After decades of only featuring in science fiction. It seems our humanoid robot future is rushing towards us. Every month now, there seems to be real, genuine, incremental improvements. If these claims hold up, then this is another milestone. Laundry folding has become such a robotics training cliché that it might be hard to spot what’s significant here.
The key breakthrough is generalization. They claim one laundry-folding video is enough to let the robot learn to fold laundry in any context. Before, the robots could only model specifics. If the rooms, tables, etc., were different, then the robots were thrown into disarray. Not anymore.
We’ve had “Sputnik” moments, and more lately “Deepseek” moments, but I suspect in the next 18 months we’ll have a “humanoid robot” moment. When someone puts enough of these recent incremental improvements into one robot and gets them working, most people will be awed and stunned.
I could not be less excited about it, when I was younger I thought robots would be super cool, I loved robots, I watched the Jetsons and looked at all the cool toy robots that were the rage in the 80s in the toy catalogs. Fast forward to now, I just vastly prefer doing things myself, I enjoy doing things myself, I enjoy the fruits of my labor and don’t feel off put by daily tasks. They should be making these things to do OUR WORK for us, not OUR SIMPLE CHORES, we’re getting fucked again
I was with you until you basically said you want to do daily tasks and chores. Now, I like doing things myself as well. I get satisfaction from a job well-done, whether it’s for my employer, or in my personal life. But what I don’t like is the monotonous, repetitive, mind-numbing things I have to do. Those are things I would theoretically want AI/robots to do, but that’s just me personally.
I think ideally would be being able to interact and have the robot do it the way you like.
