[user_7832]

I'm not sure why some comments here are so pessimistic. I was grinning ear to ear while seeing the video. You're telling me we've finally got robots that can do our laundry? And the model is at least as free as beer?

To quote the lyrics/meme, we used to pray for times like this. This is what robotics should be used for.

[GordonS]

There tends to be a lot of low-key (and some not-so-low-key) anti-Chinese xenophobia on HN, so that's likely a big part of it too.

[sph]

More like pro-US exceptionalism, and any announcement for products created outside of it (whether it's EU or China) is met with doubts and skepticism.

Unless something is from Japan, then it's perfect and any criticism is because you don't appreciate its unique cultural heritage.

[kakacik]

Is that so shocking on dominantly US forum? I wouldn't expect different situation, people are not 100% objective even if they try hard.

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.

[mlrtime]

There has not been a pro-US exceptionalism tone in any HN thread in awhile. Go to any thread recently and it's pretty anti-capitalism/anti-US.

[desterothx]

In all open weight model discussions there is at least some anti-Chinese sentiment

[h8hawk]

They are likely Effective Altruists highly attuned to AGI (With current LLM's) risks, fearing an LLM uprising and human extinction, which they regard as the world's most critical challenge.

[HPsquared]

Ironic, given the effectiveness of the open weights models that are distributed altruistically.

[baal80spam]

I've definitely noticed even more than that - any submissions painting the current USA in a good light are instantly and mercilessly buried (you can check my submissions for examples), while anything even remotely on the "USA bad" side gets to the top. It's really a sad state of affairs.

[adjejmxbdjdn]

You may take this as “USA bad”, comment, but let’s take the U.S. life expectancy reaches record high (in 2024) link you posted.

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.

[apropos_]

I tried to read the Washington Post op-ed piece you shared on reasons to be optimistic about America’s future. As soon as I scrolled down, the content was replaced by a patriotic fireworks animation and a paywall. Seemed a bit on the nose.

[thegrim33]

aka this very thread - top comment and most of the entire comment section has been taken over by literally "how dare anyone say anything even remotely negative about China, what's wrong with you".

[yanhangyhy]

i think it's because the media. it never tells the real china, instead it's full of fake news and sterotypes. so people outside of china cannot get the real information.

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.

[Gareth321]

It's strange because my impression has been pro-Chinese comments on HN. I suppose it depends on the topic, the time of day, and how many bots each government is employing on a given day for the key words and their compute budget. This submission seams rather balanced to me.

[bob778]

Is there evidence of any state-sponsored bots at all? It seems like this has become an accepted fact but I don’t see any data indicating it’s actually real.

[versteegen]

Pretty sure there isn't.

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.

[shevy-java]

Well. I already decided some time ago that I don't want to have my money go into US corporations as long as the orange King is living out his genocidal fantasies (and even without that, I am already annoyed to no ends about Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and Google abusing everyone else so blatantly and violently, including buying legislation - look at the mandatory age sniffing movement before you can access information on the www any longer; this is fascism, and children are abused as fake reason for change here). But I am not all that happy about China becoming so dominant in the whole product chain either. I think the production should be more balanced world-wide, globally. And also, very much so, locally. I am also aware that this is very hard to do, for various reasons, but still if I have a little influence then I really would rather not empower the USA or China any more than they already abuse everyone else here. And both do, by the way.

[adamtaylor_13]

Genuinely curious, who is Donald Trump genociding? Or am I misunderstanding what you mean by "genocidal fantasies"?

[idiotsecant]

A fantasy is something you'd like to do but don't.

[mwigdahl]

Sure, but the original comment said "living out" those fantasies.

[adamtaylor_13]

Right, but the original commenter said "living out his genocidal fantasies", which means he is actively performing genocide on someone and it also implies this is something being done with active, excitement.

I'm simply asking who are these people being genocided?

[HDBaseT]

Palestinians.

[TitaRusell]

Palestinians? Israelis are loathe to admit it but that country wouldn't last a year without support- from non Jews!

[adamtaylor_13]

I disagree with your assertion that Trump is somehow committing genocide against Palestinians while also acknowledging that the situation there is awful and I pray it ends soon.

But last I checked the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a few thousand years older than our sitting president.

[some_random]

This is one of the most pro-china forums out there, what are you talking about

[cultofmetatron]

western elites are currently at odds with the chinese elites and every impressionable idiot is being inundates with antichinese propaganda.

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.

[idiotsecant]

It's possible to intelligently discuss the merits of Chinese society and also acknowledge that it's a brutal autocracy.

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.

[throwaway-11-1]

The rights of which individuals? You’re familiar with nspm-7, right?

[bryanlarsen]

That you can freely talk about nspm-7 on an American forum without fear of being disappeared shows that America and China are not at the same level.

Yet.

[cultofmetatron]

"Yet" is the keyword. it won't be long before we arent' any different from china at the rate we are going at and I think a lot of us would be better off preventing the west from turning into an oppressive autocracy instead of judging china.

[HDBaseT]

You can talk about it, but the hidden social credit system operated by the 3-letter agencies in conjunction with techno-feudalism oligarchs designed explicitly to bypass constitutional rights is very real and has very real long term consequences for your privacy and freedom.

[idiotsecant]

The fact that this text still exists alone is enough to prove my point.

[coldtea]

Nation wide NIH.

[sneak]

It’s not just HN. The USG has been manufacturing consent for war with China (trade or otherwise) in the US population for decades. Same goes for Iran.

[ModernMech]

I saw robots doing this in tech demos 15 years ago. And even those robots weren't doing anything new. Like all AI models, this is just AI repackaging and rebranding of things that robots have already been programmed to do using more classical control methods. The idea to do everything via AI was of course thought of for a long time, but the conclusion has been we have faster and more reliable methods to do the same thing with less compute, and that's still true.

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).

[backlava12]

Yeah exactly. I've been seeing demos like this for ages. I'm kinda shocked at the lack of skepticism in the comments here. The hackernews comment sections have changed a lot these past couple years...

[spaceman_2020]

Every single thing that’s come out of China in the entire AI/Robotics space lately has been a massive net positive for the world

Open Source is a good thing, regardless of where it comes from

[idiotsecant]

It's also relevant that China isn't open sourcing results because that's something China will do forever on some philosophical grounds. They do it because it is currently in the best interests of the Chinese state (and the world, as it turns out, coincidentally) but as soon as that stops being true there is zero chance it'll continue to be open source.

[bad_haircut72]

Yeah the US needs to step up with its Open AI research here, they should start some kind of "Open AI" collective to release models free to the world, do it all open like

[spaceman_2020]

So I'm supposed to hate this because of what China MIGHT do in a future neither you nor I can predict?

[idiotsecant]

Is there someone saying you should hate something?

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.

[21asdffdsa12]

Reminds me of the american reprint market for books back in the colonial war area.

[torginus]

Eh, I take what I can get. A lawyer doesn't argue that his client is innocent (though that might be tha case), because of some innate sense of justice, but because he gets to paid so.

[idiotsecant]

Yes, this is the correct attitude. Fire is useful, but don't forget it burns you when you stop paying attention.

[ksec]

I keeping saying this, the best AI / LLM coming out isn't another question / answer chatbot or automate my email and essay.

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.

[fragmede]

I have so many airtags because otherwise I'd lose all my shit.

[allisdust]

This super interesting link showing things that were impossible even a couple of years back, sitting below the day old news about Kagi's me too browser tells everything about HN audiences. West will fall behind in robotics and mostly because of the wrong priorities of its VCs and developers.

[21asdffdsa12]

But can it goldplate oysters?

[lp4v4n]

The pessimism in the comments here is entirely the reflection of the times we're living in.

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.

[mlrtime]

This seems more likely than racism, or us exceptionalism as mentioned above.

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.

[echelon]

Those of us who liked the open web and P2P and hacking on projects all the time are seeing these models as a way to rebuild the internet in a shape that pleases us. To build anything and everything we want. Sans opportunity cost.

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.

[noisy_boy]

> You'll have so much more time now that you aren't AST wrangling.

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.

[numpad0]

The whole thing feels like that the US collectively isn't feeling confident about itself in the coming creativity-limited world that AI/AGIs supposedly bring, and that it's not happy about that pessimistic rational projections. I don't know exactly why wouldn't it be or why nothing seem to be done about it, though. Both look to be fundamentally solvable problems to me.

[Xalutiono]

Robots will take jobs from massive amount of low income people.

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

[echelon]

You have no evidence of this.

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.

[Xalutiono]

Of course I don't. But its a comment so its my personal current view.

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.

[dnemmers]

Yep, this is a good read and feels like the correct take.

[red-iron-pine]

> Depending on the speed of all of this, we might get a lot poorer before we get abundance everyerwer

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

[Xalutiono]

At some point it will be cheaper to give everyone bread instead of paying for your private military.

But yeah lets see what going to happen.

[sekh60]

But there's no feeling of power with giving everyone bread. Billionaires seem to have more than just an addiction to big numbers, maybe seem to want to rule over others.

[letmevoteplease]

"the future where robots do everything" and "unemployment" are the same thing

[poncho_romero]

Yes but unemployment where a small cadre of rich elites own the robots and the rest of us are serfs is very different from the public owning and benefiting from the robots in the form of strong social services and UBI.

[gonight]

The Jetsons vs. Elysium.

[TitaRusell]

If everyone is a serf who buys the products that the elites want to sell?

[pixl97]

This is a mistake in thinking that labor and sales remain.

[backlava12]

> You're telling me we've finally got robots that can do our laundry?

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.

[villish]

You would honestly pay 50-100k on a robot that just folds laundry or does your dishes? In the US you can get a maid that cleans once a week for $150-250 and would do a much better job. By the time that cost would equal this robot, the robot would be obsolete, not to mention any maintenance costs.

Also dishes are the easiest chore to do around the house, especially if you clean them after use instead of letting them pile up.

[hadlock]

As long as it was the kind I could buy spare parts for, sure. And it wasn't connected to the internet. Not having cleaning staff in the house periodically would be a huge quality of life improvement.

[backlava12]

This is a huge overlooked factor I think.

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.

[backlava12]

I honestly think I would. I have a maid come every two weeks which is of course not often enough for dishes/laundry. A maid that only came weekly couldn't stay on top of dishes either but they could do laundry fine sure. I do a lot of cooking and I find constantly doing dishes and loading/unloading the dishwasher to be a huge never-ending pain. A device that costs 100k and would free of me that sisyphean task forever would be a godsend. Also you can have the robot work anytime whereas a maid is probably on a schedule.

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.

[villish]

Well in that case the robot should cook as well! Sure, if the robot could do all the chores in a household that price looks more reasonable.

I quite enjoy doing laundry myself though, it's a routine I do at night and find relaxing.

[bad_haircut72]

A kitchen helper that did all worst parts of cooking, the prep, peeling potatoes etc - and let me come in right where the celebrity chefs on tv do, with all the ingredients ready to go, would be pretty cool

[backlava12]

I would love this. It would let me do more elaborate and complicated meals more often. I could focus on experimenting and trying new recipes rather than the drudgery.

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.

[abraxas]

Wow, some people really dislike any inconvenience in your lives, don't you?

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.

[backlava12]

Technology has already removed a huge amount of inconveniences from our lives that we take for granted, such as not having to engage in backbreaking subsistence agriculture to survive. Why do you draw the line at a robot doing dishes but not a tractor plowing a field?

By your logic, why shouldn't I get rid of my dishwasher and laundry machine?

[abraxas]

Some things are necessary for survival and flourishing while others merely remove inconvenience from our lives.

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.

[JSR_FDED]

Maybe it’s the music of the first video, and maybe because it’s late, but this made me quite emotional. On the one hand it’s like a child learning to interact with its environment. On the other hand it’s a requiem for yet another thing that used to be human.

[jldugger]

> You're telling me we've finally got robots that can do our laundry?

Did you watch it actually fold that shirt? Super slow and bad at it.

[madwolf]

Is a Chinese robot vacuuming and mopping my floor every day? Yes it is. Could I do it better manually? Absolutely. I still prefer the robot to do an ok job than to do it myself.

[jldugger]

The difference is that vacuuming seven times as often can compensate for a less effective process. Folding 7 times doesn't eliminate wrinkles.

[pertymcpert]

No one cares about wrinkles anymore. Come on let's be real.

[jldugger]

Apparently not given how many comments in opposition I got.

[whereistejas]

Most people in software misunderstand how physical goods work. When making machines you don't care about getting everything perfect all the time, you care about staying within tolerable limits all the time.

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.

[dnemmers]

I think there is a stark contrast between the plus or minus micron level tolerances, and whatever is being churned out of LLM ('not getting it perfect all the time')

[koonsolo]

My dishwasher is also super slow and bad at it. But you know what? I still prefer that over doing it myself.

[dnemmers]

Your dishwasher shouldn't be 'bad' at cleaning.

Here are some tips:

https://youtu.be/jHP942Livy0?is=B_CGi4shCuiwQLvR

[koonsolo]

It dulls sharp knives, and is very agressive to other materials too.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

It's kind of crazy what goes on in that machine. It basically turns into a mini-Venus in there.

[ErneX]

I don’t need it to do it faster than me, I just need it to do it instead of me.

Plus it’s obvious it will get better.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Super slow and bad at it

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.

[iot_devs]

Absolutely!

Also if this scale anywhere close to LLMs in 2 years they will fold at super human speed and much better than me.

[XorNot]

The real question is whether a hardware platform today would be good enough.

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?

[fragmede]

Physics. Right now the clothes folding is computationally limited, but assuming we get faster computers to get them folding faster, gravity and air resistance are still going to take their time.

[wojciii]

Exactly. I will pay money for a robot to take laundry out of the washing machine and hang it to dry and then fold it and put it away or just sort it by size. This is a chore that my wife and I have to do several times every week.

[bonoboTP]

My solution: stuff the clothes from the washer into the dryer, then stuff them into my wardrobe. I buy clothes that don't get wrinkled much even if simply shoved in the wardrobe and if they do, I tolerate it and wear them anyway.

[phs318u]

Ha! You remind me of something I used to tell my colleagues back when I held a regular job. They would compliment me on my highly patterned shirts (eg. A very small floral pattern repeated). I would explain that a shirt like that just requires low spin in the washer, and then drying on a hanger. Whatever wrinkles are left are almost invisible due to the pattern. With collars and cuffs I’d just literally manually stretch/tension them while they were still wet. Bada bing bada boom.

[dnemmers]

Sorry, but if you're buying clothes that have manual drying steps, it's gonna be a hard sale to the general public.

[fragmede]

The very first car was absolutely awful. Super slow and bad at it.

[interstice]

Slower than a horse even, why even bother

[felixfurtak]

Xiaomi's first car, on the other hand https://youtu.be/KGW8bQtcpJg

[sajithdilshan]

So what? it can take hours to do it and I can focus on something else. If these robots actually become available on affordable price I would buy one without blinking. It would totally free up my weekends, no more hours wasted doing laundry, cleaning the apartment etc.

[mlrtime]

I can also vacuum my floor 3x faster than a robot vacuum. But so what, I'm not there when it happens.

[epolanski]

You're missing the forest for the tree.

[theplumber]

I am worse than the robot and I don’t mind if it takes 3 hours to do it.

[olalonde]

It can do it over 8 hours while you're sleeping though.

[Fizz43]

and cost more than a maid

[Kostic]

Sure but that holds true for most new tech. Expensive and slow but it can only get better or stay the same. I'm thinking it's only going to get better.

[coldtea]

"Did you see the output of that Chat GPT 2? It's super lame code"

[mandeepj]

> You're telling me we've finally got robots that can do our laundry?

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.

[whatever1]

Did you see any of the MSE numbers? around 50% success rates in the tasks.

Anyone in robotics can tell you that building an 80% solution is doable, very fast. Covering the last 20% can take your entire lifespan

[sexy_seedbox]

> we've finally got robots that can do our laundry?

Until it can check all pockets for tissue paper...

[falsemyrmidon]

My wife already doesn't do that

[rvz]

> I'm not sure why some comments here are so pessimistic.

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.

[poncho_romero]

Mass displacement of every sector of labour. Dissent policed by Boston Dynamic's robodogs. You will own nothing and be happy.

[RGamma]

The outlook on this, as so often, depends on personal finances.

[brewcejener]

The singularity is literally here right now! Some people will never be happy! This is easily the most amazing thing I have seen in my life! These things will be taking care of and raising babies very soon!

[backlava12]

> I'm not sure why some comments here are so pessimistic.

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.

[whilenot-dev]

> This is what robotics should be used for.

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.

[0]: https://xkcd.com/1205/

[1]: https://www.festo.com/us/en/e/about-festo/research-and-devel...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASIMO

[bob778]

Sure but the robots that extend our capabilities often start by replicating our current capabilities, even if those are as simple as folding clothes. It provides a baseline for the next generation of robots that can do more.

[rocketvole]

You could replace "robotics" with "AI" in what you wrote above, and it would sound like what people were saying about llms when they first came out. Not trying to glaze one way or another but historically this take is outdated.

[antfarm]

We nearly destroyed our planet to get there. Technocrats here applaude the new technological achievements that make life a little easier (less boring?) for the top one percent while willfully ignoring the associated costs for everyone else. Manufacturing these at scale will only make things worse. We are approaching peak decadence ever faster.

[fragmede]

The top 1% already have humans to do things for them though.

[red-iron-pine]

Wall-E tried to warn us

[chunkyslink]

I am of course impressed by the model and the robot. Great stuff,

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.

[spaceman_2020]

Ironically, the people who can afford to have in-house help to handle things like cooking and folding clothes - the rich - also tend to be fitter and more active

Maybe if you can shave an hour every day from chores, you will actually have the energy to enjoy physical activities

[Cthulhu_]

Probably not, as the washing machine, dishwasher, car, computer, etc didn't cause that either.

edit for nuance: Sure, it did for some people I suppose. But they are the exception.

[leoedin]

I often wonder if they just made us do more washing, use more cups, travel further in the same time and get more expectations from our boss though.

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?

[XorNot]

I mean I like the much lower rates of dysentery and untreatable skin and dental conditions...

People have an extremely rosey view of the past shaped by the fact that period dramas are acted by modern Hollywood actors.

[schnitzelstoat]

Or we can use the free time to go to the gym.

Anything that frees us from labour is good.

[spaqin]

Unemployment frees us from labor too but it's not exactly good either, I'd rather avoid it.

[sph]

> 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.

[echelon]

This discourse reminds me of the handful of Christians who thought we needed Corn Flakes and uncomfortable clothing to stay chaste and that electricity made us stray from God.

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.