One thing which I find striking here is that a modern home and attendant conveniences roughly embodies 10--15 horsepower of effort, or the work of 40 or so full time house staff.

Thus far, the only notable robots are little disks which vacuum up floors (and they're getting outlawed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49104371 ) and some innovations just haven't become widespread (an uncle of mine piped his home for a central vacuum system, compleat w/ a switch at each connection for on/off) --- I really can't recall a device with widespread demand since DVD and then Blueray players (or maybe the Wii? the PS2 counts as a DVD player arguably). I don't know anyone who has done more than read about "Smart Mirrors" for example....

What will be the first device to bottle up AI and other modern technologies in a package and become widely in-demand/distributed?

> What will be the first device to bottle up AI and other modern technologies in a package and become widely in-demand

One problem I see is that corporations insist on collecting and reselling our data. As a result, a lot of people are reticent to get much automation. They seem to accept it with TVs, but other devices - it's just too much of an intrusion.

I say "a lot of people" but I don't know how many people it is, exactly.

There was recently a bit of a controversy with a refrigerator that had a big monitor on the door. That could actually be a cool feature: it could show you what's inside before you open the door. You could access it remotely if you're at the store and trying to remember if you have milk at home. But of course, the company started putting ads on it, and undoubtedly they're selling your data.

The thing I stumbled over was that the house owner was out mowing the lawn, something that we actually do have robots for nowadays. But then again, I do enjoy a good, meditative lawn mowing.

We don't build robots because the "hard/boring part" for the human is often NOT the hard part for the robot.

Take the dishwasher, for example, loading it is very hard for a robot, but easy and quick for a human. Washing the dishes is boring for the human, but a robot gets a sort of sick and twisted pleasure from cycling that dirty water around for hours on end.

In fact, we've removed some labor-saving features of houses (laundry chutes went away decades ago, and only recently has "laundry on the bedroom floor" become somewhat standard) for "safety".

MAKE DUMBWAITERS GREAT AGAIN

Only new models of robots are banned, FCC approval of previous devices still stands and therefore we can continue to purchase those models. They will just get additionally out of date.

> However, the US ban only covers new advanced robot models, not existing products that have already received FCC equipment authorization for sale in the US. The "action does not impact a consumer’s continued use of devices they previously acquired," the FCC says. "Nor does it prevent retailers from continuing to sell, import, or market relevant models approved previously.”

It'll be a US or Japanese or South Korean robot since it's not allowed to come from China.

I'd be in favor of Apple entering that market.

I think they'll be a huge first-mover advantage because of the Chinese blockade preventing cheap clones.

https://www.weaverobotics.com/

And Toyota robotics has been trying to solve loading dishwashers for at least 7 years.

And that's all the housework required really, vacuuming, mopping, dishwasher un/loading, picking random stuff off the floor, dusting is another minor thing to have done.

The vast majority of labor has already been solved with dishwashers and washing machines and dryers, electric ovens and stoves.

the real problem with household robots is that they are either flimsy toys or dangerous machines, and there's not much in-between. If we were to build a humanoid robot that would just put laundry away (as described in a HN article a few weeks ago), it would need to be strong enough to lift a laundry basket, have advanced control systems to go up and down stairs, and also be safe/reliable/trusted enough not to hurt people or damage property. We can do these things (modulo the trust, probably) but the confluence of all of it gets very expensive very quickly.

People want Rosie from the Jetsons, but the compute power required would be astronomical, the mechanical systems would need maintenance, and there would be real safety concerns.

With LLMs, we've got the wisecracking figured out...

Amazon Alexa. You're a decade late.