It'd have to be locally controlled, or securely siloed in a cloud, with auditable and accountable interactions. Any sort of home robot will have that challenge; I wouldn't trust any company or person with that sort of access. When even the highest security clearance and most secure facilities and job titles in the world frequently involve people randomly scanning around, trolling through mass surveillance, stalking exes or arbitrary targets, rifling through people's private photos and messages, there's no way a mid-tier tech company job is going to be the one where they suddenly behave ethically and respect security.
That said, robots in factories are a no-brainer, you gain a massive margin over human operated manufacturing, and the technology is effectively at an alpha level of rollout, with more or less full capability of doing any particular thing any human can do, with near perfect repeatability and millisecond granular control, and the effective cost at scale is pennies per year over whatever salary you'd have to pay a human. For municipal jobs, you can get multiple robots to do things like street cleaning, building maintenance, cleaning, facilities maintenance, guard patrols, and so forth. There are all sorts of large scale deployments that are much more compatible with low-trust , low-privacy issues than home robot butlers, and those widely deployed factory and janitor bots will help finance the robo-butlers.
Imagine robot street repair crews that operate on a 24/7 basis, with self driving cars that go around town searching out potholes and other safety issues for the robots to fix. Neighborhood robots that shovel snow or clean out water drains, or trot out with safety cones if a hazard appears. That's millions and millions of dollars in savings year over year compared the cost of paying humans, and it gets rid of the perverse incentives that lead to things like sub-standard materials being used, so that you have to replace materials every year in order to keep the union teams employed doing overpriced roadwork.
Robot contractors that learn from Amish techniques to build a well-made house inside 48 hours, or Earth Day citywide robot blitzes where the robots clean everything, and so on. The economics of things that people won't do, or aren't worth paying to do, change radically when it's a mindless robot's time being allocated.
Even if it's not Optimus, the robots are basically here, the next decade is gonna be full of fun politics and figuring out how to cope with radical change.
"It'd have to be locally controlled, or securely siloed in a cloud, with auditable and accountable interactions. Any sort of home robot will have that challenge; I wouldn't trust any company or person with that sort of access. "
I agree, but we might be in a minority here. Otherwise roombas etc. would not have had their success. Children toys with microphone and always on connection to the company. Cameras as part of a big network. Cars that can be remote controlled any time, ..
I'm slightly optimistic with the heightened scrutiny on AI and general political turmoil - maybe there's a shot at a reasonable digital bill of rights regulation, and both parties seem fairly universally against allowing China to run surveillance apparatus inside US homes. An Alexa or Roomba is one thing, but a humanoid is too close to having an actual person - there's enough of a subjective difference in vibe that it might reach critical mass in the zeitgeist.
US politics is on the "cannot let China win the AI race" side of things, as well as the "cannot have a chinese/corporation/government robot spy in your bedroom" side of things. Cheap Temu speakers with microphones that phone home, or chargers that connect to wifi for botnets, and so on, that sort of abstract IoT threat doesn't resonate. Commander Data doing your dishes feels like a person in your home.
> That's millions and millions of dollars in savings year over year compared the cost of paying humans, and it gets rid of the perverse incentives that lead to things like sub-standard materials being used, so that you have to replace materials every year in order to keep the union teams employed doing overpriced roadwork.
How does it get rid of perverse incentives? The unionised human workers use sub-standard material so they can do (and charge for) the same repair next year, but the owners of the robots do not have the very same incentive?
Is it because humans are mendacious, fallible, and corrupt, while Elon is honest, reliable, and not motivated by money?
That said, robots in factories are a no-brainer, you gain a massive margin over human operated manufacturing, and the technology is effectively at an alpha level of rollout, with more or less full capability of doing any particular thing any human can do, with near perfect repeatability and millisecond granular control, and the effective cost at scale is pennies per year over whatever salary you'd have to pay a human. For municipal jobs, you can get multiple robots to do things like street cleaning, building maintenance, cleaning, facilities maintenance, guard patrols, and so forth. There are all sorts of large scale deployments that are much more compatible with low-trust , low-privacy issues than home robot butlers, and those widely deployed factory and janitor bots will help finance the robo-butlers.
Imagine robot street repair crews that operate on a 24/7 basis, with self driving cars that go around town searching out potholes and other safety issues for the robots to fix. Neighborhood robots that shovel snow or clean out water drains, or trot out with safety cones if a hazard appears. That's millions and millions of dollars in savings year over year compared the cost of paying humans, and it gets rid of the perverse incentives that lead to things like sub-standard materials being used, so that you have to replace materials every year in order to keep the union teams employed doing overpriced roadwork.
Robot contractors that learn from Amish techniques to build a well-made house inside 48 hours, or Earth Day citywide robot blitzes where the robots clean everything, and so on. The economics of things that people won't do, or aren't worth paying to do, change radically when it's a mindless robot's time being allocated.
Even if it's not Optimus, the robots are basically here, the next decade is gonna be full of fun politics and figuring out how to cope with radical change.