I'd be mad if washing machines were marketed as a "robot maid"

"Washer" and "dryer" are accepted colloquial terms for these appliances.

I could even see the humour in "washer-bot" and "dryer-bot" if they did anything notably more complex. But we don't need/want appliances to become more complex than is necessary. We usually just call such things programmable.

I can accept calling our new, over-hyped, hallucinating overlords chatbots. But to be fair to the technology, it is we chatty humans doing all the hyping and hallucinating.

The market capitalisation for this sector is sickly feverish — all we have done is to have built a significantly better ELIZA [1]. Not a HIGGINS and certainly not AGI. If this results in the construction of new nuclear power facilities, maybe we can do the latter with significant improvement too. (I hope.)

My toaster and oven will never be bots to me. Although my current vehicle is better than earlier generations, it contains plenty of bad code and it spews telemetry. It should not be trusted with any important task.

[1] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA

A woman from 1825 would probably happily accept that description though (notwithstanding that the word “robot” wasn’t invented yet).

A machine that magically replaces several hours of her manual work? As far as she’s concerned, it’s a specialized maid that doesn’t eat at her table and never gets sick.

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