Well it's here, we are entering the future. I saw Bicentennial Man in theatres, a story that seemed like it could be about my lifetime. It starts with a family receiving their first robot. It ends with the robot becoming nearly human, and saying goodbye to its owner as he passes away. What a great film! Household robotics, and all the ethical implications have always seemed just around the corner in my lifetime. Personal Robots! Wow, like so many sci-fi ideas, they are grounded more in possibility than fantasy, and this generation is facing it.
How lazy am I? Do I need a robot to fold my laundry? Well it could be convenient.
This just makes me want to fold laundry, to prove my usefulness. Humans do however have creative facilties that could be put to better use, writing books, painting art, building things, yet we have so many chores to do each day. I have clothes on a second dry cycle right now.
Helix: A Vision-Language-Action Model for Generalist Humanoid Control
https://www.figure.ai/news/helix
"Helix can now handle a wider variety of packaging approaching human-level dexterity and speed, bringing us closer to fully autonomous package sorting. "
Living with robots seems less like science fiction in 2025, and more like our near future. If you have the money, it's just another toy for Christmas you can add to your collection. For the 'financially disadvantaged' it seems like a threat-- that low paying jobs are at risk of being replaced. Still, Robots will need supervisors-- at least until other robots can supervise them.
Maintenance and repairs are going to be costly, and making sure your robot stays on task and isn't painting the office furniture instead of the wall, important too. However as AI gets better and better each week, we will likely arrive in 2035 and discover robots doing tasks perfectly, everywhere. It was not long ago, 2022 that I decided to try to print my own robot.
@AlphaLab has been sitting in the corner, with a tripod up its spine, for a while now. Collecting dust, I have not given up all hope of putting him together in a meaningful way, but open source designs like Poppy will be obsolete soon (if not already), as Optimus and Helix steal the spotlight. I shifted my focus towards ChatGPT very cautiously, as GPT2 took a huge leap forward thanks to OpenAI and now Machine Learning is a household term.
Even your parents are using ChatGPT, friends on Meta unknowingly talking with Llama3, or other family members running their preferred ML models on their computers. Everything is accelerating so fast, the singularity I was thinking about ten years ago is happening now.
When all the information on the internet is being learned by these machines, and suddenly anything is possible, and the only limitation is your imagination. We will have a lot of time to think, about what to think about, while robots are folding our laundry, sorting our junk, and working our jobs. How will things turn out, in another ten years? How much will change, and also, how much will remain the same? Likely, humans will still eat at McDonalds, but in addition to the self checkout kiosks which have now become standard at all locations, and the points App they are always asking if we will use, will Robots prepare and serve us our Cheeseburgers? The quality control will be a benefit of course, but where will Humans work?
Some sort of intellectual reputation based system will be needed (hint hint) to give humans something meaningful to do with their time. If only there was a way they could blog and get rewarded for their human-meaningful efforts! Are there any humans out there?
@Darkflame