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CES Was Full of Useless Robots and Machines That Don’t Work

492 points by tlb 9y ago

kulu2002 9y ago
We are still improving flat panel displays and making smartphones over smart. It feels like there is atleast a decade for AI, Machine learning, NLP, AR/VR to come into mainstream and do some meaningful stuff for mankind.
adventured 9y ago
CES 1982: full of useless computers that don't do much of anything, have little to no software available for them, very expensive. (should not be taken literally, the point however is obvious) Check back in about 5 to 7 years.
Laura-Vieujean 9y ago
What was your favorite product at CES ?
- amerine 9y ago
  Everything that I saw announced felt uninspired/tepid/meh or an incremental update to something nobody needed. It was pretty... boring.
  - pishpash 9y ago
    Take note, we're near the peak of froth.
- jandrese 9y ago
  One thing I'd thought about for years finally appeared at CES. They had a mister you attach to the outside unit of your heat pump. It included the deionizer/water softener to prevent the minerals from building up on your A/C. But then the company ruined it by selling it only as a $100/year service.
  - knodi123 9y ago
    I bought a pair of those several years ago. It worked for about a year and then broke down. I tried to sell the remaining unit for 90% off on craigslist, and there were no takers. It was the kickstarter version 1.0 of this: http://mistbox.com/ http://mistbox.com/
- thrillgore 9y ago
  Any that worked when the power went out.
- bufferoverflow 9y ago
  - 8K TV with HDR going to 10000 nits. Where bright objects actually do look bright. - The new LG Gram ultralight laptop. - On-screen fingerprint scanner. - Intel's voxel tech, but that's a very expensive system. - Pretty much all of NVidia's machine learning tech. - The dual-perspective projector system, very clever.
  - yoodenvranx 9y ago
    > On-screen fingerprint scanner. From all the stuff I saw on CES this is the only thing which I _really_ want.
    - jagger27 9y ago
      Apparently it uses IR and is easily fooled. I think Android manufacturers have it right by putting the scanner on the back or side. We can keep our good capacitive fingerprint sensors and still get bezelless displays. I wonder how far off a transparent digitizer is that can make out fingerprints?
deleted 9y ago
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bane 9y ago
Here's what I want robots to do: 1) Wash my dishes, dry them and put them away completely automatically. 2) Wash and dry my clothes, fold them and put them away completely automatically. These two things would save me hours of work per week. FoldiMate simply isn't even close to being good enough, but I'd be willing to spend about that much for a robot that could do #2. I can vacuum my floor by myself and greet people at the door, thank you. I have no use for drones, or bipedal robots, or some kind of other walking robot at all. Alexa and similar provide nothing to me that I've been able to ascertain. I wouldn't mind some kind of thing that can hold stuff and follow me around (and up and down stairs) on occasion, but that suitcase isn't going to do it. Anybody who can crack either #1 or #2 is going to break the robotics industry wide open.
- beaconstudios 9y ago
  for 1, a dishwasher covers (wash) and in some cases (dry) - the putting away is the least time-consuming step so I'm not convinced a robot would be a massive innovation over dishwashers unless it also collected not-in-use washables but that's robot butler levels of complexity. for 2, I don't know about the US but in the UK you can get small local companies that will wash and iron a sack of laundry for you, and return them folded. I don't know what benefit you would see by having that automated instead of done by a human. It's fairly cheap too I understand.
  - lev99 9y ago
    2. In the US it would cost at least $400/yr per person for a pickup/drop off laundry service. Foldimate sells for $850, and can presumably service an entire household. If it was more capable (just put clean clothes in a hopper, or connects directly to a dryer) it would be significantly more economic then human labor.
    - semi-extrinsic 9y ago
      If the Foldimate was more capable, the laundry services would start using them and their prices would drop accordingly, no?
Pxtl 9y ago
Love the Simone Giertz shout-out. And yes, as a father of 3 who spends half his weekend on laundry, I would pay a lot for a really functional laundribot.
- rorykoehler 9y ago
  Why not pay a maid?
zitterbewegung 9y ago
I used to work in the event services industry and CES no longer needs to exist. All of the major companies can hold their own press events and promote their products. Why buy an exhibitor booth at CES when you could take the same money and DIY. Apple , Google and Microsoft get this. Also, things like Kickstarter do the same. In a few years CES , E3 won't really exist anymore they are already dead.
- kbutler 9y ago
  CES and E3 exist because many people, especially the press, are willing to go. Apple, Google, and Microsoft have a big enough draw that people (the press) will pay to go see what they provide. Smaller, less-dominant companies don't inspire the same level of desire. What good is saving money by providing your own show if nobody comes?
- jandrese 9y ago
  CES is for brand recognition. There are thousands of products that come into existence and disappear every year. Having to find the website for all of them would never happen. Even aggregators like this site are going to miss most of them. Walking the floors of the convention is a great way to get a huge infodump on what people are planning to sell. I agree that a lot of what goes on there is a stupendous waste of money, but you are guaranteed to see dozens of products that you've never heard about when you walk the show floor. The other reason people set up booths there is that they're looking for distribution partners and investors. It's a long shot, but it's better than every distributor and every investor getting a call from every company that wants to make/sell products in the US. This is why you see a ton of Chinese companies with tiny booths with names like Shenzen Happy Fun Heavy Industries just waiting for someone with an investor badge to walk by and make an offer to sell their phone cases and USB cables.
  - zitterbewegung 9y ago
    I think that Linus Tech tips could singlehandedly eliminate CES.
- chrisco255 9y ago
RandomInteger4 9y ago
Anyone here go to CES who can corroborate the linked story?
- modeless 9y ago
  CES is like this every year.
- jandrese 9y ago
  That stupid laundry folding robot was there. They had a "show" every 15 minutes or so where they would pick a person from the audience to stuff clothes into the machine and have them not folded (the demo machine only had the loader). I didn't see the crashed companion robots. They were working when I walked by, but I didn't pay them much mind because I thought they were stupid. There were also a number of advertising robots which show up every year. They have screens for heads/chests and don't do much of anything useful. The new addition this year was a French model that was built like a Heroin Chic Supermodel instead of the superdeformed look that most of the Japanese companies opt for. IMHO, Google's voice stuff was more common than Alexa this year. It actually got annoying to hear someone say "hey Google" for the millionth time. Even the goddamn Monorail was saying it.
  - throwawaybbqed 9y ago
    The companion robots were there last year too (in Sands IIRC). They were also working when I passed them .. singing a creepy old McDonald had a farm. I spoke to a rep and she said kids can get rough with these things so they are targeting seniors. Yeah.. I dunno about this one. Cruzr was a big robot from a Shenzen company. I really liked it. I have seen Jibo in action .. the Cruzr I saw had a personality that surpised me! I thought there was another laundry robot that won a prize. I went to a "demo time" but it wasn't a demo .. it was just a talk. They had a video from inside the robot and they were obscuring things. My personal opinion but I was very annoyed at the lack of demo (so were others) and felt they might be hiding something. The table tennis robot was pretty awesome and so was the dobot magician. I could hardly believe that the same arm was used as a 3d printer, a lazer engraver and a paint brush. Some of the VR stuff I saw was disappointing. The pimax guys were running the Blu demo .. what a horrible demo to show case their tech. I couldn't tell a difference between it and my oculus. I tried the HTC vive pro at the Intel booth and it was decent (I was able to clearly read text). But what blew me away was the Sansar VR demo. I was stupid and skipped the Intel wireless headset demo .. kicking myself over it. Saw a bunch of engineering demos that were very cool.
dpweb 9y ago
There are a lot of solutions looking for problems nowadays.
apsec112 9y ago
Is it really that surprising that a convention whose whole focus is new and experimental technology would have lots of things that don't work very well?
- hsljekskfh 9y ago
  eh, it's not a science fair.
pishpash 9y ago
I feel this cycle of hype of several technologies (not just robots) has a larger-than-ever component of the MBA culture wherein pseudo-understanding and handwaving are rewarded. It has the same smell as reading crackpot imaginings about "the body electric" from the 19th century or "quantum neurology" from the 20th.
pishpash 9y ago
This is what you get when you can borrow money for zero or negative interest rates for ten years, and every "investment" looks like gold. Thanks Uncles Bernanke/Draghi/Kuroda.
- thro123341 9y ago
  I shudder to think what the next crash is gonna look like.
ProAm 9y ago
CES is a dying trade show, its not worth much of anything of relevance these days.
Feniks 9y ago
Well TRULY life transforming tech doesn't happen all that often. Oh sure the tech companies are going to say that 2018 TVs and smartphones are so disruptive from last year...
kylesf 9y ago
This folding robot was at least more impressive in person. https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/10/16865506/laundroid-laundry-folding-machine-foldimate-ces-2018 https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/10/16865506/laundroid-laundr...
- crowbahr 9y ago
  That has real promise. Sounds like they just need brighter lights or a variable high contrast background to the sensors.
- ashelmire 9y ago
  Do you work for them? The video on that page never shows it successfully folding anything. The narrator gave it a t-shirt and it failed.
  - kylesf 9y ago
    Fair enough, it just seemed more impressive in theory. I just did quick search because I saw it at the show.
raitom 9y ago
We are talking about machines but during my last trip to Japan I’ve been blown away by the domotic present in the appartment I rented. There was a self-filling bathtube that I could program directly from the kitchen. Is there any « bathtube auto-fill/alexa » product in the US? I never been able to find something like that. I’d like to be able to ask alexa to prepare my bath while I’m cooking.
- QAPereo 9y ago
  Sounds like a way to scald someone with a hack. Edit: There was a self-filling bathtube that I could program directly from the kitchen. How much do you want to bet that a US version would be networked, probably smartphone integrated?
  - gruez 9y ago
    it's not IOT.
    - yorwba 9y ago
      How do you know? There needs to be some kind of connection for remote programmability. The default choice is likely something connected to the (W)LAN. From there, it's only one misconfigured firewall and a default password away from being hacked over the internet.
      - jamesvandyne 9y ago
        They're not. They've been around longer than WiFi. It's a simple wired connection to the control panel in the tub that's installed as a single unit. It let's you control things like temp, intercom to the kitchen and so forth. Automatic Bath one of my favorite things about living in Japan, even more so than the heated toilet seat.
        QAPereo 9y ago
        Oooh... I stand corrected then. It would certainly make a ton of sense for a bathing culture like Japan, but for showers... eh. Heated seat with bidet and air though? Oh hell yes please.
phreack 9y ago
A weird aspect of CES is that it's THE trade show that blows up outside the US on developing countries. News programs send people to report on what is absolutely certainly the future and coming up if they were to be believed. I've always found it surprising, as no true disruptors are revealed there, and every year it seems to get worse as the article notes.
m3kw9 9y ago
The pitch deck for the investors must be all drawing boards then
erik_landerholm 9y ago
Don’t care! It’s the golden age of tvs! Oleds are a technology that’s actually living up to the hype. I have an lg wallpaper tv and you can roll it up! The new ones look even more flexible. One even rolls up into a box. Robots will catch up. The future of TVs is now!
- pitaj 9y ago
  I want my OLED monitors. I've been waiting for years for an OLED monitor, it's my dream. The closest thing is VA+Quantum Dot monitors, but they just aren't the same.
  - therealdrag0 9y ago
    I would love an affordable eInk monitor. A lot of nights I want to do textual work on my computer (coding or writing), but my eyes are so done with the brightness.
  - refset 9y ago
    I agree completely. This article suggests a few reasons why CES was so disappointing in regards monitor/laptop OLED: https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/oled-laptops-and-monitors-are-missing-at-ces-2018/ https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/oled-laptops-and-mon... Thank goodness for ASUS offering us a glimmer of hope with their portable OLED monitor.
  - yoodenvranx 9y ago
    Not sure if I want a OLED monitor with current OLED technology for everyday use. All current OLED phone displays will have (slight) burn in after 1-2 years and I am pretty sure the same would happen on a monitor which you use daily for 8-10 hours.
  - gnode 9y ago
    What do you want it for? I recently got an OLED TV which I'm now using as a monitor for games and video, and it's brilliant (although you might think otherwise if you have extraordinary latency demands). I also find the large size of the display more immersive than a conventional monitor. I still use an LCD for static content (programming; web browsing; etc.) as I want to avoid burn in, but I don't really care about high contrast and wide colour gamut in that use case.
cdoxsey 9y ago
The next 20 years will be a constant stream of half broken robots and ai systems. At least until we either get them to actually work or we figure out how bad they are and go back to using people again. It will be like setting up video conferencing, except for everything. Your car will go to the wrong place because it failed to account for a leap second, thus breaking gps. Your fridge will put itself in eco mode because it thinks you're on vacation from misreading your calendar and spoils all your food. Your front door will forget who you are after you get a haircut and lock you out. After an automatic system upgrade your shower will no longer produce hot water, because a bug results in the system using Celsius instead of Fahrenheit. Your bug report is ignored for a week and after a dozen people complain you get in an argument with the engineer about whether the place you live in actually exists. Wait. Who am I kidding... You won't be able to talk to an engineer. All support will be automated and it will be impossible to get the robot to understand your complaint. You'll just have to replace it. I suspect you're going to have to replace things a lot. On the bright side it will probably be really cheap though. And then there will be all the outages. One of these days Uber is going to accidentally send all drivers in a big city to a single location. It'll be the great ai outage of 2018, the first of soon to be monthly occurrences of bizarre system failures we can't begin to imagine. I feel like someone should write a pg wodehouseesque novel about the "smart" future.
- firefoxd 9y ago
  "Ending is better than mending". It was written way way back.
- ThatGeoGuy 9y ago
  > Your car will go to the wrong place because it failed to account for a leap second, thus breaking gps. I do get the implication you're going for, but GPS actually ignores leap seconds for this reason. The time scale on the GPS system was fixed when it was deployed, and is 18 seconds ahead of UTC because it does not account for leap seconds. Sometimes we design horrid systems that are harder to use than analog counterparts. Sometimes, our systems work because they required a lot of thought to go into them. AI hell is more likely to be a problem of decision trees than it is going to be anything to do with sensor disruption or time offsets.
sirmike_ 9y ago
Heatworks made this $300 wonder. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4UgIijI0Z0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4UgIijI0Z0 I am down. Sad to see more hype than substance re:robots.
- xzel 9y ago
  I was just thinking about something like this from the above comments. It reminds me of the cup washers they use at bars that moves cups under hot water and then to a place to dry. Both would be an interesting piece in a home kitchen.
- rurounijones 9y ago
  Why on earth does it need to be internet connected?!
- jbob2000 9y ago
  Too small, completely useless. I don't need a dishwasher to wash a couple of glasses and cutlery. Those take 2 seconds to do by hand. I need a dishwasher because 20 people were just over and I don't want to be up all night washing. Or we just made an intense meal that needed lots of equipment and I don't want to wash 10 bowls, 3 knives, 4 spoons, a spatula, and a cutting board.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
jl6 9y ago
> A giant banner in the main hallway read “A better life. A better world.” But all I could think of is how much I wanted to be back home in the real world where, even if it’s primitive, most technology just works. To be fair, most real world tech doesn’t just work either.
abalashov 9y ago
I have never been to and didn't follow CES, but the little I learned about this one just made me depressed about our civilisational priorities: an unimaginably gargantuan space of Chinese electronic junk largely devoted to servicing the whims of pampered and effete digiratti, all of which will be obsolete, discarded and piling up in landfills a mere few years after it's taken to market. I got about 30 seconds into the news clip about the highlights and had to turn it off.
maurits 9y ago
I get the sentiment, but I have faith. The RAND computer was probably also quite irrelevant for the household at its time.[1] [1]: https://bwithers.files.wordpress.com/2006/12/rand_home_computer.jpg https://bwithers.files.wordpress.com/2006/12/rand_home_compu...
jeffreygoesto 9y ago
Didn’t we have that topic already? http://www.businessinsider.com/san-francisco-tech-startups-replacing-mom-2015-5?IR=T http://www.businessinsider.com/san-francisco-tech-startups-r...
Symmetry 9y ago
Robotic technology is slowly making its way from more structured environments to less structured ones. Most of the work in factories is now done by robots. The invasion of warehouses is underway (and I'm helping with that). Probably you'll be seeing robots stocking shelves in retail. And folding clothes is substantially harder than stocking shelves and you, the consumer, aren't willing to pay nearly as much for a robot to fold your clothes as a store is for a robot because the amount of labor being replaced is much smaller. So it'll be a while.
deleted 9y ago
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ThomPete 9y ago
This article and many comments here completely misses the bigger picture. Robots is only one way for AI to be expressed. To expect us to be much further ahead with robots shows how wrong most discussions about robots are. In most industrial settings, robots is the standard and works just fine, in an increasing number of warehouses and other semi controlled environments it's gaining popularity. Consumner robots ai needs to be much more generalized for them to feel "smart" as they are in much less predictable environments. To expect consumer robots to be much further than they are makes no sense. Thats not where the primary progress is made just yet and no one maybe besides media and a few opportunistic companies are under that illusion.
y3sh 9y ago
Still in the era of the sharper image. Gimmicky tech with rush-to-market sensationalism.
trisimix 9y ago
I dont like the article. First of all the simone giertz intro was pretty cringey. Second of all you just wrote about yourself being a dick to a bunch of people.
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492 points by tlb 9y ago

kulu2002 9y ago

We are still improving flat panel displays and making smartphones over smart. It feels like there is atleast a decade for AI, Machine learning, NLP, AR/VR to come into mainstream and do some meaningful stuff for mankind.

adventured 9y ago

CES 1982: full of useless computers that don't do much of anything, have little to no software available for them, very expensive. (should not be taken literally, the point however is obvious) Check back in about 5 to 7 years.

Laura-Vieujean 9y ago

What was your favorite product at CES ?

amerine 9y ago
Everything that I saw announced felt uninspired/tepid/meh or an incremental update to something nobody needed. It was pretty... boring.
- pishpash 9y ago
  Take note, we're near the peak of froth.
jandrese 9y ago
One thing I'd thought about for years finally appeared at CES. They had a mister you attach to the outside unit of your heat pump. It included the deionizer/water softener to prevent the minerals from building up on your A/C. But then the company ruined it by selling it only as a $100/year service.
- knodi123 9y ago
  I bought a pair of those several years ago. It worked for about a year and then broke down. I tried to sell the remaining unit for 90% off on craigslist, and there were no takers. It was the kickstarter version 1.0 of this: http://mistbox.com/ http://mistbox.com/
thrillgore 9y ago
Any that worked when the power went out.
bufferoverflow 9y ago
- 8K TV with HDR going to 10000 nits. Where bright objects actually do look bright. - The new LG Gram ultralight laptop. - On-screen fingerprint scanner. - Intel's voxel tech, but that's a very expensive system. - Pretty much all of NVidia's machine learning tech. - The dual-perspective projector system, very clever.
- yoodenvranx 9y ago
  > On-screen fingerprint scanner. From all the stuff I saw on CES this is the only thing which I _really_ want.
  - jagger27 9y ago
    Apparently it uses IR and is easily fooled. I think Android manufacturers have it right by putting the scanner on the back or side. We can keep our good capacitive fingerprint sensors and still get bezelless displays. I wonder how far off a transparent digitizer is that can make out fingerprints?

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

bane 9y ago

Here's what I want robots to do: 1) Wash my dishes, dry them and put them away completely automatically. 2) Wash and dry my clothes, fold them and put them away completely automatically. These two things would save me hours of work per week. FoldiMate simply isn't even close to being good enough, but I'd be willing to spend about that much for a robot that could do #2. I can vacuum my floor by myself and greet people at the door, thank you. I have no use for drones, or bipedal robots, or some kind of other walking robot at all. Alexa and similar provide nothing to me that I've been able to ascertain. I wouldn't mind some kind of thing that can hold stuff and follow me around (and up and down stairs) on occasion, but that suitcase isn't going to do it. Anybody who can crack either #1 or #2 is going to break the robotics industry wide open.

beaconstudios 9y ago
for 1, a dishwasher covers (wash) and in some cases (dry) - the putting away is the least time-consuming step so I'm not convinced a robot would be a massive innovation over dishwashers unless it also collected not-in-use washables but that's robot butler levels of complexity. for 2, I don't know about the US but in the UK you can get small local companies that will wash and iron a sack of laundry for you, and return them folded. I don't know what benefit you would see by having that automated instead of done by a human. It's fairly cheap too I understand.
- lev99 9y ago
  2. In the US it would cost at least $400/yr per person for a pickup/drop off laundry service. Foldimate sells for $850, and can presumably service an entire household. If it was more capable (just put clean clothes in a hopper, or connects directly to a dryer) it would be significantly more economic then human labor.
  - semi-extrinsic 9y ago
    If the Foldimate was more capable, the laundry services would start using them and their prices would drop accordingly, no?

Pxtl 9y ago

Love the Simone Giertz shout-out. And yes, as a father of 3 who spends half his weekend on laundry, I would pay a lot for a really functional laundribot.

rorykoehler 9y ago
Why not pay a maid?

zitterbewegung 9y ago

I used to work in the event services industry and CES no longer needs to exist. All of the major companies can hold their own press events and promote their products. Why buy an exhibitor booth at CES when you could take the same money and DIY. Apple , Google and Microsoft get this. Also, things like Kickstarter do the same. In a few years CES , E3 won't really exist anymore they are already dead.

kbutler 9y ago
CES and E3 exist because many people, especially the press, are willing to go. Apple, Google, and Microsoft have a big enough draw that people (the press) will pay to go see what they provide. Smaller, less-dominant companies don't inspire the same level of desire. What good is saving money by providing your own show if nobody comes?
jandrese 9y ago
CES is for brand recognition. There are thousands of products that come into existence and disappear every year. Having to find the website for all of them would never happen. Even aggregators like this site are going to miss most of them. Walking the floors of the convention is a great way to get a huge infodump on what people are planning to sell. I agree that a lot of what goes on there is a stupendous waste of money, but you are guaranteed to see dozens of products that you've never heard about when you walk the show floor. The other reason people set up booths there is that they're looking for distribution partners and investors. It's a long shot, but it's better than every distributor and every investor getting a call from every company that wants to make/sell products in the US. This is why you see a ton of Chinese companies with tiny booths with names like Shenzen Happy Fun Heavy Industries just waiting for someone with an investor badge to walk by and make an offer to sell their phone cases and USB cables.
- zitterbewegung 9y ago
  I think that Linus Tech tips could singlehandedly eliminate CES.
chrisco255 9y ago

RandomInteger4 9y ago

Anyone here go to CES who can corroborate the linked story?

modeless 9y ago
CES is like this every year.
jandrese 9y ago
That stupid laundry folding robot was there. They had a "show" every 15 minutes or so where they would pick a person from the audience to stuff clothes into the machine and have them not folded (the demo machine only had the loader). I didn't see the crashed companion robots. They were working when I walked by, but I didn't pay them much mind because I thought they were stupid. There were also a number of advertising robots which show up every year. They have screens for heads/chests and don't do much of anything useful. The new addition this year was a French model that was built like a Heroin Chic Supermodel instead of the superdeformed look that most of the Japanese companies opt for. IMHO, Google's voice stuff was more common than Alexa this year. It actually got annoying to hear someone say "hey Google" for the millionth time. Even the goddamn Monorail was saying it.
- throwawaybbqed 9y ago
  The companion robots were there last year too (in Sands IIRC). They were also working when I passed them .. singing a creepy old McDonald had a farm. I spoke to a rep and she said kids can get rough with these things so they are targeting seniors. Yeah.. I dunno about this one. Cruzr was a big robot from a Shenzen company. I really liked it. I have seen Jibo in action .. the Cruzr I saw had a personality that surpised me! I thought there was another laundry robot that won a prize. I went to a "demo time" but it wasn't a demo .. it was just a talk. They had a video from inside the robot and they were obscuring things. My personal opinion but I was very annoyed at the lack of demo (so were others) and felt they might be hiding something. The table tennis robot was pretty awesome and so was the dobot magician. I could hardly believe that the same arm was used as a 3d printer, a lazer engraver and a paint brush. Some of the VR stuff I saw was disappointing. The pimax guys were running the Blu demo .. what a horrible demo to show case their tech. I couldn't tell a difference between it and my oculus. I tried the HTC vive pro at the Intel booth and it was decent (I was able to clearly read text). But what blew me away was the Sansar VR demo. I was stupid and skipped the Intel wireless headset demo .. kicking myself over it. Saw a bunch of engineering demos that were very cool.

dpweb 9y ago

There are a lot of solutions looking for problems nowadays.

apsec112 9y ago

Is it really that surprising that a convention whose whole focus is new and experimental technology would have lots of things that don't work very well?

hsljekskfh 9y ago
eh, it's not a science fair.

pishpash 9y ago

I feel this cycle of hype of several technologies (not just robots) has a larger-than-ever component of the MBA culture wherein pseudo-understanding and handwaving are rewarded. It has the same smell as reading crackpot imaginings about "the body electric" from the 19th century or "quantum neurology" from the 20th.

pishpash 9y ago

This is what you get when you can borrow money for zero or negative interest rates for ten years, and every "investment" looks like gold. Thanks Uncles Bernanke/Draghi/Kuroda.

thro123341 9y ago
I shudder to think what the next crash is gonna look like.

ProAm 9y ago

CES is a dying trade show, its not worth much of anything of relevance these days.

Feniks 9y ago

Well TRULY life transforming tech doesn't happen all that often. Oh sure the tech companies are going to say that 2018 TVs and smartphones are so disruptive from last year...

kylesf 9y ago

This folding robot was at least more impressive in person. https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/10/16865506/laundroid-laundry-folding-machine-foldimate-ces-2018 https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/10/16865506/laundroid-laundr...

crowbahr 9y ago
That has real promise. Sounds like they just need brighter lights or a variable high contrast background to the sensors.
ashelmire 9y ago
Do you work for them? The video on that page never shows it successfully folding anything. The narrator gave it a t-shirt and it failed.
- kylesf 9y ago
  Fair enough, it just seemed more impressive in theory. I just did quick search because I saw it at the show.

raitom 9y ago

We are talking about machines but during my last trip to Japan I’ve been blown away by the domotic present in the appartment I rented. There was a self-filling bathtube that I could program directly from the kitchen. Is there any « bathtube auto-fill/alexa » product in the US? I never been able to find something like that. I’d like to be able to ask alexa to prepare my bath while I’m cooking.

QAPereo 9y ago
Sounds like a way to scald someone with a hack. Edit: There was a self-filling bathtube that I could program directly from the kitchen. How much do you want to bet that a US version would be networked, probably smartphone integrated?
- gruez 9y ago
  it's not IOT.
  - yorwba 9y ago
    How do you know? There needs to be some kind of connection for remote programmability. The default choice is likely something connected to the (W)LAN. From there, it's only one misconfigured firewall and a default password away from being hacked over the internet.
    - jamesvandyne 9y ago
      They're not. They've been around longer than WiFi. It's a simple wired connection to the control panel in the tub that's installed as a single unit. It let's you control things like temp, intercom to the kitchen and so forth. Automatic Bath one of my favorite things about living in Japan, even more so than the heated toilet seat.
      - QAPereo 9y ago
        Oooh... I stand corrected then. It would certainly make a ton of sense for a bathing culture like Japan, but for showers... eh. Heated seat with bidet and air though? Oh hell yes please.

phreack 9y ago

A weird aspect of CES is that it's THE trade show that blows up outside the US on developing countries. News programs send people to report on what is absolutely certainly the future and coming up if they were to be believed. I've always found it surprising, as no true disruptors are revealed there, and every year it seems to get worse as the article notes.

m3kw9 9y ago

The pitch deck for the investors must be all drawing boards then

erik_landerholm 9y ago

Don’t care! It’s the golden age of tvs! Oleds are a technology that’s actually living up to the hype. I have an lg wallpaper tv and you can roll it up! The new ones look even more flexible. One even rolls up into a box. Robots will catch up. The future of TVs is now!

pitaj 9y ago
I want my OLED monitors. I've been waiting for years for an OLED monitor, it's my dream. The closest thing is VA+Quantum Dot monitors, but they just aren't the same.
- therealdrag0 9y ago
  I would love an affordable eInk monitor. A lot of nights I want to do textual work on my computer (coding or writing), but my eyes are so done with the brightness.
- refset 9y ago
  I agree completely. This article suggests a few reasons why CES was so disappointing in regards monitor/laptop OLED: https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/oled-laptops-and-monitors-are-missing-at-ces-2018/ https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/oled-laptops-and-mon... Thank goodness for ASUS offering us a glimmer of hope with their portable OLED monitor.
- yoodenvranx 9y ago
  Not sure if I want a OLED monitor with current OLED technology for everyday use. All current OLED phone displays will have (slight) burn in after 1-2 years and I am pretty sure the same would happen on a monitor which you use daily for 8-10 hours.
- gnode 9y ago
  What do you want it for? I recently got an OLED TV which I'm now using as a monitor for games and video, and it's brilliant (although you might think otherwise if you have extraordinary latency demands). I also find the large size of the display more immersive than a conventional monitor. I still use an LCD for static content (programming; web browsing; etc.) as I want to avoid burn in, but I don't really care about high contrast and wide colour gamut in that use case.

cdoxsey 9y ago

The next 20 years will be a constant stream of half broken robots and ai systems. At least until we either get them to actually work or we figure out how bad they are and go back to using people again. It will be like setting up video conferencing, except for everything. Your car will go to the wrong place because it failed to account for a leap second, thus breaking gps. Your fridge will put itself in eco mode because it thinks you're on vacation from misreading your calendar and spoils all your food. Your front door will forget who you are after you get a haircut and lock you out. After an automatic system upgrade your shower will no longer produce hot water, because a bug results in the system using Celsius instead of Fahrenheit. Your bug report is ignored for a week and after a dozen people complain you get in an argument with the engineer about whether the place you live in actually exists. Wait. Who am I kidding... You won't be able to talk to an engineer. All support will be automated and it will be impossible to get the robot to understand your complaint. You'll just have to replace it. I suspect you're going to have to replace things a lot. On the bright side it will probably be really cheap though. And then there will be all the outages. One of these days Uber is going to accidentally send all drivers in a big city to a single location. It'll be the great ai outage of 2018, the first of soon to be monthly occurrences of bizarre system failures we can't begin to imagine. I feel like someone should write a pg wodehouseesque novel about the "smart" future.

firefoxd 9y ago
"Ending is better than mending". It was written way way back.
ThatGeoGuy 9y ago
> Your car will go to the wrong place because it failed to account for a leap second, thus breaking gps. I do get the implication you're going for, but GPS actually ignores leap seconds for this reason. The time scale on the GPS system was fixed when it was deployed, and is 18 seconds ahead of UTC because it does not account for leap seconds. Sometimes we design horrid systems that are harder to use than analog counterparts. Sometimes, our systems work because they required a lot of thought to go into them. AI hell is more likely to be a problem of decision trees than it is going to be anything to do with sensor disruption or time offsets.

sirmike_ 9y ago

Heatworks made this $300 wonder. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4UgIijI0Z0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4UgIijI0Z0 I am down. Sad to see more hype than substance re:robots.

xzel 9y ago
I was just thinking about something like this from the above comments. It reminds me of the cup washers they use at bars that moves cups under hot water and then to a place to dry. Both would be an interesting piece in a home kitchen.
rurounijones 9y ago
Why on earth does it need to be internet connected?!
jbob2000 9y ago
Too small, completely useless. I don't need a dishwasher to wash a couple of glasses and cutlery. Those take 2 seconds to do by hand. I need a dishwasher because 20 people were just over and I don't want to be up all night washing. Or we just made an intense meal that needed lots of equipment and I don't want to wash 10 bowls, 3 knives, 4 spoons, a spatula, and a cutting board.

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jl6 9y ago

> A giant banner in the main hallway read “A better life. A better world.” But all I could think of is how much I wanted to be back home in the real world where, even if it’s primitive, most technology just works. To be fair, most real world tech doesn’t just work either.

abalashov 9y ago

I have never been to and didn't follow CES, but the little I learned about this one just made me depressed about our civilisational priorities: an unimaginably gargantuan space of Chinese electronic junk largely devoted to servicing the whims of pampered and effete digiratti, all of which will be obsolete, discarded and piling up in landfills a mere few years after it's taken to market. I got about 30 seconds into the news clip about the highlights and had to turn it off.

maurits 9y ago

I get the sentiment, but I have faith. The RAND computer was probably also quite irrelevant for the household at its time.[1] [1]: https://bwithers.files.wordpress.com/2006/12/rand_home_computer.jpg https://bwithers.files.wordpress.com/2006/12/rand_home_compu...

jeffreygoesto 9y ago

Didn’t we have that topic already? http://www.businessinsider.com/san-francisco-tech-startups-replacing-mom-2015-5?IR=T http://www.businessinsider.com/san-francisco-tech-startups-r...

Symmetry 9y ago

Robotic technology is slowly making its way from more structured environments to less structured ones. Most of the work in factories is now done by robots. The invasion of warehouses is underway (and I'm helping with that). Probably you'll be seeing robots stocking shelves in retail. And folding clothes is substantially harder than stocking shelves and you, the consumer, aren't willing to pay nearly as much for a robot to fold your clothes as a store is for a robot because the amount of labor being replaced is much smaller. So it'll be a while.

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ThomPete 9y ago

This article and many comments here completely misses the bigger picture. Robots is only one way for AI to be expressed. To expect us to be much further ahead with robots shows how wrong most discussions about robots are. In most industrial settings, robots is the standard and works just fine, in an increasing number of warehouses and other semi controlled environments it's gaining popularity. Consumner robots ai needs to be much more generalized for them to feel "smart" as they are in much less predictable environments. To expect consumer robots to be much further than they are makes no sense. Thats not where the primary progress is made just yet and no one maybe besides media and a few opportunistic companies are under that illusion.

y3sh 9y ago

Still in the era of the sharper image. Gimmicky tech with rush-to-market sensationalism.

trisimix 9y ago

I dont like the article. First of all the simone giertz intro was pretty cringey. Second of all you just wrote about yourself being a dick to a bunch of people.

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