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I think one of the problems is that we don't have the right people working on the right problems. Self-driving cars seem to have absorbed most of the world's h
by tgflynn 6y ago
I think one of the problems is that we don't have the right people working on the right problems.
Self-driving cars seem to have absorbed most of the world's high-level robotics efforts for the past decade or more. I was always skeptical of that application because my experience has shown that weak-AI works best when there's a human backup and/or the stakes of an error are not too high. That isn't the case with self-driving cars where a lethal mistake can occur in less than a second.
I think we would be much better off today if much of the self-driving car effort had been focused on household utility robots and/or business applications. No it wouldn't be "saving lives", but it would be saving countless life-hours spent on mind-numbing tasks that are a major reason for why life is so unpleasant for so many people.
- mdorazio 6y agoWhat household tasks do you think are well-suited to robotics that aren't already addressed? The reason so much focus has gone into autonomous vehicles is because there are trillions of dollars to be made there by the companies that solve it, and many obvious use cases will result in large profits even with imperfect solutions (where "imperfect" means it works only in specific design domains like the southwestern US during the day with no rain).
- tgflynn 6y agoAll of them - cleaning, cooking, laundry, etc. Everything that a human needs to do to maintain reasonable living conditions and would hire someone else to do if they were rich. EDIT: I think that if you could come up with a really good solution for all of that most people would be willing to pay about as much as they do for a car.