Anyone reading this who works/runs a robotics company, I really want to encourage you to build a robot to pick up trash on city sidewalks as an early product.
Picking up trash requires a lot of dexterity and will come with many challenges, but I think it’s a simpler problem than many household tasks and it’s probably on par for what these tests show is doable.
I think you’re going to have to PR challenges getting people to welcome robots into their homes. If you have robots out in cities providing a public good, not only do they serve as walking advertisements for your company, you’re going to earn some trust before you’re ready deploy them into private spaces.
Plus, governments (or perhaps HOAs for wealthy communities) can be good early customers since you can have a focused sales strategy. Politicians love these types of visible quality of life improvement projects. If you can show that your robots, working round the clock, can decrease litter at a low cost, many cities are going to want to buy them.
> I think you’re going to have to PR challenges getting people to welcome robots into their homes.
I think it's important that someone point out this isn't a 'PR problem'. It's a practical resistance to commodified surveillance. All these domestic robotics companies train on video of users homes, many sell such data, each and every one are a vector for state domestic state surveillance. Not to mention criminal hackers, stalkers and others with an interest in who is at home when and what precisely they are doing. Short of having non-internet connected, locally processing domestic robots - something unlikely to exist in the foreseeable future - they are a privacy nightmare. Bad as google home, alexa and such devices are for privacy - a walking, controllable, camera and set of mechanical arms running loose in a home is infinitely worse.
I've been thinking a lot about what it would look like to support verifiable/auditable guarantees around data exfil/capture for this class of use.
I don't think it's enough to pinky-promise that you aren't sending a dragnet of video with facial capture etc back to the mothership, I think you really end up wanting auditable proof that nothing sensitive can leave the robot or at the very least a no-logging hot-path inference loop (e.g. apple's confidential compute).
It is absolutely a PR problem. Privacy is a real concern, but it's the PR that companies are scared of. As, say, Flock have been starting to find out lately. Public backlash matters.
And PR is the problem you have to overcome for people to let smart devices into their homes too. For instance, people started avoiding Ring cameras once it got out that they're a privacy nightmare -- that's PR. Sure, the people that avoid them care about privacy -- that's why they're listening -- but PR is the reason they even had anything to listen to. Likewise, PR is how people get creeped out by robots scanning their homes. They already never wanted that, of course, but they weren't creeped out until they learned about it. That's PR. Now people are wary to let any new devices into their homes, especially robots, because of historical PR like this. And so now it is a PR problem to get people to give you a chance in the first place.
Edit: I want to be explicit here that I'm saying you avoid bad PR by not only being good but having people discover the good. And waiting for people to sufficiently discover it can be a struggle. It doesn't matter how good you are if people don't know. That's what I mean by it being a PR problem -- PR is how people know.
I find your comment bewildering. It seems so focused on the perceived effect of an issue that it leaves no room for the actual material effect of the issue.
Frankly I couldn't give two hoots about the impact on sales of future robotic devices of the 'PR problem' of their perceived privacy intrusions. By contrast the actual danger of their real material privacy intrusions is deeply concerning. Similar to Ring - or more pertinently Flock cameras.
The media discourse is interesting, but only sociologically. The fact that these devices are actually spying is significantly more pertinent.
> PR is the problem you have to overcome for people to let smart devices into their homes too.
Why on earth should real material concerns be 'overcome'? These concerns focus on real and deeply serious issues. They concern child safety, marital privacy and a host of other real issues.
> PR is the reason they even had anything to listen to.
This is factually incorrect. You're confusing the shadows in the cave for reality.
Nowhere did I ever say anything is not a real issue or that people don't have reasons to be upset or any of the things you people seem to be putting in my mouth. By PR problem I literally mean that people have to discover and spread that your product is genuinely not a violation of privacy, which of course requires that your product genuinely not be a violation of privacy. Nowhere did I ever say that the problem is that people have a problem with it. The problem is that people don't know you don't do it until they know. For business that is a struggle because you can't necessarily control what people know like that. All you can do is make the same claims everybody else makes and hope that someone will independently investigate and discover that yours are claims that actually hold up.
> Frankly I couldn't give two hoots about the impact on sales of future robotic devices of the 'PR problem' of their perceived privacy intrusions. By contrast the actual danger of their real material privacy intrusions is deeply concerning. Similar to Ring - or more pertinently Flock cameras.
What I'm saying is that PR influences how the masses perceive your product and therefore whether it gets mass adoption or mass avoidance. Yes, the so-called "material effect" (whether privacy is actually undermined by the product) results in PR one way or the other, but most people don't do the digging to figure out exactly what the material is, they rely on what has reached the public eye.
> Why on earth should real material concerns be 'overcome'? These concerns focus on real and deeply serious issues. They concern child safety, marital privacy and a host of other real issues.
You overcome it by being able to prove you don't invade privacy. That's overcoming the preconceived notion that products in your category are not to be trusted in general.
I never, ever said or meant that the goal is to still undermine privacy but just not have people find out or have a problem with it. (Even though most companies in practice have this goal)
Zero VC funded companies in this space will not eventually invade privacy if they're able to. The only way to avoid that is open source and self-hosted - actually owning the equipment AND fully controlling the open software stack. Anything else will eventually be exploited for spying by a VC funded company. Rug pulls always happen - "Don't be evil" always turns into "Be nearly maximally evil" for financial reasons in corporations configured to be exploitable in this way by their shareholders...
That's like saying a law and order problem is a PR problem because word got out that crime is spiking.
The PR problem is downstream consequence of what can be measured, but the root cause is upstream. Focusing directly on solving the downstream problem is basically Goodharting the metric -- thereby ensuring the upstream problem never really gets solved, and the downstream metric becomes fake and decoupled from the true situation.
Once you "solve the PR problem" what is the incentive to ensure that the root problem is actually solved now that you have successfully blinded yourself (society) from measuring the true problem?
Well, it is a PR problem. It's bad for business to cause a crime spike... that's my point.
I never said focus directly on downstream. I thought it would be obvious that I'm talking about why you bother with upstream, because the downstream effects are important.
It seems I phrased something very wrong because it looks like everybody is assuming I'm saying that you should do as much bad as you can possibly prevent people from noticing.
It's one of several downstream problems, including poorer quality of life by various metrics. By emphasizing a PR problem for businesses more than other human problems downstream or the root problem, you are demonstrating priorities that prosocial humans viscerally disagree with.
I think internet people care about some theoretical surveillance angle more then anyone else actually does. People hire cleaners and tradespeople into their homes all the time.
The practical problems with robots are effectiveness, cost and safety in roughly equal parts.
I think you’re partly right: normal ‘non-internet’ folk care less about such things… until a reason to care is demonstrated.
Take the recent anti-Flock actions - it’s probably mostly not ‘internet people’ going for evening walks with their angle grinders. Everyone starts to care about privacy when it really becomes invasive.
Likewise, people might be fine getting their elderly parents a robot to help out with household tasks, until intimate stolen videos start appearing on realgrannies.com or similar.
Sadly we're all internet people, and have been for about 15 years. If you mean people on Hacker News... Then yes, obviously they're by and large better informed about the reality of surveillance, government and corporate, than most. Nothing theoretical about any of it. Unless we fail to remember the content of Snowdon's leaks.
> People hire cleaners and tradespeople into their homes all the time.
It's very obvious that there is a difference between a single person that you can personally vet, and something that records videos that can be shared anywhere.
> I think internet people care about some theoretical surveillance angle more then anyone else actually does.
Yes, that's usually the case. However in the very current time of surveillance resistance with the de-Flock movement, I think there is increased mainstream awareness of the issue.
> If you can show that your robots, working round the clock, can decrease litter at a * low cost *
The idea sounds good, but I'm curious about the "low cost" part. How do you account for vandalism and theft? A sidewalk robot seems like an easy target for being damaged, stripped for parts, or simply stolen.
Coincidentally, Asia is a lot more receptive to AI as well. Turns out having strong job protections means that companies actually need to figure out how to make humans more productive with AI, instead of replacing them.
Most of my reference is Japan and South Korea, yes. You're relatively hard to fire there unless you genuinely in the red as a company. They have their own loopholes around this, but you can't just do forever layoffs for no reason like the US.
My much less researched understanding of China is that there's much less protections in terms of well-being (no federal minimum wage, absurd work hours as standard, etc), but China also comes down much harder (at least, compared to the US) on companies that violate laws. Actual punishments will depend on loyalty, but companies take care to avoid that situation to begin with.
> much less protections in terms of well-being (no federal minimum wage, absurd work hours as standard, etc)
There absolutely is minimal wage but is set by local governments, because different places have different cost of living.
There are better protections for work hours for salaried workers than America. Anything above 40 hours get paid at 1.5X and anything above 60 hours get paid at 2x.
For layoffs in China, you have to pay N+1 of months of salary in terms of severance. N being the number of years an employee has been there.
And talking about absurd work hours, SK and Japan aren't better than China.
So China overall has far better labor rights protection than the U.S.
>talking about absurd work hours, SK and Japan aren't better than China.
On paper, no. Japan has overtime bonuses too, but you're culturally discouraged from reporting overtime. So 12 hour days are common with no OT. And thats not including "optional" after work outings.
Yet, it's also not uncommon for Japan to bring about the "appearance" of working more than really working. Whether you judge that appearance of work as more or less stressful than China's work standards is a more personal question.
Either way, my main comparison was Asia to the US rather than countries within Asia. US has higher salaries, better minumum wage (but still nowhere near good), and usually better hours. But stability without unions is non-existent as we've seen the past decades.
Most of my understanding is based around studying Japanese law, so I wouldn't extend it to all of asia. But the main protection is that much of Asia is not at-will employment. So you can't easily create mass layoffs like the US without good reason (some regions won't do that because wage floors are pathetic or non-existent, but it's still some protection).
So, im going to address this low effert, uninformed post first, but the longer part of this will attempt to be informational to the larger branch under discussion here.
TLDR; not really trash in the streets anywhere by any reasonable measurement and nowhere near 'plenty' unless the definition of 'plenty' is 'some, somewhere, sometimes.' & Conversion rates don't matter when discussing minimum wage rates, only the local purchasing power matters.
Here's the longer than anyone might expect who doesn't recognize my posts;
Trash may sometimes appear in a few places, mostly in larger inner cities with significant international populations. In my town, and even in the larger regional metro areas, just about the only places I see actual litter are where tour buses full of international tourists deposit daily crowds or where a high speed road passes through forested areas without much concurrent traffic and so people feel that it is acceptable to toss drink bottles and food wrappers out the window unseen. The rest is remarkable for the general lack of any trash on the streets.
It is a common sight in almost every town and city, early in the mornings, to see any number of people actively sweeping the sidewalk AND street in front of homes or businesses. Some will be washing with a brush and clean water.
For nearly the entire country, trash is collected from a designated bird and vermin proof cage or box from every block on most weekdays, on a weekly and monthly rotating schedule, sorted into recyclables: with different days for plastics, paper, small metal, appliances and fabrics, and actual 'trash' which is restricted to burnable foodscraps/paper products which are too soiled for recycling and which do not contain glossy or metallic dyes.
If the pickup schedule is inconvenient at your house, or if your volume of recyclables isn't worth spending 35jpy for a clear rash bag [which is how they manage funding the collection: through region specific trash bags of are clear plastic with color coding for which type of waste belongs in them that you may purchase at nearly any grocery or convenience store] there are sorted recycling bins near the main doors of every grocery and convenience store - just drop off on your way in for shopping.
My wife and I do frequently collect and recycle litter from two areas, because one of them is the walking gardens around a shrine which we wish to see remain mostly free of cigarette butts, and the other is a roadside forest of beech, black walnut and chestnut trees. We visit there regularly, collecting for some extra variety in our diet the nuts, sansai (wild greens) and edible fungi that grow in the forest. Collecting the trash haul is no small part of our biweekly free time in the late summer and fall.
Over this last year, as we have continued working along both sides of a 3km stretch of trees it is remarkable how little new trash is occurring. This seems to match our initial observation that the volume of rubbish was of varying ages and had accumulated over a significant length of time since the last cleanup of this nominally 'public domain' patch of forest. [It is a local land trust with the responsibility of fire prevention and otherwise is a Satoyama designated resource for exactly this kind of community wilderness light impact harvesting - which is why there isn't a designated trash cleanup scheduled but once every 4 to 5 years]
Otherwise the amount of 'trash in the streets' is very much limited to inner city and is one of the reasons underlying growing popularity of tightening of immigration regulations. Not saying it doesn't happen in smaller cities, but rather most of Japan generally engages in cleaning up as soon as they notice any trash. The total of loose trash is remarkably lower than anywhere else I have been, and we do travel to other places fairly regularly; including Taiwan, Thailand, Malaysia in the last few months. None of the clean corners of those places is anywhere near as clean as the average street I travel through in Japan, and this has been true in my observations during many visits and several periods of residency over the last 32 years.
Now, for the concept of working conditions and overtime protections in Japan.
One strange bit of the perception about overworking and high cost of living compared to wages in Japan, is that so many of these observations and statistics deal with the slightly more than half of the population crammed into the Tokyo to Kansai wedge of giant, almost contiguous metropolitan urban swath along the east-south coastal corridor.
The other half of the population not living in these major cities has a significantly different experience. Work is still hectic, but the revenue to cost of living balance, the total hours expected at work per day or week, and the general approach to work-life balance is quite different. A significant portion of this population engages in some agriculture in addition to holding a regular job, and this is understood to be a necessary part of the local economy.
It is not uncommon for a Sendai taxi driver to also farm rice on a small to medium scale. This keeps him busy driving a cab when there would be nothing to do but watch the wind blow across growing rice, and he can schedule time off from the cab managers against the few time sensitive days for harvest, planting, or water flooding/draining that are determined by that seasons specific weather. Otherwise the rest can happen on his 'weekend' which may be Tuesdays-Wednesdays, or some other day of the week as most fellow drivers are in the same situation and they work schedules around each other.
The same may be true of a local bank branch manager in Yamagata, or the train station ticket clerk in Morioka, an Akita retail shopkeeper, or Aomori middle-school math teacher. It is remarkable how the high paced, high stress, long hours working demand of inner city Tokyo becomes the view that the whole world adopts as the state of affairs in Japan. It is unsurprising though, over 95% of visitors to Japan ever get more than 30 minutes away from a Shinkansen stop.
That's right, less than 5% of all visitors see any of the rest of Japan. It's still possible, today, as a 'hen na pera pera gaijin' going to small towns and meeting random people who have ever actually met or spoken to anyone from anywhere else in the world in their whole life. They are just busy doing what they do, and no one ever shows up to see what it is like.
The lives lived in rural Japan would be the envy of the world if they were truly understood. The regularity of the seasons, reliability of daily life, kindness of neighbors, freshness of local farm and wild vegetables, fruit in splendorous variety, the sounds of winter snowfall and light traffic through safe, clean, and orderly streets, are each and all a wondrous marvel.
My rural friends' primary small complaints all revolve around the sameness of it all year after year, and I have to smile and tell them that sameness is what they have that is best of all. A long, slow, quiet life without the chaos and fear of unpredictable outcomes, where they have the time to enjoy perfecting whatever craft they pursue, is nothing to complain about.
Most of them do actually 'get it' and have not moved to the city because they value it, but to me they say that they are envious of travel and excitement. I think in order to not make me feel like I have missed out by being from there, and partly it's to keep too many from moving out of the city and ruining the quiet. "Its sooo boring here, you'd not find anything to entertain you. Thanks for visiting, but nobody should WANT to move here, we're all too dull."
But the regular community festivals and local get-together occasions make the absolute lie of this all; pork soup and mochi-pounding at the local fire-station community center with about a hundred people eating and laughing. Happy kids running around being silly while all the adults sit and chat about the things that made them laugh and are told in a way to make everyone laugh at what fun they've had just this week doing normal things among the field and office work.
Time and again I find this to be a piece of the kind of community life that Norman Rockwell was trying to capture in his art, and somehow this is more real, and more pervasive, and more harmonious than any of those scenes.
So, circling back to the 'trash in the street' view of Japan. Everyone here who hasn't actually been to Japan, and even those who have; if your view of Japan is equating the big city perspective of Tokyo, Osaka, and Kyoto as representative of the whole country for lifestyle, attitudes, scenery, workplace environments, culture, and habits you have missed the overwhelming rest of the country.
Here is a link to a map showing with colored regions which are home to approximately 51% of the population. Compare that the the rest of the map and you can begin to understand the 35x difference in density between Kanazawa (Kawasaki) and Yamagata prefectures. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiheiy%C5%8D_Belt#/media/File...
Now, there is a minimal wage which has been lifted 5% recently to 1092JPY per hour in Yamagata. Something that is important to realize about that wage, before breaking out a calculator and converting to USD for an 'ours is higher' comparison, is the real purchasing power of a weeks wages at minimum earnings. Total tax, pension and healthcare withholding will max at ~17% for minimum wage employees working over 30 hours per week. This withholding amount is matched by the employer separate from wages, which for a full time position nets just over 145k JPY per month.
In my town, 2 Bedroom 1 Bath, Dining, Kitchen apartment costs 25k to 40k JPY per month, and a 3Bed 2 Bath house can be rented for about 45 to 50k. That's living space for a couple to a family of four on between 28 to 35% of a single full time minimum wage job, with pension and health insurance. Electricity, LP gas, water and septic (the bill includes both by volume), and two cell phones work out to around a little less than 40k per month total. Add another 40k per month as groceries for two, plus eating out for a couple of ramen shop lunches or curry house dinners every week - a bit high because we each drink way too much of the wonderful 3.8% Hokkaido milk and a couple could still be living comfortably within 90% of that SINGLE full time minimum wage paycheck. If the second person has even 3/4 full time work at minimum wage, that's another 108k JPY every month and the total cost of a normal life is slightly over 51% of 1.75x FTE at minimum wage earnings. It doesn't matter how many USD that equals, because it's not realistic to expect to be able to support a family of two on a single minimum wage job anywhere in the US and it hasn't been that way since at least 1981, and the ~17% withholding rate covers fully comprehensive health coverage and pension without deductibles or surprise out-of-pocket bankruptcy level events.
Do some workers living in the busiest and most expensive parts of Tokyo fall victim to social and societal pressures to 'outlast' coworkers by not leaving, even to the extent of clocking out and returning to their desk and appearing to work? Sure. Its unhealthy and performative. They pretend to work, and the company isn't actually paying them for not working. So, yeah, a-hole bosses and brown-nosing coworkers seem to be ubuquitous in every over-corporate environment, but that's not actually 'Normal' for most of the country.
I have personal friends who were born and raised in the Tokyo societal realm, and work in quite large and productive roles with immense pressure, but they don't pretend to work, or work off the clock. Large, productive, and efficient businesses don't thrive by pretending to be good at something. My friends do work long hours, but also have specific time off and participate in raising their own children, and take annual family vacations which include skiing in Nagano and Zao, regular weekend trips to zoos and educational amusement, and has spare time to meet us at the Airport or go to an early lunch at the Ramen Museum if given them enough lead time and there isn't a real project constraint that cannot be worked around. So, stressful and busy? Yes. Well compensated and appreciated at work? Yes. Also very much not senior management, nor frontline labor, just a mid-grade logistics professional with good work-life balance and a partner who is a full time parent and manages the houshold budget with clear purpose and effective planning. Another 15 years when we both reach retirement age and decide not to retire because of the facts about ageing populations in Japan, he'll still already be worth a couple of million dollars (US) because of these facts about wages and cost of living. So would I be, if 30 years ago I had taken the minimum wage job on offer and stayed in Japan. But no, I could only see that i would make a bigger hourly wage if I moved and worked in the US. I was pretty stupid in my youth, it's been an expensive lesson to learn. Don't do what I did, if you get offered a minimum wage job in Japan and are qualified to do the work, say yes, be patient with the endless paperwork and interminable waiting, and then show up and be a reliable helper.
Was just in a Waymo in SF and we were attacked by a gang of cyclists repeatedly swerving at and trying to cause our waymo to crash. Really powerless feeling. And they were doing this knowing humans were inside. I don't pretend to know their motivation other than perhaps misplaced social rage, but I'd imagine a litter robot would be immediately destroyed.
Indeed, I was surprised to hear about “Lowell students” robbing people on Muni and “bicyclists” causing trouble in Mission Bay but when I observed some of this anti-social behaviour (when I saw them they were doing wheelies and swerving at people walking) I was rapidly able to discern why the statements were relatively vague as to the categorization.
I suppose it shall be the case for the short term at least that we must admit that “humans” really cause harm. Though perhaps that’s over specific and I should recognize that most crime is committed by eukaryotes.
The motivation is that they keep getting away with it. And they're going to keep getting away with it until society decides we're going to stop tolerating shit like that.
In SF they would be taken quickly by the homeless for parts, probably the batteries most of all. That and rummaged through for drugs, or repurposed to deliver drugs.
Is this what happens with scooters and lime bikes etc? Because it always strikes me that they’re easy targets for cannibalism yet nobody seems to do it.
It was common for people to vandalize and throw them in bodies of water for a while before people got used to the idea. I still occasionally see some repurposed from time to time
I don’t want to say you guys overstate things, but literally every downtown in the US? Might be time to move. I was regularly visiting San Francisco in the late 2010s when the tech bro community was really ginning this story up. Was it an ugly clash of both the promise and the failure of US economics? Yeah. Was their shit on the streets? Also yeah. Did I ever feel unsafe? Not really. Anecdata but I remain skeptical because of these Helen Lovejoy-level overstatements.
But who is going to pay for all that ammo? That sounds expensive to the tax payer and not ideal for re-election. Perhaps you could employ the robots in ammo factories first to bring the cost of ammunition down and then the frequent use on the lower cla.., I mean criminals, wouldn’t be so costly.
Cities with the social order required for robotic street cleaning rarely require robotic street cleaning. One might as well suggest a novel heart surgery that works only on healthy patients.
China has very little street crime but they pay street cleaners very regularly. You can actually find videos on YouTube. I just watched one with a 65-year-old man who manages 600m of street and has managed the same street for 28 years. Just using big brushes, dust pans, and putting it all in garbage bins. the city pays him between $600 and $800 a month in USD.
Then people will say "you're doing this for the rich, and say it can't be done for the poor". Not even for long-term ill or old people living in poor areas.
The cleaning robot might still be a good test bed. But I suspect if you are only in it for efficiency, you would use something like a street sweeper truck. Just like the dishwashing robot that everyone uses at home (the humble 'dishwasher') doesn't use robot arms to mimic how humans wash dishes.
Btw, Singapore shows that we already have proven, low cost techniques for keeping cities clean without robots.
I wouldn't be so categorical. There might be some applications, or combination of applications for which a humanoid form factor would be useful. It's just that for most applications, more specialised forms are better suited.
I'm guessing it's because making specialised robots was so much cheaper and easier than usable humanoid robots.
See also the humble domestic dishwasher. It's a robot that washes dishes and works in an environment that's otherwise sized for humans and hasn't really been redesigned to accommodate robots. Similar also for washing machine and dryer etc.
Same for recycling. A robot that could sort through trash would be phenomenal. You need computer vision, maybe other sensors and also dexterity. After visiting a recycling facility I think nobody should have to work there. It’s just horrible.
As a tech demo sure. But the current tech for this is much better where you just have a camera pointing at the trash falling, and either flipper paddles or air jets to push the trash in to the correct buckets as it’s falling.
I feel like robots that could do this with 100% accuracy might shine too bright a light on how well recycling currently works. And I say that as a proponent of the three Rs.
> Are you suggesting that wealthy people litter less?
Yes. Well, middle class less than working class at least. And only on average. Also individual behaviour isn't the only factor - they also tend to live in wealthier less dense areas, where councils have more money to spend on keeping things tidy, and there are also people who do volunteer litter picking.
> Are you suggesting that wealthy people can not be vandals?
Obviously not.
> Or are you suggesting that common people are littering vandals?
Not even sure what you're trying to say here. You think I was suggesting that all lower class people are littering vandals? Lol.
The cost would need to be much cheaper than the PSA then. At a buck per picked up cigarette butt, you could pay a person to do this much faster and more reliably. Heck… I’d do it at that rate.
I would like to run a robotics company. But raising for that is super challenging, because you have high execution risk combined with low margins on the final product. It's like the opposite of what western VCs want to see. That's why this type of company is usually founded in China.
And I disagree with you. I'm pretty sure parents worldwide would love a clean-up robot. You can avoid a lot of the risks by making it work only for empty rooms, which is OK because you need to clean up and let the vacuum robot run anyway (when the kids are away sleeping in their bedroom). There's been multiple attempts at building DYI robots to vacuum LEGO bricks off the floor. (Because stepping on them at night is such an immediate pain point.) Unless your product is soaked in hostile behavior and surveillance tech, parents will probably be happy to buy an in-home cleaning robot, no PR needed.
I think the main issue here is that parents are typically busy, which makes them bad startup founders, which is why they cannot "scratch their itch" and turn it into a business.
=> home cleaning robots do not exist because western VCs don't like it and parents aren't usually startup founders.
I’ve had exactly the same idea! Living in LA I sometime imagine how the city will look like in hopefully ten years or less when robots pick up all the litter! Hopefully there will also be landscaping robots and sidewalk/road repair bots too.. those three pretty much are what you need to turn any rundown neighborhood into a sparkling oasis it seems. My other near term idea is just robotic city trash cans, that slowly crawl down the sidewalks on a loop and empty themselves into a big bin in the alley or whatever as part of that loop. I think people probably wouldn’t mess too much with the litter bots either, especially if they work a lot on the sides of freeways. Also people don’t seem to mess too much with the cocos out there delivering food three blocks..
Hmm never seen that in a residential neighborhood, is that a thing? Typically there is not a trash problem simply because the residents are careful enough. Trash doesn't just appear out of nowhere
This is really stupid tho. There are already robots that are way better at cleaning the streets. This is at least how they clean the dirty af streets in eindhoven after an event literally in one single night. Maybe sorting the trash for recycling... But then you don't need any legs, at most hands. So I don't think humanoid robot would be the way but there would still be the need of vision and hands I guess...
Have you ever not been able to send your kids to school for weeks (or years in the case of COVID) because the teachers refused to work? Have you ever been unable to get timely medical treatment because nurses refused to work? Have you ever been unable to work yourself because the transit workers refused to work?
People have this right to take better jobs at other companies. This is how we get better working conditions: competition between employers. Tech has figured this out. I’ve never felt the need to go on strike.
Unions can be a deterrent to this. If you have sectoral bargaining, you can’t get a better deal anywhere because everyone pays the same. Or even if it’s within a single company, you’re just stuck with whatever scheme the union bosses agreed to.
But also, unions are a deterrent to new employers since fewer people want to start companies in industries where unions have taken over. They’re a nightmare to deal with. Fewer employers means less competition means worse services.
We have a dynamic economy with lots of competition. It’s easy to switch jobs and find a better place to work. We should not want to give this up.
"Competition is universally good" is what has decimated American manufacturing since Reagan. It's hollowed out the US middle class, which affects what the country can build, purchasing power, and innovation. Free trade policies have destroyed cities, eliminated millions of well-paying jobs, cut social services, and ripped the social fabric from communities. There were no alternatives to just "take a job at a better company"; most manufacturing jobs that left had no alternatives.
It was cynically selfish and short-sighted. The US from 1980–2020 is a perfect example of how much more complex systems, economies, worker dynamics, and second/third/nth order effects are.
Just to add to that "Competition" is no longer even a thing when the unchecked capitalistic game is played to the extent we are at, with extreme consolidation and duo/triopoly cartels running most services and playing all the dirty tricks in the bag (regulatory capture, rent extraction, lobbying for deregulation and weakening of labour and environmental norms, ...)
Competition is generally good for the consumer, but Americans need to wake up to the fact that it's not built into the system, it's to be regulated into it, and competing is only good so far as it doesn't turn into a race to the bottom (which again, is a matter of a regulator setting the bar).
You realize his examples are public sector unions. Which mean the “employer” you are referring to is the citizens? Not some evil corporation, government mandated monopolies which then get taken over to serve their union members.
I don’t have any objection to voluntary unions. Meaning people can join them for support or collective bargaining, but that citizens can just opt to not employ anyone in the union. Unions could be support structures for workers, instead they are mafia bosses.
Well… yeah. But I didn’t blame the employees, I blamed the employer who must have seen the writing on the wall for a long time and yet let it come to this.
Where do I say that nurses shouldn’t have good working conditions or good pay? Most of us have figured this out already: you can take a job at another company that’s better to work for. Most nurses do have pretty good working conditions and get paid well. Competition among employers is the solution here. Walking out and putting customers (or patients in this case) in a precarious position is not.
The average nurse in the southern US is paid roughly ~$30 an hour. Given their responsibilities, long shifts, and overall stress, do you think that's a fair wage?
>Walking out and putting customers (or patients in this case) in a precarious position is not.
Sometimes the system needs to grind to a hault to get peoples attention.
So she doesn't enjoy her job and only works there because you can't make up the $15 hour difference between her working in a book store for minimum wage vs her working for $30 an hour? Why don't you take a part time job on the weekend to lighten her load? There are many people who become a nurse because its a calling.
>So she doesn't enjoy her job and only works there because you can't make up the $15 hour difference between her working in a book store for minimum wage vs her working for $30 an hour?
She loves being a nurse and couldn't do anything else. But that doesn't mean it isn't exhausting for her.
>There are many people who become a nurse because its a calling.
And that excuses the shit pay and unsafe working conditions for nurses?
The labor market is just kind of complicated. Having a four year span where your real income goes down because you didn’t job hop isn’t ideal, but it’s totally possible that it pays off in the long run quite handsomely.
Ideally, you want to have a dynamic economy where people have very many paths to prosperity. In the US, you have people like Ted Sarandos who managed video rental stores for 17 years before taking a job at Netflix, which eventually led him to become CEO. Or you have Doug McMillion, who started at Walmart in 1984 unloading trailers at a distribution center and rose up to the CEO position. And you have Dara Khosrowshahi, the Uber CEO, who started his career in investment banking, became a media executive, and then served as Expedia CEO. An of course, there any plenty of extremely successful entrepreneurs who never worked for anyone else before founding their own company.
This take only makes sense if you don’t know what people use Google search for. If you’re looking for your local Ford dealership, or to book a Carnival cruise, or need a disability lawyer, or to refinance your credit card debt, you’re searching for an ad. You’re not using Chat-GPT for that. You’re asking Chat-GPT about a research project. It’s stealing away all the hard to monetize searches and leaving the incredibly lucrative searches.
Your narrative depressed Google’s stock price for years, and bears finally gave up since they kept coming out with huge earnings beats.
I actually use Claude for finding stuff and recommendations. like "Find me a decent shoe with blah blah conditions" this query now goes to LLM Chat instead of google search. I use google search to find the url of something that i know exists like find the website of a company or finding address of a store.
The issue is Claude is losing money serving you that, and while Google makes money serving you the same result. On top of that, you are paying Claude to get that same result.
Unless Claude adds ads, it isnt going to be sustainable for both Anthropic or you - and congrats, you've invented Google Search.
Google and ChatGPT are both running LLMs on free user queries. If Google is doing it more profitably, it’s because they have a much more mature ad business, and/or they are running a cheaper LLM. There’s no fundamental difference in the business model in that specific product line.
Regarding Claude, it’s true they must be losing money on free users since they promised they won’t put ads there.
Speculatively, I think people are overestimating the cost of inference for the consumer free tier chatbots. I suspect it’s effectively a marketing cost. The primary expenses are compute to train the next model, stock compensation, and heavy-duty enterprise inference (which pays for itself).
I agree. But then again you and I are contrbuting to that. We invest our money into S&P 500 hoping it'd grow (and that greed / need is what is contributing to companies trying to make a profit).
It isnt Netflix deciding, sure I'll make money, it is more shareholders are demanding profits .. and Netflx is forced to act.
So if Ads are a disease, and we (you + me + anyone with a stake in the US economy's growth) are the virus.
> But that’s it. I never use Google outside of that. It’s just ads, and most of the web is just ads or AI slop.
Funnily enough, their core revenue driver (Google Ads) is very broken too. I'm trying to run some ads, but for a week they haven't been showing due to some invisible combination of flags when the campaign was created. There's no way of knowing they're not showing from the dashboard, it only becomes apparent when you try and preview the ads with one of your search terms.
I know everyone is long Google but that experience seriously makes me question how valuable their ad business will stay in the future.
Someone deleted a reply to this comment “And where does ChatGPT get the data for those answers?” they wrote and I think the question is important: LLM chatbots can crawl the web just as well as Google.
Nah, just another startup that’ll get acquired or a similar fate. Building the capability is a superior option imho, if you’re at Anthropic or OpenAI scale. Cut out the middleman.
Indeed, but what is the difference between crawl data and model data but decay rate? Models are trained on previous crawl data, but if an LLM provider engages a search engine to get "live data," that data isn't live but previously crawled as well (and perhaps not yet integrated into models as crawl data).
So, why would you use Google as a tool or search target when you can, in some combination, go direct to the website (or whatever the target data endpoint is) yourself as an LLM provider to retrieve the most recent data or rely on your own "hot cache" of that data that was crawled recently but said data is not stale enough warranting a live web crawl to retrieve and present to the user or AI agent? Is this capability to perform retrieval from a data source in real time not similar to an AI agent?
Broadly speaking, I'm just spitballing on the concept of "You must use a search engine for an LLM to return 'live-ish' results" as I think we're directionally headed to where that isn't the case.
> but if an LLM provider engages a search engine to get "live data," that data isn't live but previously crawled as well
I'm not sure frontier labs do it, but imo fetching live data requires fetching both the search engine (1) and the website/page (2). The search engine gives you search results + content snippets (potentially stale), the website/page gives you the actual content fresh from the source.
The tradeoff I see here is between liveness/staleness and cost (hitting an index if of course cheaper and faster than querying live websites again).
You clearly haven't spent much time around young adults. I work with college students a fair amount and they use chatbots for 100% of their questions, including the ones you listed. And much like google got a rich data trove from user's searches, OpenAI is getting an even richer trove from chatbot chats.
I would actually recommend using a LLM over normal search for that sort of thing, because SEO has ruined those high intent phrases. The AI equivalent of SEO is also a problem there, but it's so much less prevalent.
"google it" has a stain on it. And that's not said in jest. In my social circle, it has grown a boomer-tint. Like it or not; it's just how it is.
I personally like google over asking an AI. Esp. since something like google is a substrate without which an AI would be far more prone to hallucinations.
IMO, the area where AI is going to be most useful over the next couple years is in developing manufacturing processes top to bottom. Maybe a million token budget is too small, but something like "design me a sneaker and all the equipment to manufacture it autonomously".
They can't even run a vending machine. I don't want to do a shallow dismissal, but I think there's a gulf between my understanding and yours. I hope it's me so I learn something.
I think LLMs will be excellent glue of "find the right function/button and run/push it" but design without constraints and they just explode immediately
I've been getting into 3D printing recently and while the flagship Anthropic models can regurgitate community wisdom about the hobby they can't do spatial reasoning. They'll tell me that objects will fit on my print bed when they won't and vice-versa. They get confused about materials and nozzles. It takes several iterations to get them to do basic objects (in my case a slotted tray) in OpenSCAD. Useful, certainly, but very far from autonomous for end-to-end manufacturing workflows.
> IMO, the area where AI is going to be most useful over the next couple years is in developing manufacturing processes top to bottom.
Why do you say this? I have some experience of manufacturing processes and am not seeing where AI would be useful other than to drive the robots which we can already do quite well without AI (see all the dark/lights-out factories that already exist).
Where do you see it being useful? An example would be nice.
I think embodied AI or autonomous experimentation will need to make a lot more progress before that kind of thing is possible.
Asking AI to design real world objects doesn't work very well because all of its tests involve proxies and thus miss things that are glaringly obvious when the object is actually built.
Yes but the second order effect of this is that the cost of the tooling goes up since it is now the bottleneck, and therefore the shoemakers that survive do it off of technical complexity, branding, and regulatory capture.
You’d think tech enthusiasts would actually make an attempt to understand the tech they’re enthusiastic about. OpenAI’s mysterianist marketing has broken some people’s brains.
> "design me a sneaker and all the equipment to manufacture it autonomously"
We already have sneaker designs and the equipment to manufacture them. Whatever it spits out is going to be, at best, a mediocre clone of something that already exists. What exactly is the point?
Sneaker manufacturing is a very manual process. Nike famously tried to automate it and failed (https://www.wsj.com/economy/trade/why-its-so-difficult-for-r...). Designing and constantly changing all the processes is more expensive than just having people do it by hand. If you can have AI design the process, then the equation switches.
We don't follow "rules" in war anymore, according to "Secretary of War" Pete Hegseth. We show no quarter and take no prisoners, we pursue "maximum lethality, not tepid legality."
That's American policy now. The gloves are off, no holds barred, everything and everyone is on the table. So I guess we reap what we sow.
I don’t think this is where the robotics revolution is going to happen. The big one will be using AI to design and build highly specialized robots to automate mining and manufacturing.
Making robots is a very narrow, highly specialized subset of things that robots can do.
Also, no one said it could male any robot until you tried to broaden the scope just now because you didn't want to admit you're wrong. This is an example of "bad faith" in a discussion.
Big humanoid robots are expensive, the actuators still suck, and the control problems are hard. Their big advantage is that they can occupy human-shaped spaces, but struggle to do anything useful.
Not to say we won't get humanoid robots eventually, but I think there's probably some low hanging fruit for people to make some other kinds of solutions. Specialized robots for industrial environment, well-thought out appliances for the home.
It would be a bit surprising if the progression was Roomba -> humanoid robot.
We have Google, Figure, Tesla, Boston Dynamics, and literally dozens of Chinese companies building humanoid robots and making huge improvements in the tech. Not there yet by any means as a general-purpose home assistant, but I don't think it will be too surprising if at least one of them succeeds
I hope humanoids will be ever present, it’s just that the scale of impact from specialized robots will be far greater. Humanoids will be our butlers, but the other robots will be creating a world of unimaginable abundance.
Yes of course life insurance and pension funds are going to buy this debt. This is the highest quality debt that's out there. If you don't want life insurance and pension funds to buy debt from big tech companies because you believe it's too risky, then you believe that bonds are just too risky in general.
OK, wait a minute. Elsewhere in this discussion, people are saying that only a few of these AI companies are going to survive. For stocks, that can still be a reasonable investment - low odds, but still a positive expectation value - but for bonds, it's terrible. You're paying me single-digit interest when there's only a 20% chance that you live long enough to give me my principle back? Get outta here. Literally nobody should be investing in such bonds.
FWIW, a firm can go bankrupt and the stocks be worth zero with the bond holders being paid 100%. In fact, that's sort of the goal and "ideal" scenario (ideal given bankruptcy, of course, which in turn is not ideal).
In the real world, recovery rates for corporate bonds are between 30% to 70% or so, depending on the seniority of the debt and the collateral.
If big tech bonds are a terrible deal for investors at 8%, then Google or OpenAI is getting a screaming deal by raising debt at that rate. Saying nobody should be investing in these bonds is very similar to saying that big tech should raise more debt.
Agree with you on that. I just wanted to point out that Big Tech debt being a bad purchase for things like pension funds means its a good deal for big tech. Everyone else in the thread seems very negative on big tech debt for some reason. You can't have it both ways.
Interstellar travel is probably not ever going to happen. Even if we have antimatter propulsion (which is still probably not practical even under ideal circumstances), we’re still talking hundreds of years of travel time to get to somewhere like this star.
This also goes for aliens visiting Earth. Interstellar travel is just so impractical that I don’t think anyone has come on safari to Earth.
A generation ship is probably doable with some level of conceivable technology. We just have to figure out how to be self sufficient out there then we have all the time in the world, or universe. That's a big "just", I know.
Picking up trash requires a lot of dexterity and will come with many challenges, but I think it’s a simpler problem than many household tasks and it’s probably on par for what these tests show is doable.
I think you’re going to have to PR challenges getting people to welcome robots into their homes. If you have robots out in cities providing a public good, not only do they serve as walking advertisements for your company, you’re going to earn some trust before you’re ready deploy them into private spaces.
Plus, governments (or perhaps HOAs for wealthy communities) can be good early customers since you can have a focused sales strategy. Politicians love these types of visible quality of life improvement projects. If you can show that your robots, working round the clock, can decrease litter at a low cost, many cities are going to want to buy them.
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