The (unspoken?) goal is to do my laundry - and all the other domestic tasks, because that’s where human satisfaction can be unleashed
Give me a moment
1. All economics / markers of value are about human happiness / satisfaction - we claim it’s money but it’s only given a value by humans who want it.
2. As soon as people get rich enough they outsource their domestic tasks - hire a maid or a cook, or buy ready meals.
3. In the western world companies over past fifty years got a free boost as women joined the labour force, and essentially companies were paying one guy the cost of a household now they pay two people the cost of household getting twice the workers for same price.
4. So most households have lost 35 hours a week, and also still have same amount of domestic duties to do
5. As we can’t give everyone a maid we might be able to give everyone a robot maid.
6. Most innovations / technologies find their way into homes - from bricks to heating to electricity we invent it and eventually find a way to make our lives more comfortable - see the point about economics is just humans liking stuff
7. I assumed that real robo maids would be a social shift - ie a different design of washing machine, people eating at other peoples houses every day, anti-dust surfaces. But this one looks … interesting
8. I know this is incredibly western middle class centric - but exactly what else are 6 billon people aiming for?
Where did the economies get a boost when women joined the labor force? In Germany the post-war economic miracle happened mostly without them.
In the beginning of the 1970s, when women did join the labor force in greater numbers, admittedly the macroeconomic conditions were bad (oil crisis), so it is hard to filter that out.
But still, mostly we have more workers, which lowers wages and leads to the creation of more bullshit jobs. To be clear, also men create and perform bullshit jobs!
Now it takes two salaries to finance a house and a family. Great progress.
At the supermarket, I boycott automated self-checkouts even if the lines are long so the nice cashiers keep their jobs.
> Now it takes two salaries to finance a house and a family
Yes! I have been thinking this. So as an economic consequence of both parents being able to work, now the choice to stay home and care for the kids is an even harder one. The birth rate falls. Kids are raised by childcare workers, not their parents.
That's the irony. Before, there was no choice but for women to stay at home. Now, most have no choice but to work.
Turns out, for the market, having a choice is a form of wealth. It will make you pay to acquire it, it will treat you as that much more wealthy if you have it, and it will encourage you to sell it.
I would argue wealth is only the execution of more choice, and choice as a concept is equivalent with power. Powerful people can make bigger choices, and that's what makes them powerful.
That’s really quite impactful and insightful. Presidents have choices no one else has … how interesting
Yeah, as far as labor market goes "women's liberation" never really happened. The social pressure to have a family didn't really disappear, and yet there's way more pressure to build a career to appease our corporate overlords. Is that really an improvement?
Ultimately capitalism is built so that improved productivity, more working hours, higher salaries never benefit the worker long-term. If people start earning more, the owning class will simply raise prices to match this new level of income. The US is the wealthiest and strongest country in the world, and yet young people there struggle to buy houses just as much (or even more) than their peers in much poorer countries.
> The social pressure to have a family didn't really disappear
All sexually reproducing organisms on the Earth have families without any social pressure and we evolved from primates who work like this.
By far the stronger pressure is biological. I doubt social pressure even comes close to moving the needle.
Unlike most organisms, we’re smart enough to satisfy those urges without having children.
The peak reproductive years are the late teens to late twenties (give or take). However and in modern society, having children in the first two-thirds of the peak years is a recipe for failure or lifelong hardships.
But capital got their assets pumped and that's what matters!
We need to stop asking 10+ workdays a week from each couple. Once we only demand 7 workdays a week, people are allowed to raise their own kids again!
Kids are raised by childcare workers, not their parents
Is this bad?
only in the same sense that most coffee shops are now starbucks where the coffee is made by temp baristas, not shop owners who care about the legacy of their coffee
Were you drinking coffee before Starbucks came on the scene? I was, and if you could find a cafe that served better than a brown crayon steeped in water, it was a rare treasure.
You're making the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. Posh coffee didn't become a "thing" because of starbucks. Starbucks became a "thing" because of emerging posh coffee trends, which created a market for starbucks in the first place.
The thing you're missing is that, you go to a starbucks, which promises to sell you posh coffee, but it may be good, or it may be crap, and it's all down to luck whether the barista gives a crap about your "posh" coffee. Whereas if you go to a small business owner whose business is posh coffee, you can probably expect a great coffee (or if they don't, then you expect the place to soon go out of business)
Great example. I don’t know anything about coffee, have no idea how to make it, and no desire to learn it. If I’m ever forced to make my own coffee it would probably suck. When I want to drink coffee I go to Starbucks. Their coffee tastes great to me.
I’ve seen those baristas pouring hot espresso directly into the plastic cup.
If you can boil water, you can make coffee at least as good as Starbucks. If boiling water is too difficult, there are automated push button machines (Nescafe, etc).
it's a skill that takes 15 minutes to learn. maybe 30 if you include roasting your own beans. it could be taught in highschool to everyone.
hardly requires a bustling industry to solve this 'problem' or provide this 'value'.
starbucks is a monument to the lazyness and exploitation of this lazyness in homo sapiens.
Making coffee takes like 3 steps.
The only 'skills' you need is the ability to transfer powders and liquids from one container to another.
I have no idea why people idealize coffee making so much. I have been doing pour over coffee my whole life and it feels as basic a skill as washing a dish.
That's clearly the "why" no one pushing for innovative products is answering. A couple decades ago one salary could sustain a family in most developed countries, now it seems to be a struggle with two for many, we have mass unemployment, productivity soared but somehow society also can't afford enough cleaners to keep places decent.
Is the solution really to replace even more workers by capital, or do we have an issue with how we measure value that we should fix first?
> Is the solution really to replace even more workers by capital, or do we have an issue with how we measure value that we should fix first?
I have more faith in our ability to solve world peace and AGI than I do in us getting to a more objective way to measure value that everyone can agree and adhere to.
It doesn't have to be more objective, it just has to not run away.
The problem with the wealth-weighted-value that gets optimized by capitalism is that the gini coefficient tips the optimization process from being about doing what other people want to being about doing what rich people want. Rich people mostly want to get paid for being rich, of course, so they pump assets to increase their wealth. Their weight goes up, the objective function pumps assets harder, their weight goes up, the objective function pump assets harder... and gini heads to 1 and you return to a palace economy.
A note of optimism: we've been here before, shortly after the industrial revolution. We've fixed this before, even though Marx predicted that we couldn't. We should all be trying to figure out how to make sure that next time the USA gets neo-Roosevelt, not neo-Hitler or neo-Lenin.
I don’t really understand what you’re proposing. How would we fix things to “not run away”. If we’re not trying to value fix to be more objective, what guiding principle should we follow?
On the wealth weighting, I’m a fan of a 100% inheritance tax tbh. I’m in the “top 1%” and I don’t plan on giving my kids more than a great upbringing and education. I’m not giving them any additional cash injection. I think that solves a lot of the wealth weighting problem by shortening the lifecycle of capital holds, but I don’t know if I’ll ever live to see it (or some form of it like inheritance caps).
Any readings to recommend? :)
> We've fixed this before, even though Marx predicted that we couldn't.
Is it fixed if it falls apart in a couple generations? Maybe flex tape over the problem isn't going to cut it.
I'm afraid that "a more objective way to measure value that everyone can agree and adhere to" is necessary to solve AGI (as opposed to getting extincted by one), and world peace will kind of follow naturally.
In other words: we're screwed.
efficiency and productivity is clearly more important for development of all industries than what you value. Political institutions are not very good at preparing for unfamiliar problems, dont count on them doing that. Just push for progress in natural way, and for politicians to adjust to an already happend changes. Thats the best that we can do.
"efficiency and productivity is clearly more important for development of all industries than what you value"
And yet countries that value more than efficiency and productivity are repeatedly ranked as the happiest in the world [0].
"Just push for progress in natural way, and for politicians to adjust to an already happend changes"
How much damage has unfettered tech done to society at large? Maybe we'll never know the full answer, but we can definitely agree it hasn't all been positive (advertising, social media etc..). We're now retrospectively regulating, but a lot of it feels too little, too late, for some elements of society (privacy being a notable example).
0: https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2020/the-nordic-exceptional...
Perhaps being happy is not the goal? What if the happiness isn't sustainable?
Happiness is the only goal, because all other goals no longer matter if you're unhappy. Infinite money is worthless if you do not have the motivation and drive to enjoy it. Have 1 trillion dollars and spending none on something you care about is equivalent to having zero dollars.
> we have mass unemployment
We do?
No, not in the US at least, but society runs on vibes these days
Fair enough, I'll withdraw the "mass": EU 6.5%, USA 4.5%. That's still enough to have all sorts of policies to reduce that amount, apparently...
Arguably in the recent election the Democrats learned that increasing inflation to reduce unemployment was a bad political tradeoff.
Vibes being misinformation and populist propaganda campaigns. Emotionally manipulating people is highly effective and, by far, the easiest it's ever been with technology.
For this to be true, real wages would have had to collapse (at the very least ~50-70%) for a household of two workers to be less rich than the household of one worker x years ago.
This is just not true. If people feel worse it's because they want more things from life, not because they are able to afford less things.
(I'm talking about the last ~50 years. The last 20 years may be a different point, but it doesn't have to do with female participation in the marketplace)
> Where did the economies get a boost when women joined the labor force? In Germany the post-war economic miracle happened mostly without them.
I have a "hobbyist conjecture" that I'd love feedback on from people familiar with economics. Simply put, the idea is this: if you were to give every human around the world a million dollars (imagine this is easy and feasible), prices would inevitably rise. The poorest might experience some improvement in their standard of living, but not as much as one might expect. This effect seems to go beyond inflation alone. My intuition is that prices ultimately adjust based on social structures and expectations.
Similarly, we see a unique economic advantage in many dual-income gay couples who, statistically, achieve higher standards of living. Often, this is partly because fewer have children, which shifts financial priorities and spending capacities.
IANAEconomist, but I've long arrived at the same conjecture; I usually phrase it as "the market always adjusts to keep average discretionary income at 0".
So, if you give everyone in a given population (I'd go for the country instead of the world to see the effect much faster) a million dollars a month, the average discretionary income would, obviously, rise by one million dollars. That would cause prices to raise, but also all kinds of new products and services to become available. Some of those would evolve from luxuries to necessities over time - like e.g. having a car, or a mobile phone. Housing would likely eat a chunk of the surplus.
In the end, it would all stabilize, at exactly the "life is more expensive by a million dollars, on average" point. We'd still have socioeconomic classes - poor with < 0 surplus, rich with > 0 surplus, and the middle with ~0 surplus. Some people would've moved to different places on the ladder, but the ladder would still be there, simply because of variability in individual incomes.
I guess put another way, you could say, the market is a DC filter - as wealth distribution in a population changes, the market always adjusts to cancel out the constant component ("DC offset").
Except via policy you can adjust how much each percentile has. If you set a tax at 70% over a million dollars of income/capital gains/etc, and bolster lower brackets to have more income kept (eg fewer sales taxes), you can increase the amount of discretionary incomes for people where a little bit more goes a long way. It’s not like there aren’t controls available for wealth distribution.
It's not that easy since changing policies could give you the exact opposite result that politicians think. For example, increasing wealth taxes could make people to go elsewhere and moving fortunes abroad.
Changing policies frequently increase the risk for future arbitrary decisions.
Yes this is common knowledge in econ supply/demand and money supply.
Other currencies 1M base notes is not a lot (e.g. 1M dinar). You can just add/remove zeros but prices have adjusted, those people can't live like "millionaires" with 1M dinar.
There was a time goods like meat cost pennies, now it's $10 per pound. In those times $10,000 would be a life-altering amount of money, today most people have $10,000 in assets. The price of goods is related to money supply, they get more expensive if people have more money.
Money has no intrinsic value, it is balanced by whatever goods and services can be bought by it. If you add money but no goods and services, money is worth less (see COVID policy, increase money and decrease goods and services).
Thank you! The COVID policy example feels especially relevant because it illustrates the kind of sudden economic shift I'm curious about, rather than just changes in nominal currency values. To clarify my thought experiment: imagine a stable economy where suddenly every person worldwide is gifted $1 million USD. I'm interested in exploring how this kind of immediate influx would impact prices and standards of living, beyond just inflation.
If every person is giftet USD1M, prices of all things will go up by a lot. Furthermore, prices of necessities will rise by larger fractions because most people in the world are significantly poorer than the median of this forum.
More generally, gifting every person worldwide the same amount of money seems roughly equivalent to taxing every above-average wealth person a fixed percentage of their surplus and giving every below-average-wealth person a fixed percentage of their deficit...
I think that's not quite true, because rich people mostly keep their wealth in assets, not cash. Stock will just rise.
Which of my two claims is not true? Why should stock rise more than basic necessities? Of course, all prices would rise a lot. But I think stocks would rise by a smaller factor.
Ah sorry, I wasn't very clear. I was talking about your second claim - that giving people lots of money would redistribute a fixed proportion of wealth from the rich to the poor. My point was that the rich have most of their wealth in stocks and the like, so the redistribution would only affect the cash portion of their wealth, which is quite small.
I see. The "taxation" scheme I had in mind was intended to apply to "any and all wealth", which I didn't make clear. Do you think it works out then?
On a more realistic note, gifting every human 1M would probably completely break the financial system and cause a global recession...
You're right of course, except I wouldn't say it's "beyond inflation alone" - it IS inflation by definition. It's beyond the usual level of inflation, but that doesn't make it a separate phenomenon, you've just caused a shit ton of inflation to happen by giving everyone a million dollars.
I’m not saying the continues got a boost - but companies were able to absorb extra workers and maintain the total outgoings per household for decades
Not sure how that shows up in the stats
I generally agree with you, if you want someone else to do the checkout for you because you don't like doing it.
But if you also buy clothes only made from hand-spun yarn, I mean, it was a problem for the yarn-spinsters back then, and by all means help them. But paying someone to do something that no longer needs doing is how you create bullshit jobs. No problem with spinning yarn for recreation, but if they have to do some complete nonsense to earn a roof and a meal... there are kinder ways to help.
> I generally agree with you, if you want someone else to do the checkout for you because you don't like doing it.
Alternative take wrt. self-service checkouts: the store is making you do unpaid labor for it. And with how it's implemented in practice, it's not only offloading work of a specialist to you, it's also costing you time and frustration, since a cashier doing checkout 8h/day on a checkout desk optimized for throughput is doing a much faster job at it than you doing it ad-hoc, in constrained space, on a machine that throws an error if you look at it funny.
I'm very much for automating bullshit jobs away, but store checkout ain't it yet, and the results are universally worse.
More importantly, it's a common pattern that's been inflicted on people (and ourselves) by our industry particularly often: "automating away" specialist jobs with software. The workload doesn't actually go away - it gets redistributed to everyone. It only looks like a win, because specialist salaries are legible to the business, while generalized productivity loss isn't.
Think of it next time when a two day coding problem takes you a week, because you also need to attend several useless meetings, make some powerpoint slides, update your calendar, timesheet, and fill in expense reports from a business trip.
Groceries are a highly competitive market so a large fraction of cost savings end up being returned to the customer in lower prices.
From my perspective self checkout is a latency optimization. The person in front of you in line may have 3 items and still take an unreasonably long time finishing the transaction, but replace one line with 4 machines and the line keeps moving.
Sure I’ll take a full cart to an actual cashier, but by removing people with only a few items from those lines they become more predictable.
> Groceries are a highly competitive market so a large fraction of cost savings end up being returned to the customer in lower prices.
It doesn't look this way from customer perspective, so I propose alternative interpretation: it contributes to hiding inflation, because instead of seeing the prices rapidly rise, we see them rise slower (further slowed down by "shrinkflation" and related shenanigans), but the quality of service goes down too. So what we get is ever worse shopping experience and lower inflation rates reported by economists.
(Not to mention, shopping taking more time because of this "optimization" is effectively even more hidden inflation.)
> From my perspective self checkout is a latency optimization. The person in front of you in line may have 3 items and still take an unreasonably long time finishing the transaction, but replace one line with 4 machines and the line keeps moving.
It's a good reason to have both. Because in practice, 2 out of 4 machines are, at any given moment, locked and waiting for a supervisor - and many stores "optimize" further, by eschewing a dedicated role and just tacking responsibilities on to existing work roster. Meaning, the supervisor you're waiting for is likely staffing a checkout point or unloading boxes in the back of the store at the same time, so you better get ready to wait.
Ideally, the store would have both automated and staffed checkout, and direct those with few discrete items to the former, where a dedicated supervisor would ensure problems get resolved quickly. That would indeed optimize latency/maximize throughput.
> It's a good reason to have both.
I’ve never been to a store that only had self checkout, I think the equilibrium is one bank of self checkout + a bunch of normal registers.
> 2 out of 4 machines are, at any given moment, locked and waiting for a supervisor > where a dedicated supervisor would ensure problems get resolved quickly
Sounds like an implementation issue.
The grocery store I typically use has one bank of 6 self checkout machines with a dedicated attendant who seems to be able to resolve any issues. It’s common for 1 or 2 of the machines be down though. They also have 4 to 14 normal checkout lines open depending on how busy the store is.
I rarely use self check but it seems like a good tradeoff vs a 5th line being open when things aren’t that busy.
Post-war Germany relied on cheap, foreign-worker labor instead: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gastarbeiter
Note: The European guest worker model of the 1950s and 1960s doesn’t work for the United States, due to the birthright citizenship status.
Users of self check out are training cashier replacements.
Doesn’t matter whether a person chooses self check out or cashier check out.
What matters is the training.
When self checkout becomes nearly as accurate as cashiers the cashiers lose their jobs.
Which lane we choose has little to do with the replacement. Thousands of holdouts won’t affect the millions of shoppers training the replacements.
> At the supermarket, I boycott automated self-checkouts even if the lines are long so the nice cashiers keep their jobs.
I’m not sure this is Owning the Bots the way you think it is.
you should also try to avoid cars and electric lights, grooms and gas light maintainers need jobs too
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And then what, conclude that a useless action to delay progress is somehow good and allows you to feel better about yourself and superior to others using self-checkout while doing absolutely nothing? If that's the outcome of "classic education" I think you didn't do it right.
The underlying real goal is to have sex with the robots, just as the internet was going to be the gateway to all known information but instead is for porn.
Is both
Ok. Fairy Nuff.
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>3. In the western world companies over past fifty years got a free boost as women joined the labour force, and essentially companies were paying one guy the cost of a household now they pay two people the cost of household getting twice the workers for same price.
If demand for work is fixed, then doubling the supply of work (male + female from the same household) would in principle decrease wages (not necessarily by half). However, the supply need not be fixed. This is what I like to call the "musical chairs theory of employment". Let's say there are 2x more working age people in 2024 than in 1954, does it mean each person earns less? When immigrants come to a country, does it mean that each immigrant causes a native to become unemployed?
The evidence tells us that's not true and that there are other changes in the economy that also increase the demand for work. Check the literature of immigration effects (even major short term shocks) on unemployment and wages to see a pretty clear picture. I'm not aware of a study of what more female employment has done (my guess is that it's much more difficult to study, because it's a phenomenon that has slowly happened over decades. As an aside, this has happened in plenty of places around the world, no need to restrict yourself to the western world. Plenty of other places are relevant)
The Canadian experiment have shown us that with enough unskilled immigrants GDP per person goes down.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-gdp-per-capita-rich-...
https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/canada-immigration-per-...
Rent goes up.
These Physical Intelligence guys are very talented, but they will never raise enough money to achieve their goals. Their problem is saying it costs $30m to develop such a technology, when it will cost at least $1b, and probably closer to $5b.
Not $30M, they raised $400M, and I'm sure if their stuff works and gets adoption they can raise more
$400m isn’t enough.
With $400M they can make some buggy app or they can push really hard. It's enough amount that can be used a lot more efficiently. So entirely depends on team and the founders
For factories and closed environments, stuff is getting good fast, but for the rest of the "real world", no robot or AI is practical without human supervision. I automate physical things for a living and have thus become convinced.
The first thing that robot will do is start a dryer that a toddler climbed into because it isn't that aware of the world around it.
And that will be the end of general purpose domestic robots.
That or knocking over candles or fucking up something else simultaneously trivial and terribly dangerous in context.
I dream the same dream of a general purpose machine, but I think it may never be possible, and if it is we're a long way out.
I recall reading many comments on HN confidently predicting that the moment a self-driving car caused an accident that killed someone, that would be the end of self-driving cars. But while they have caused accidents, and there has been resulting lawsuits and investigations by regulators, it hasn't put an end to them. And with the incoming US administration, I'm expecting far less legal and regulatory barriers to greater use of robots and automation.
Dying in a car accident is normal, but having your (robot) maid kill your children or burn your house down is not.
I think that will weigh on people's opinions of domestic general purpose robots when compared to robotic cars.
Dying in a domestic accident like a house fire is as "normal" as dying in a car accident. Robots are a novel element in both, so I don't see why one would be more readily accepted than the other.
The domestic accident is in the home, a far less acceptable place to have a threat. Furthermore, the threat/cause of the accident is presumably being visualized as a human shaped live-in android a la Bicentennial Man. A human shaped threat can feel a lot more viscerally unacceptable, at least in my experience.
House fire deaths are at least an order of magnitude less common than traffic deaths and houses are the most valuable asset that many people will ever own. They’re certainly similar but I think different enough that people would have very different reactions to robot-caused destruction.
To be fair, many many people die in car accidents every day. Yes, self driving car crashes are still newsworthy but you are up against a baseline that’s pretty bad.
On the other hand, virtually no one dies from laundry, that I’m aware of. So the reaction to a single accident might be quite different.
I found one instance from quick search: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/483581/child-s-death-in-... and there is also many stories of dead cats online.
I was so paranoid when I lived with cats. I'd double check the washer and drier.
I do remember that time where people were being manipulated into eating Tide Pods...
Even if they need supervision, watching a robot hang up the laundry to dry is better than having to do it yourself.
Like that old quote: "I love work, I can watch it all day."
How about at first if we put camera on it and then someone from overseas checks around before performoning the task? for cheap but it can make it secure.
Sci-fi authors were worried about rebellions of enslaved robots, while the industry figures, why risk jumping into the unknown, when we can fake a smart computer with overseas labor and an Internet connection, and wage slavery we know how to handle...
Anyway, if we're going to fake smart robots this way, why not just honestly call it what it is? Remote household staff. Might as well give them better sensors and actuators, but I guess this is giving humans too much agency and risk; what if the operator decides to hurt the "robot" owners or something? The vendor would not have that. Cannot have that. Humans are too messy to deal with.
Or is this the short-term future of all automation? I look at my robotic vacuum cleaner now, occasionally pausing for a second or two while it figures out where to go, and I wonder - maybe in those moments, it's using some Protein Intelligence Chip to query a bunch of random humans somewhere?
I trust an ai model more than remote humans.
I’d rather not have someone from overseas walking around my home via remote cameras
Many chooses Amazon and Google to listen their home + record their home every day. Most customers just buy things.
AI = actually Indians
AI, the secret sauce that powered Amazon Fresh (or was it Amazon Go?)
Better than Alexa recorder
at that point, why not just have someone from overseas control the robot?
Because you can just have actual local people do it right there and then? The point of a robot is to not interact with other people, presumably they will be much more expensive than having someone come over for a few hours a week to clean - the whole appeal is there's no other human involved to coordinate or be nice to.
This is what happens with "autonomous" delivery robots that are operating on London campuses.
They are actually controlled by "robot operators" in Estonia, though officially it's "AI".
That being said, every day it's getting a little bit better.
> That being said, every day it's getting a little bit better.
Estonians are fast learners!
Because one remote overseas person can watch multiple camera feeds at once which should make the cost of a human-in-the-loop more palatable.
mm, good point!
Liability.
I agree. So far I haven't seen production-ready robots doing even relatively simple agricultural tasks, such as picking tomatoes in a greenhouse and taking care of the plants. It's all done by cheap foreign labour. If that's too hard to automate, I'm not yet holding my breath for general purpose household robots either.
Admittedly the videos in this article do seem promising though, would love to see how this tech would perform in a greenhouse.
> So far I haven't seen production-ready robots doing even relatively simple agricultural tasks, such as picking tomatoes in a greenhouse and taking care of the plants. It's all done by cheap foreign labour.
While they aren't widespread, there are production robots being used in many types of agriculture. In fact, it was even trivial to find one working in tomato greenhouses: https://www.arugga.com/technology (this one is used to pollinate tomatoes instead of doing it by hand or using bees).
Oh yeah, the exact same way roller coasters got banned as soon as one failed and killed some people.
The hard problem for a laundry robot is not folding the clothes, it's getting into the laundry room.
Living in European city, space is a hard constraint. The cost of rent is 30€ per square meter per month in Paris.
Laundry rooms are small. This robot is too wide and won't be able to go through the door of my laundry room. Ironing boards are foldable for a reason : they need to be setup every time. This robot can't do it, and also can't handle the softener bottle for the washing machine.
Having 1 square meter empty table (0.5 for the table and 0.5 accessible space for the robot doing the folding) dedicated to folding is a pipe dream for most. Laundromats are there because some don't have enough space to even have a washing machine.
Laundry room are a dedicated space for humidity and ventilation reason, so they have been designed on specific location on house plans probably more than 30 years ago on average, not having in mind robot accessibility, but rather be as small as functionally possible.
Quite often for people not living in flats, but in houses, the laundry room is located in the basement with only stair or single step access.
I don't think architect and construction accessibility norm will change fast enough, specially with bipedal robots right around the corner.
The slack necessary for home robotics emergence has already been eaten multiple time due to the high cost of space.
Laundromats are kind of a drag since you have to hang around nearby for almost 2 hours to do the 5 minutes of labor that the machines don't do for you. Dropping off a sack of clothes for wash & fold on the other hand is a pricey luxury. Perhaps if the laundromats could automate the whole process it would bring down the price of wash and fold and fewer people would be inclined to have washing machine at home (as you say, taking up space for a machine that is used a couple hours a week)
Alternatively you can simply attach the laundromat to a cafe or bar, turning a chore into an opportunity to relax and socialize but most of the world is not prepared for that degree of civilization.
Yes and the laundromat user interface could simply be a package locker style wall and an app.
An adjacent use case is apartment buildings that currently have shared washer and dryer rooms that tenants book time slots for. Upgrade: drop off a tagged laundry bag anytime, pick up when convenient from locker. Only service technicians need room access so layout and washers and dryers can be robot optimized.
If you scroll down, this is a general-purpose robot. It can drive around and bus the table or fold a cardboard box.
I'm not sure it can't handle the softener, and V2 will likely be able to set up the ironing board.
In terms of size, even now, it's smaller than a fridge, washing machine, dishwasher, or many other household time-saving appliances common in most houses (although not necessarily historic cities with multi-century homes not designed for them). No effort has gone into shrinking it either; perhaps with clever engineering, it can be made much smaller if it moves out of the research prototype phase.
Another question, to me, is cost. Many robots like this run around $100k, and with good reason. Can this be brought down? I hope so.
The water bottle is usually a common hard test for robots. The softener bottle raise the stakes even more. Because every time I handle it, I need to wash my hands afterwards.
Ironing board is bigger than the robot, and quite heavy, the torque in setting it up is a lot and probably greater than the torque necessary to break the expensive actuator when things go wrong.
Keeping a shared table clean so you can fold clothes on it is a not trivial but more manageable problem.
The home market is highly predatory. If people have enough to invest in a home robot, it means that they have some available money that other actors didn't grab. In France last time they remove 5€ per month of renting help, it was a struggle for lot of people.
You have lots of actors that call dibs on your home improvement money before you can improve your home. There is usually the landlord, then the building manager (or Home Owner Association) (which is usually already working in the kleptocracy domain), then there are local tax, and mandatory ecological improvements (thermal isolation, and windows), home improvement market (paints and kitchen), and of course everything is indexed on the current cost of energy, and uncontrolled inflation.
It's not a question of costs, otherwise all smart investment improvements that bring more than they cost on the relevant time-scales like thermal isolation and solar power infrastructure, collective infrastructure, not having to do the laundry every week..., would have been done already. It's more about determining who deserve the money.
I don't use fabric softener, but that's a solved problem. The laundry machine I have takes both laundry detergent and, if I used it, fabric softener and dispenses those by itself.
Actuators, competently designed, won't break when torque gets too high:
1) The control system can handle this, trivially.
2) The mechanical linkage can be designed to limit torque. At some point, it should slip.
3) Forces out-of-axis should not be transferred to the actuator
The kleptocracy is more a function of rent-seeking city living. Even a little ways out, into the suburbs, things are very different. Rural, and space is virtually free.
>Actuators, competently designed, won't break when torque gets too high
The mechanical part of robotics is quite challenging. Because of the overhangs, 6DOF arms usually are bulky to be able provide useful force. Alternatively too strong industrial robots are unsafe to operate near humans even if compliant.
But most probably even robot building startup can't even attempt it. (They are not looking for mechanical engineer in their job listing, so probably they don't design the robot arm themselves).
If you don't design the robot arm yourself, then you only have the option of which off the shelf actuators to pick. Usually they are weak and expensive. And how to integrate them while staying in specs.
For manipulation sensory input is very useful, but if the API of your robot arm doesn't provide the feedback you do with what you have. When forces are weak closed-controlled loop system don't flex and can know their position, when things flex and deform, it allows to have lighter arms, but the robot can't know it's internal state. Here they close the loop via visual feedback, so knowing position exactly is not so important : humans have shitty repeatability but handle folding the laundry quite well.
But shitty robot arms are not very useful and also need the same motors and controls that good robot arms, so you might as well make your task easier and develop your robot with expensive arms first so prices converge towards expensive robot arms, and the economics equations of this market (high R&D cost, low sell volume) are geared not for home applications but industrial control which usually necessitate maintenance operations on the robots themselves.
What's even worse for the business model, is that once you have spend money to gather data and build a dataset to teach your neural networks, then your competitors only have to copy, vertically integrate, improve, scale and grab the money pot.
One of home robotics main obstacle is a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem where no one wants to front the costs of building the datasets, front the costs of cheap actuators, front the costs of cheap prototypes so everyone reinvents their own solution which can't solve the economic equation.
Good point.
When I was younger, I'd have argued the collective action problem is just a matter of time and development, but I've now seen dozens of technologies stalled out.
I firmly believe it's the reason we don't have flying cars. I can sketch out all the pieces needed to get there, which in the simplest-to-explain version consist of a few regulatory changes, an autogyro, a control system, and some infrastructure, but those few changes easily add up to an obscene amount of money. Once invested, the next competitor can do almost the same thing almost out of a garage.
Lots of medical technologies too. And medical systemic changes. Education too.
Why would you think a laundry robot is something people who can't afford comfortable apartment with their own washing machine might use?
I think this might be eventually integrated with washing machine so that you buy one device where you put your dirty clothes in and take out clean and folded. It's not like the traditional washing machine is the expensive part that needs to be kept separate and in current form.
> The cost of rent is 30€ per square meter per month in Paris.
Only for big enough apartments. 20m² appartements do not go for under 850€, ie around 42€/m². Granted these flats are too small to even have a laundry machine, let alone a laundry folding robot.
Get it a bit better in term of precision and we have a killer lab automation tool. Labs around the world would be willing to pay 1M for a robot that can handle manual lab works and it is not like they are very difficult. Lots of labwork is based on established protocols with well defined steps. A robot that can grab things and go to town on those tubes without any programming needed is a blockbuster product to me.
Agreed, my girlfriend has a biochemistry degree and works in such a lab. It involves some physical work like collecting, preparing and inputting samples, doing basic maintenance of the machines, some analysis and then some administrative/secretarial work in feeding the results into a system or by phonecall to the doctor.
All of which can indeed be automated in my view.
I would say it really depends on where you are though. In the US it probably makes sense quite quickly. But she lives in a small EU country where salaries aren't high, and this is very much a junior position with a lot of students looking for such a job. Her position costs about 25k a year.
The NPV of a $1m investment with a 25k cashflow is negative at normal discount rates. Once you get to replace a $120k salary with a $1m robot, it does make sense.
Further I do still expect there to be some jobs in overseeing the robot (e.g. your average factory manager). That makes sense for large centralised production locations, because you can have 1 human job overseeing many robots. It doesn't necessarily make sense with many small decentralised production locations. And that's the nature of most labs, I believe due to the time sensitivity of a lot of lab work they need to be everywhere and close to customers. But maybe that will change.
It wouldn't cost 1M. The BOM[1] of Stanford's Mobile Aloha[2] (very similar to physical intelligence's robot) is around $30,000.
[1]https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_3yhWjodSNNYlpxkRCPIlvIA...
[2]https://mobile-aloha.github.io/
$7000 for the wheels/navigation module $3500 x2 for the control arms $6000 x2 for the controlled arms
I don't think you need a $7000 navigation module and the arms are also probably overkill. To which extent do we need closed-loop Dynamixel servos when the policy diffusion algo already relies on computer vision driven closed-loop control ?
Production version of these robot arms would not be anywhere near $1m
That seems to only account for the hardware. How much do you reckon a software license will cost for your fleet of cheap arms?
> That seems to only account for the hardware. How much do you reckon a software license will cost for your fleet of cheap arms?
Just a bit lower than what a human would cost.
Remember though that AI is a winner takes all space. It will probably be won by a company with lots of cash behind it (like this one which has support from many companies, including OpenAI).
significantly lower than what a human already doing the job would cost, until the VC money runs out. And then a whole bunch more than what a human would cost, after they've got you locked in and you've let your staff go.
I got really excited for a second for people who need to work on a lab thinking they will be able to work from home now...
Keep in mind that workers in the EU work for around 6 hours a day, a robot works for 24, so it's replacing 4 of them, not 1.
Good point, although it probably won't be 4 for most labs, perhaps 2. My gf does 1 nightshift a week and she is alone in the lab for the 3-4 emergency samples that come in (versus a team of people processing hundreds during the day), there simply isn't much demand at night. Most blood sampling has a human pipeline of people going to their doctor or hospital with an issue, getting blood taken, which is sent to a lab, the majority of that during the day.
Again for large scale centralised labs that get sent samples throughout the 24 hour period from all across the world, where timing isn't an big issue, this could work. But most labs are small, close to the customer, time-sensitive, and work with couriers to bring samples because samples need to be transported and stored in specific ways not to go bad.
She works quite long shifts btw (10-12h), but that's more a function of her country/company culture rather than the norm. Probably 6-8 is more common indeed.
How much of the timing on samples is down to lab availability, though? E.g. my gp wants samples in by 1pm because otherwise they'll got to the lab the following day. If the lab would still process things that came in at the end of the day, I could very much see larger doctors offices sending off samples more than once a day, with the last one coming in after the end of their clinics.
I could see demand spreading out more - though I agree it might be closer to 2 than 4 - if the availability of human labor wasn't an issue.
6? Not 8?
Assuming a lunch break is not included as part of 8 hours, do you really think most exmployees are productive for a full 8 hours?
Most office workers spend an exorbitant amount of time twiddling their thumbs, reading emails, going to the restroom. On average, I'd say knowledge workers are typically productive for about 2 to 3 hours per day. I'd estimate physical laborers range up to 4 or 5 hours.
Assuming 8 hours of full productivity is a strange number to focus on
I was surprised too but I guess OP included the weekends too since robots don't need those off. So 40 hours divided by 7 days.
Lunch and breakfast are serious business.
Huh? The average working week in the EU is 37.5 hours a week, or 7.5 hours a day: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/d...
Breakfast and lunch are not paid breaks in any EU country as far as I know.
It really depends. For Finland lunch is unpaid unless you are forced to eat at premises. But then you usually have 2 refreshment breaks (10-15min) which are paid...
> Breakfast and lunch are not paid breaks in any EU country as far as I know.
One 30 minute break (lunch break) is paid in Croatia and Slovenia
Don't expect much. Even screwing a nut on a bolt is a huge problem for generic robot. Which means you will need a 'robot friendly' lab. Were all things can be done by a primitive robotic hand. Other options are making more capable hands, and completely robotic specialized labs. The first is most interesting and the way to go. When it happens it will open a lot of possibilities. Like "self-repairing" vehicles and planet stations. Just with 'technician' robot onboard.
This lab automation product already exists and the couple of startups in this space face the same headwinds as everyone else trying to sell hardware when the stuff people are essentially really paying for is software.
Also nobody’s academic lab is buying $1m startup lab equipment. A whole core for 30 research groups is buying something, but it will be a piece of equipment that directly leads to publishing, ie, something with history. That is why you don’t have the exact thing you are talking about, which exists, in labs.
Also worth mentioning that a lot of stuff in chemistry labs is toxic and even potentially deadly to humans, it would be a big win if these could be handled by robots instead.
That reminds me of Dr. Greenamyre in Pittsburgh who thinks he accidentally gave himself Parkinsons researching rotenone in pesticides [0]
Certainly. I have a friend working in this space (AI lab automation). In a few years he expects competition to be fierce, though.
I like that their robot is pretty simple comparing to humanoid robots so cost should be much lower. I don't get it why focusing on clothes folding though, does anyone do laundry more often than once a week? Much more useful if it can do cooking since that's something you do at least once every day.
Instead I would like to see some new innovation in laundry machines. Current technology is very basic, you heat water and keep spinning. Why not some something more similar to bigger paper printer that at the end of the day you feed your 1 shirt, roll it into a roller, sprinkle with some high pressure minimal amount of water, heating and return 30min later already perfectly ironed.
Laundry is kind of the perfect demo for advanced motion planning systems. Fabric is, for all intents and purposes, completely intractable in classic motion planning paradigms; it's wildly non-rigid, which means that predicting its behavior is the domain of highly specialized and expensive dynamics simulators, it's nearly impossible to invert the problem to ask what motions would be required to produce a given result, and it's highly continuous and resistant to discretization even if you can predict it. You can't make the "folds have zero width" assumption you always see when reasoning about origami, for example. Clothing is extreme even for fabric, given that it's not only highly non-uniform but also fragile; every shirt is a different hideous bit of floppy topology covered in strange textures with complex and unpredictable local properties and it'll start popping stitches if you look at it funny. Ruffles, zippers, pockets, drawstrings, the list goes on. On top of that, laundry is something that everyone does so it's relatable and easy to set up in a lab, and humans can intuitively evaluate performance with a glance. Despite all the attention, nobody's been able to demonstrate convincing performance on it in like seventy years of work, which makes it a more difficult task than backflips or shooting hoops or loading a truck. All of that together means that, when you have a fancy new algorithm that can handle more than some blocks on a tabletop, you pretty much always point it at the laundry.
And just to be clear, this is still not "convincing performance" since it is still the WYSIWIG model of robotics in the sense that it can only do exactly what you see it doing in the videos. It can fold a couple of shirts and a pair of pants and wouldn't, e.g., be able to fold my hoodies, never mind a bra or something else with straps.
The big advance here seems to be that the robot can pick the clothes out of a basket on its own rather than having someone set it all up neatly for it. I mean they sort of imply it here but you have to read carefully to understand what they refer to (folding a t-shirt that hasn't been laid flat on a table first):
Laundry. We fine-tuned π0 to fold laundry, using either a mobile robot or a fixed pair of arms. The goal is to get the clothing into a neat stack. This task is exceptionally difficult for robots (...and some humans): while a single t-shirt laid flat on the table can sometimes be folded just by repeating a pre-scripted set of motions, a pile of tangled laundry can be crumpled in many different ways, so it is not enough to simply move the arms through the same motion. To our knowledge, no prior robot system has been demonstrated to perform this task at this level of complexity.
> I don't get it why focusing on clothes folding though, does anyone do laundry more often than once a week?
Folding laundry is not the end goal here. They chose it because it’s a very challenging thing for a robot to do, requiring great manual dexterity, planning, reacting to sensory inputs etc. In other words: if your robot can do your laundry it can probably be taught to do pretty much anything else around the house.
> does anyone do laundry more often than once a week?
Once you have a nonzero amount of kids, laundry becomes a continuous process will no defined start and end.
> Much more useful if it can do cooking since that's something you do at least once every day.
Thing is, cooking is something a lot of people find deeply rewarding and humanizing (I don't, but I realize I'm an outlier here). Meanwhile, I challenge you to find anyone who thinks doing laundry is a worthwhile use of their limited time on Earth.
> Once you have a nonzero amount of kids, laundry becomes a continuous process will no defined start and end.
Pretty much this. You’ll be folding clothes while washing more at the same time.
And it isn’t just the folding that is a challenge. It’s putting it away. I’d gladly take a “put the clothes away” robot before I got a “fold the clothes” robot.
My point is from business perspective cooking is much bigger market since this applies to B2B as well (commercial laundry is not as big) - many restaurants would happily buy such robot and pay even more than typical home user. I also think solving cooking is simpler task than folding any types of clothes - they could even simplify further by focusing first on making burgers/pizza/sandwich/kebab only and be profitable much faster.
> I don't get it why focusing on clothes folding though, does anyone do laundry more often than once a week? Much more useful if it can do cooking since that's something you do at least once every day.
Lots of people do 3-4 loads per week. Some people don't cook at home at all. There are 8 billion people out there.
Some people don't cook at home but they still have to eat. Restaurants still have to hire people for doing cooking tasks.
> I don't get it why focusing on clothes folding though, does anyone do laundry more often than once a week? Much more useful if it can do cooking since that's something you do at least once every day.
Because the people on the Axiom are going to need clean jumpsuits?
Seriously, laundry folding is an example of a complex task that requires considerable dexterity and sophisticated object manipulation on the robot's part, but unlike cooking it's relatively low stakes: little harm is likely to be caused to the robot, the environment, or bystanding humans if the robot screws it up. So it makes a pretty good research task that, when solved for, will make impressive demos at trade events.
> does anyone do laundry more often than once a week?
Yes, at least 3x per week. Young kids, toddlers, babies, workout clothes, sports clothes, work clothes, etc.
> does anyone do laundry more often than once a week
I can tell you do not have children. We frequently run 2 loads per day...
Also, I challenge anyone to look at that video from 2:00 to 2:45 (which is 90 seconds IRL) and tell me with a straight face this has anything to do with "intelligence". I have seen human babies at 5 months old severely outperform this thing.
Small businesses like Cafes? They will hopefully get this to laundromats once this bot can iron, too. Not even once did I iron or fold my laundry back in university ...
I got myself this perfect clothes folding robot about 8 years ago when I decided I would not fold or iron clothes ever again. Two useless activities forever gone from my life. There's more things like this around the house but folding and ironing are 100% useless. I pick the clothes from the rack, they come kinda folded in half but I don't even try, and all get dumped into drawers. I never lack space because I'll buy clothes only upon throwing out clothes, so the bigger volume of the clothes doesn't make a difference in storage space either.
I just leave the clothes on the rack. I can see what I have better and my clothes smell better getting aired out more compared to sitting in a drawer.
This also means I use less floor space as I don't need cabinets/dressers to hold them.
And yes, I have many racks on my walls. The rack life is good.
That sounds like a great setup, my place had inbuilt ones but that's the spirit.
Folding laundry is a tiny chore, the real holy-grail is robotic arms that can cook 24/7. The job-market will never recover from robotic arms in every fast-food joint, restaurant, hotel, hospital, military base, cruise ship, and everywhere else that preps food. The biggest winners might be grocery stores that sell hot meals prepared from their own produce, which are then drone-delivered to the nearby homes. I'm probably being way too optimistic though.
On HN 9 days ago.
Fascinating work.
I never thought about what we could do if instead of trying to do work in real time we slowed robots down for non time critical tasks to latencies which current transformers can deal with on real hardware.
von Neumann, Theory of self-reproducing automata (1966) p.72 "Role of High Complication":
> An automaton can not be separated from the milieu to which it responds.
> The characteristics of a human for survival are well defined on the surface of the earth in its present state, though for most types of humans you must actually specialize the situation a little further than this. But it is meaningless to argue how the human would survive on the bottom of the ocean or in a temperature of 1000 degrees centigrade. Similarly, in discussing a computing machine it is meaningless to ask how fast or how slow it is, unless you specify what type of problems will be given to it.
I know very few people under 40 who fold and iron clothes, and I'm not sure I know people under 30 who own an ironing table and iron (or if they own one, it's busted, and if it's not busted, it's lost).
I think "doing the laundry" is getting obsolete faster than doing it yourself is. Kind of like people didn't give up on sewing their damages clothes by hiring a robot to do it... they gave up by throwing old clothes away and switching to fast fashion.
If this product addresses high-income people (which would probably be the case even if the price comes down from $100k to even $1k), then it still seems a lost cause for this reason.
Fast fashion clothing increasingly cannot be ironed. But also it’s increasingly hard to buy good quality clothes because of the influence of fast fashion. Even very expensive designers will have shit like unlined coats or thin sweaters. Part of this is that the supply chain for good quality clothing has been greatly reduced. Even if you wanted as a designer to acquire good quality fabric, you have to pay more for it than you used to.
Maybe someone in the HN crowd knows that: Why are these robots moving so slowly? Is it for safety or does speed increase the difficulty significantly?
My guess is that speed is not their first concern.
They are using a vision language model to generate the robot motions token by token. They are being bottlenecked by the inference of the VLM.
So we will have robots building and making corve there, while humanity focus on making smart policies through continuoys education for all and involvment in direct democracy.
Or maybe we will have private army robots under the order of some random dictator disconnected from the reality of people.
Or some mix of these. Or finally no longer any war, in a world without any human though.
What a time to be alive.
Pretty sure that once the pre-trained models used for this are pre-trained on lots of video and get larger (2-3 orders of magnitude larger than this), things will quickly improve. This may already exist in prototype form behind closed doors. Think how LLMs have improved since gpt-2 and gpt-3. Though I imagike it in real-time and cost efficiently may be a challenge.
LLMs literally barely improved since gpt3
Be serious. Go retry GPT-3 and compare it to Claude Sonnet and come back here.
Man, watching that robot struggle with that green shirt made my eye twitch.
Folding the laundry is “the easy part”. The actual hard part for me is putting it away. You can fold all you want but it does no good unless it gets put away into whatever closet/drawer configuration you’ve got.
Let's automate everything, so we don't need to do anything just lay in our bed.
Yes because clearly this is how automation works. Never mind that we've improved efficiencies many orders of magnitude over the last century and people still work the exact same amount of hours.
We could automate the world and then we'd all be stuck rolling a cube up and hill and back down. We will work, no matter what, even in the face of post-scarcity utopia.
People should be free to enjoy life their way. Including if they want to be grandpa Joe from willy wonka.
There is something funny in the way it performs some of the moves in a sub-optimal manner. It reminds me of cats playing with small objects (earings on a beside table...). This is still quite impressive.
Finally someone teaching AI to do all the stuff I _dont’t_ want to do.
Love to see mecanum wheels being used here. They're so much rarer to see than they should be! I go months to years between each instance of seeing them.
Is my knowledge out of date, or is this a step change in robotics capabilities? Boston Dynamics robots are impressive, but this seems way beyond what their robots have been able to do.
It's not really a step change.
Saycan demonstrated similar functionality with PaLM 2 years ago (2.5 years first demo of cleaning up coke cans, etc):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ru23eWAQ6_E
Caveat - I am way out of my depth here as I focus on Software AI, but: I can't see any major breaks from SayCan looking at this information. When studying robotics, Degrees of Freedom/basic Arms and mechanisms (tension, grip, extension, types of joint etc) are a typical case study. However, I do not think there has been any practical progress (with the lack of data) in about 20 years now, besides increased refinement from materials science (e.g. detection of soft materials) allowing some better grip but not particularly better dynamic movement(e.g. walking remains badly solved compared to the efficiency/mechanism of humans).
It's certainly an expansion of software capabilities with respect to what Boston Dynamics typically highlights in their videos.
With that said, Boston Dynamics is likely to have their own version of this in the works if not already live. They're videos just tend to highlight advancements in both hardware and software that are likely to go viral and connect with non-technical viewers.
You can already see it in some of BD's latest videos.
The trouble Atlas had taking the car parts off the slotted shelf makes it seem like they're quite a bit further away, given the hand dexterity it takes to fold clothes.
Folding clothes is a special task. Other prototypical tasks that are used in robot benchmark:
- changing a bike chain
- closing a jacket's zipper
They need better hardware. Show me a robot that can button a shirt.
How long before we see this running on a fleet of excavators?
Nice, finally some AI functionality I could actually use.
This robot cannot "do your laundry". It is the same toy as always in robotics. It works in very specific environments, with very specific laundry, as long as no one gets in the way and nothing bad ever happens, you've trained it to do your laundry, you never buy anything unusual, nothing gets tangled too much, etc.
They have an extremely specific definition of the word "laundry". Three specific shirts of size M, L, and XL, and two pairs of shorts of size 28 and 36. Then they do a mobile task on three specific shirts of size M, M, and XL, and two shorts of size 32 and 31W.
That's not "laundry" the way any lay person would understand.
It's sad to see yet another group hype their work for money. What they did do, is invest a tremendous amount of engineering effort to scale things up, to collect data, and to see what changes models need to scale well in this space. That's nice and useful. It's something that as academics we generally cannot afford to do. And won't be able to afford any time soon because they don't share their data and none of their results are reproducible.
PS: Where is this title from? "Physical Intelligence's first generalist policy AI can finally do your laundry " It's not in the article. It's very misleading.
Mwell, the robot picking out the "laundry" from a basket next to the table is slightly more than I've seen before so at least they managed to combine two tasks that would previously be considered distinct (although note the very lengthy attempt to pick a corner of a green shirt in the "3x video" further down the article, which I think is the most honest of the bunch).
I agree this is still a tech demo showing a prototype robot solving a toy task. As usual we're supposed to think "if it can do that then it should be able to do this" but it never works that way in reality.
Sure, what you said is somewhat true, but you have seemingly misunderstood one key aspect here. They simply do not have enough training data to fold all possible laundry. If there was a way to fine-tune the robot on your own clothes, then it would be able to do your laundry just fine.
You're under the mistaken impression that this is just a scripted demo built around learning directly from teleoperation as was the case with mobile aloha. The VLA model here is capable of more generalization than you are willing to admit.
No intention to mislead, but to fit their gist into an informing title. I was originally linking to X, describing their tweet with laundry vid, then changed to point to their source blog post, where their title doesn't fully convey the content.
So this title is firm name and blog post title, adding the "laundry" from their hero video under the title and featured video on their x.com post that links to this blog post, as well as the first featured/labeled "Laundry" task discussed in body (not to mention, answering HN commenters such as this, since "doing the laundry" is by now a meme):
> I’m still waiting for a neural net that can do my laundry. -- sheeshkebab 11 hours ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42098153
The response to this, portrayed in both blog post and x.com feature videos, is in the third sentence of the blog post:
To paraphrase Moravec’s paradox, winning a game of chess or discovering a new drug represent “easy” problems for AI to solve, but folding a shirt or cleaning up a table requires solving some of the most difficult engineering problems ever conceived. To build AI systems that have the kind of physically situated versatility that people possess, we need a new approach — we need to make AI systems embodied so that they can acquire physical intelligence.
The synthesis is, this is about “doing your laundry”.
Finally, to take it out of air quotes, the article's first explicit and bold labeled text task description is:
LAUNDRY. We fine-tuned π0 to fold laundry, using either a mobile robot or a fixed pair of arms. The goal is to get the clothing into a neat stack. This task is exceptionally difficult for robots (...and some humans): while a single t-shirt laid flat on the table can sometimes be folded just by repeating a pre-scripted set of motions, a pile of tangled laundry can be crumpled in many different ways, so it is not enough to simply move the arms through the same motion. To our knowledge, no prior robot system has been demonstrated to perform this task at this level of complexity.
They hold they have demonstrated this robot doing the laundry.
These things can be huge for agriculture
Yeah, one thing is for sure: the robot has actually understood that it is very boring to do the laundry. Proof ? Just look at how it botches the d*n task :-) I mean, I would never ever pince a t-shirt so bad :-)
I hate doing laundry. Everyone gets one task they get to abhor. Mine is laundry. If I could buy this in a few generations for less than $20k, I would, pinches and all.
Perfect is perfect. Good enough is good enough.
$20k... Doesn't that buy a lot of serviced laundry? I am unaware about prices in the rest of the world, but 20k is more than a lifetime of having my laundry picked up and ironed every week (which I do as I too hate laundry).
> $20k... Doesn't that buy a lot of serviced laundry?
In my neck of the woods it costs a couple years of the cleaner dropping in every week or two. In New York, maybe a couple more years, albeit with the added burden of having to pick it up and drop it off myself.
At Physical Intelligence (π) our mission is to bring general-purpose AI into the physical world.
We're excited to show the first step towards this mission - our first generalist model π₀
Paper, blog, uncut videos: http://physicalintelligence.company/blog/pi0