I believe robotics hardware is near and damn it there, and has been for a while now. We're already seeing semi-reliable robots such as 'smart' hoovers enter hom

I believe robotics hardware is near and damn it there, and has been for a while now. We're already seeing semi-reliable robots such as 'smart' hoovers enter homes. The biggest problem by far is the software - in particular the AI. The biggest companies in the world have thrown billions of dollars at AI, Universities have had some of the most brilliant minds among their ranks, and we essentially got some (impressive) slightly better search algorithms. There are absolute fundamental questions (+) that need to tackled in order to have the kind of generalized AI such environments require. Most AI (that I'm aware of) currently lacks the ability to do anything other than optimize itself for strictly specified scenarios/environments. Personally I quite like the information theoretic approaches to self-motivated agents, there are some nice mechanisms out there such as empowerment [1]. It's not the full picture, but it's a step in the right direction. I don't think this is something we can throw larger neural networks and computation resources at and hope it solves itself. (+) This is the subject of a paper I am currently writing. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1310.1863 https://arxiv.org/abs/1310.1863