It does indeed.

My dad used to tell me “It’s a lot harder to carpet the world than it is to wear shoes.”

Ambitious redesigns of existing infrastructure are neat, but they are rarely more efficient or practical. Especially when you are overengineering to solve an issue that’s already been dealt with. A self cleaning room requires a lot of additional hardware, all of which has to be designed, built and installed, and has to be powered and run by software that needs to be programmed. It also needs to be maintained, and depending on how it’s cleaning things, it may also be dangerous, or at least capable of damaging property (ever have a motion activated light turnoff while in a bathroom stall? now imagine it triggers steam jets). Not to mention the potential hazards of water damage on a room if anything goes wrong.

Or, you can buy a mop for 0.1% of the price.

Humanoid robots can escape this problem because versatility adds value. The upfront cost may be tens of thousands of dollars, but for that price you’re getting something that solves many, many problems. They can potentially go from task to task, filling a multitude of roles, and ideally with minimal down time.

It also helps that we can use existing processes to train them. They can observe human workers performing a task, attempt to replicate that task, and use feedback to improve. And that’s critical because the hardware is the easier part, it’s software that’s the real challenge.

It’s easier to build a specialized robot for one task than to create a general purpose robot to handle that task. However, as the technology matures, I think it becomes much more practical to create a general purpose robot that’s capable of performing millions of tasks than to create millions of different specialized robots. Not only is that far less to design, source parts for, build and maintain, but it also makes it much easier to repurpose them as needs change. The same basic design can potentially be used for factory work, household chores, new construction, search and rescue operations, food service, vehicle maintenance, mining, caring for kids/elderly/pets, building and maintaining other robots, etc. We’re not there yet, but that’s where this kind of technology could potentially take us.

The advantage of a mostly humanoid robot is that it’s versatile and can use existing solutions built for people. Yes, you could replace the legs with wheels or treads, and you’d probably be just fine for most functions with a Johnny 5 type design, but there will still be exceptions. Being able to climb up or down a ladder for example means that you don’t have to engineer a solution to deal with getting onto a roof or down into a tunnel system. We’ve already spent thousands of years solving those problems for humans.

Lying about testing a product in order to get people to buy it so you can get your affiliate revenue sounds like fraud to me. Seems like the kind of thing that should lead to lawsuits and potentially criminal charges. Not that anyone would actually try to do something about this or most other problems facing consumers.

I Always thought Perkins was Jerkins

Prime was a reasonable value for me a decade ago. The streaming side was never the main draw but it was a nice added bonus, especially when Netflix started to lose a lot of the content I actually wanted to watch.

Unfortunately, Amazon’s been flooded with worthless trash, and they made the conscious decision to make searching and filtering as useless as possible. It’s actually impressive that they’ve so degraded their service that it’s usually more convenient for me to go shopping locally than to try to navigate the unending mine field on Amazon.

So of course they try to ruin the last thing keeping me subscribed. I’m done, they can fuck off. I’ve got a jellyfin server, I don’t need these assholes.

Unfortunately, I’m sure they’ll make an obscene amount of money with this move, because apparently the world is full of people who will pay good money to bend over and take it.

If I buy a product, and the manufacturer remotely disables that product in order to coerce me into buying their goods and services, the people responsible should be charged with fraud, destruction of property, criminal conspiracy, racketeering, and anything else that can stick. It should be treated no less severely than if they hired thugs to smash it with a crowbar.

AI today, or actual AI someday? And do they need to do the job well, or just at all?

I also wonder how many of these people are open to the idea of UBI when brought up in the context of AI replacing the majority of human labor.

Not since I was a teenager.

Sending a notification that a renewal is coming up? Impossible, will cost a fortune.

Sending mountains of junk mail offering bundles and limited time offers? Clearly much cheaper and easier.

Also, think of the labor costs, retraining the call center staff to not spend hours trying to talk people out of canceling and instead just having them hit a button. Why, that’s got to force a price hike.