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.
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.
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')
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is a mostly American perspective that I find endlessly amusing. I only have a handful of clothing items that say that tumble drying is fine on the tag, and most of my clothing is very casual wear (t-shirts, jeans, sports clothing). Dryers eat up clothing like it's nobody's business. Plus, electricity costs money while the sun is free. And while yes, the time to hang laundry has value, it takes 10 minutes to hang a load. If it rains, I hang the clothes indoors with a dehumidifier which is cheaper to run than a dryer and dries clothes in a matter of a couple of hours.
I was referring to shirts specifically. If you put any kind of cotton shirt in a dryer it’s almost certainly going to need ironing. Waiting for a shirt to dry naturally shouldn’t be a big deal.
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.
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.