.g. a golf course would be done by dedicated robots.

EDIT: my point is that just like smartphones replaced a number of specialised devices for most people, a humanoid robot could do the same, by virtue of being a general purpose machine

[Benlovescnn]

You're honestly comparing a computer that can poorly answer questions to a fully functioning robot that does chores?

[iammjm]

Well, one of those is already a reality in each persons pocket, and the other is a vision needing a lot of money and effort to implement at all