I hope early home robotics will be like a game console launch - a community rush to break through any initial barriers to homebrew. Specific early firmwares will be desirable and a whole community will form around creating exploits and running user software. As old robot units fall out of service and are sold in bulk, the community will pick them up and keep them running.

Dont forget the artificial people personalities

And you'll better start to practice worshipping those ads unless your ass wants to be the star in B-166ER's last home video.

>we're only a decade away from the US or Israel etc. airdropping 1000 armed humanoid robots into a civilian space to hunt for "terrorists"

Currently they just bomb the buildings into the ground, killing everyone indiscriminately, so robots can't be any worse than that.

Why not both? They partner with Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, etc.

A couple weeks ago I saw a proud post by a humanoid robot CEO showing off how well his robots could sort objects on an assembly line. It was painful to watch. It's like he's never seen a real industrial sorting system in his life. Vision algos from 30 years ago along with simple mechanics or puffs of air were doing it 100x faster back then. I'm not convinced there is a bubble in AI, but there's definitely one in humanoid robots.

A robot that cleans my toilet would be nice. Sure I could have a dedicated toilet cleaning robot, and a dedicated dishwasher loading robot, and a dedicated pickup-up-crap-off-the-floor-the-kids-have-left-around-robot ... or just something general purpose?

I don't care if it is humanoid or not, but given that our house is built for humans to interact with it seems reasonable that it should fit into that space.

A dishwasher is the only reason you can think of a humanoid robot? How about a robot to load and unload the dishwasher.

The fact is we live in a world built for humans. I have a robot vacuum and for it to be effective I had to setup my home in a certain way, and even then it is not fully effective.

People pay for cleaners to come into their home all the time, it shouldn't be hard to think why a humanoid robot would (theoretically, if it worked well) be far better than a purpose built machine in the home. But also in many cases working with those machines.

Where is my non-humanoid robot that does all the household cleaning? Including vacuuming the stairs (a roomba doesn't work there), dusting the surfaces, mopping floors, cleaning windows...

I guess a warehouse can be designed in a way that works well for a non-humanoid robot, but an environment designed for people in the first place (like a home) fundamentally needs to be person-shaped.

Dishwashers also cannot work without a human loading and unloading dishes. How do you propose to automate this part?

I'd love the robot to fill and empty the dishwasher and put the stuff in the correct drawers and cabinets

edit: but if the robot could in addition also do dishes in the sink and not need a dishwasher at all, that'd also save up space in the kitchen for something else

Depends on what your definition of "good" is.

If your definition is "it could, at some point, enable me to stop paying humans for their labor and pass along more of the value to major shareholders like myself", then yes, that's a reason to want humanoid robots.

If your definition of "good" is a little more broadly scoped than the above - which it should be if you don't have an MBA and a substance abuse problem - then you're correct.

You say it worries you more than pure digital AI but don't explain. What is it about that humanoids that makes you worry?

I was thinking the other day that Apple is best positioned for drone companions- not even necessarily humanoid, but solving the battery charge problem to have an assistant follow you everywhere.

You’d only have to worry if we still had a long horizon of peace and globalism. With more potential breaks in supply chains, everything will cost a lot more in terms of time and money.