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One of the crazy things about AI and robotics is that in the year 2025, most people still don't use Roombas or other robotic vacuum cleaners.

They're useful in many contexts, but they're not clearly better across most metrics than a human with a vacuum cleaner yet. They've been out for a very long time, gradually improving. And that's one *very specific* task with pretty clear visualization requirements and floor mobility requirements and pretty low safety thresholds with high repetition levels, and yet that market isn't dominated by robotics yet.

That's an example of why I continue to view white collar computer-work AI as being *way* ahead of in-the-field blue collar robotic AI in terms of competing with human jobs.

The moment where it's a joke to buy a human-powered vacuum instead of a robot vacuum, rather than a debatable trade-off, is kind of the canary in the coal mine moment for consumer robotics. We can't even nail that yet, but once we do, it's kind of a floodgate moment, considering how long that task has been in the works for, and it will probably quickly expand to other areas following that moment.

That's kind of my basic test for robot hype. Yes, they're getting better and better. Yes, they do backflips now. Yes, it's a big deal. But in-the-field blue collar skilled work is a really high bar, and we haven't fully cleared the "vacuum carpeted areas of the same house floor area over and over" stage of that yet.

Everything is kind of hype until that stage is fully breached. Then it's off to the races.

What's your view of that heuristic?

Cykros 11mo ago

I'm not surprised things like roombas aren't all that widely used. Vaccuuming isn't particularly dangerous work, and roombas aren't all that cheap. Things like, servicing nuclear meltdown sites and other hazardous locations, however, is a great use of robots that does seem to be fairly widely used. Also, the use of drones. Though, I suppose it depends whether you consider remote controlled machines in the same space as autonomous machines, because drones and things like Vicarious Surgical's "robot" might not be fair to compare to fully autonomous systems that act purely algorithmically.

Maybe at some point we'll look to robots to do things that aren't so difficult for humans to do, in the same way we use dishwashers now, but I think most things we recognize as robots just don't have the best cost:benefit ratio, especially when we consider the inertia of having a routine that already has us doing things manually.

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Discussion

Cykros 11mo ago

Amazon's roboticization of its warehouses may be something I expect to see sooner than an at home Rosie from the Jetsons for this reason. While the work may not be that hard in individual increments, expecting humans to spend 8-10 hours on their feet with insufficient bathroom breaks is just begging for burnout. Robots do not suffer these limitations.