Physical Intelligence's first generalist policy AI can finally do your laundry

https://www.physicalintelligence.company/blog/pi0

by Terretta • 2 years ago

218 188 2 years ago

physicalintelligence.company

Terretta2• 2 years ago

At Physical Intelligence (π) our mission is to bring general-purpose AI into the physical world.

We're excited to show the first step towards this mission - our first generalist model π₀

Paper, blog, uncut videos: http://physicalintelligence.company/blog/pi0

via: https://x.com/physical_int/status/1852041726279794788

gigel82• 2 years ago

Nice, finally some AI functionality I could actually use.

tomohelix• 2 years ago

Get it a bit better in term of precision and we have a killer lab automation tool. Labs around the world would be willing to pay 1M for a robot that can handle manual lab works and it is not like they are very difficult. Lots of labwork is based on established protocols with well defined steps. A robot that can grab things and go to town on those tubes without any programming needed is a blockbuster product to me.

NoLinkToMe2• 2 years ago

Agreed, my girlfriend has a biochemistry degree and works in such a lab. It involves some physical work like collecting, preparing and inputting samples, doing basic maintenance of the machines, some analysis and then some administrative/secretarial work in feeding the results into a system or by phonecall to the doctor.

All of which can indeed be automated in my view.

I would say it really depends on where you are though. In the US it probably makes sense quite quickly. But she lives in a small EU country where salaries aren't high, and this is very much a junior position with a lot of students looking for such a job. Her position costs about 25k a year.

The NPV of a $1m investment with a 25k cashflow is negative at normal discount rates. Once you get to replace a $120k salary with a $1m robot, it does make sense.

Further I do still expect there to be some jobs in overseeing the robot (e.g. your average factory manager). That makes sense for large centralised production locations, because you can have 1 human job overseeing many robots. It doesn't necessarily make sense with many small decentralised production locations. And that's the nature of most labs, I believe due to the time sensitivity of a lot of lab work they need to be everywhere and close to customers. But maybe that will change.

llm_trw3• 2 years ago

Keep in mind that workers in the EU work for around 6 hours a day, a robot works for 24, so it's replacing 4 of them, not 1.

bagels• 2 years ago

Production version of these robot arms would not be anywhere near $1m

ValentinA232• 2 years ago

It wouldn't cost 1M. The BOM[1] of Stanford's Mobile Aloha[2] (very similar to physical intelligence's robot) is around $30,000.

[1]https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_3yhWjodSNNYlpxkRCPIlvIA...

[2]https://mobile-aloha.github.io/

$7000 for the wheels/navigation module $3500 x2 for the control arms $6000 x2 for the controlled arms

I don't think you need a $7000 navigation module and the arms are also probably overkill. To which extent do we need closed-loop Dynamixel servos when the policy diffusion algo already relies on computer vision driven closed-loop control ?

M4v3R2• 2 years ago

Also worth mentioning that a lot of stuff in chemistry labs is toxic and even potentially deadly to humans, it would be a big win if these could be handled by robots instead.

bottom999mottob2• 2 years ago

That reminds me of Dr. Greenamyre in Pittsburgh who thinks he accidentally gave himself Parkinsons researching rotenone in pesticides [0]

[0] https://youtu.be/7mYEqUrx6dQ?si=x4P6pkUCd7EvCe1N&t=152

amelius3• 2 years ago

Certainly. I have a friend working in this space (AI lab automation). In a few years he expects competition to be fierce, though.

doctorpangloss4• 2 years ago

This lab automation product already exists and the couple of startups in this space face the same headwinds as everyone else trying to sell hardware when the stuff people are essentially really paying for is software.

Also nobody’s academic lab is buying $1m startup lab equipment. A whole core for 30 research groups is buying something, but it will be a piece of equipment that directly leads to publishing, ie, something with history. That is why you don’t have the exact thing you are talking about, which exists, in labs.

bubaumba• 2 years ago

Don't expect much. Even screwing a nut on a bolt is a huge problem for generic robot. Which means you will need a 'robot friendly' lab. Were all things can be done by a primitive robotic hand. Other options are making more capable hands, and completely robotic specialized labs. The first is most interesting and the way to go. When it happens it will open a lot of possibilities. Like "self-repairing" vehicles and planet stations. Just with 'technician' robot onboard.

Animats• 2 years ago

On HN 9 days ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42011770

qnleigh• 2 years ago

Is my knowledge out of date, or is this a step change in robotics capabilities? Boston Dynamics robots are impressive, but this seems way beyond what their robots have been able to do.

authorfly• 2 years ago

It's not really a step change.

Saycan demonstrated similar functionality with PaLM 2 years ago (2.5 years first demo of cleaning up coke cans, etc):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ru23eWAQ6_E

Caveat - I am way out of my depth here as I focus on Software AI, but: I can't see any major breaks from SayCan looking at this information. When studying robotics, Degrees of Freedom/basic Arms and mechanisms (tension, grip, extension, types of joint etc) are a typical case study. However, I do not think there has been any practical progress (with the lack of data) in about 20 years now, besides increased refinement from materials science (e.g. detection of soft materials) allowing some better grip but not particularly better dynamic movement(e.g. walking remains badly solved compared to the efficiency/mechanism of humans).

Falimonda3• 2 years ago

It's certainly an expansion of software capabilities with respect to what Boston Dynamics typically highlights in their videos.

With that said, Boston Dynamics is likely to have their own version of this in the works if not already live. They're videos just tend to highlight advancements in both hardware and software that are likely to go viral and connect with non-technical viewers.

You can already see it in some of BD's latest videos.

fragmede• 2 years ago

The trouble Atlas had taking the car parts off the slotted shelf makes it seem like they're quite a bit further away, given the hand dexterity it takes to fold clothes.

ValentinA232• 2 years ago

Folding clothes is a special task. Other prototypical tasks that are used in robot benchmark:

- changing a bike chain

- closing a jacket's zipper

llm_trw3• 2 years ago

Fascinating work.

I never thought about what we could do if instead of trying to do work in real time we slowed robots down for non time critical tasks to latencies which current transformers can deal with on real hardware.

082349872349872• 2 years ago

von Neumann, Theory of self-reproducing automata (1966) p.72 "Role of High Complication":

An automaton can not be separated from the milieu to which it responds.
The characteristics of a human for survival are well defined on the surface of the earth in its present state, though for most types of humans you must actually specialize the situation a little further than this. But it is meaningless to argue how the human would survive on the bottom of the ocean or in a temperature of 1000 degrees centigrade. Similarly, in discussing a computing machine it is meaningless to ask how fast or how slow it is, unless you specify what type of problems will be given to it.

wiz21c• 2 years ago

Yeah, one thing is for sure: the robot has actually understood that it is very boring to do the laundry. Proof ? Just look at how it botches the d*n task :-) I mean, I would never ever pince a t-shirt so bad :-)

JumpCrisscross2• 2 years ago

I hate doing laundry. Everyone gets one task they get to abhor. Mine is laundry. If I could buy this in a few generations for less than $20k, I would, pinches and all.

Perfect is perfect. Good enough is good enough.

anonzzzies• 2 years ago

$20k... Doesn't that buy a lot of serviced laundry? I am unaware about prices in the rest of the world, but 20k is more than a lifetime of having my laundry picked up and ironed every week (which I do as I too hate laundry).

pzo3• 2 years ago

I like that their robot is pretty simple comparing to humanoid robots so cost should be much lower. I don't get it why focusing on clothes folding though, does anyone do laundry more often than once a week? Much more useful if it can do cooking since that's something you do at least once every day.

Instead I would like to see some new innovation in laundry machines. Current technology is very basic, you heat water and keep spinning. Why not some something more similar to bigger paper printer that at the end of the day you feed your 1 shirt, roll it into a roller, sprinkle with some high pressure minimal amount of water, heating and return 30min later already perfectly ironed.

M4v3R2• 2 years ago

I don't get it why focusing on clothes folding though, does anyone do laundry more often than once a week?

Folding laundry is not the end goal here. They chose it because it’s a very challenging thing for a robot to do, requiring great manual dexterity, planning, reacting to sensory inputs etc. In other words: if your robot can do your laundry it can probably be taught to do pretty much anything else around the house.

bitwize• 2 years ago

I don't get it why focusing on clothes folding though, does anyone do laundry more often than once a week? Much more useful if it can do cooking since that's something you do at least once every day.

Because the people on the Axiom are going to need clean jumpsuits?

Seriously, laundry folding is an example of a complex task that requires considerable dexterity and sophisticated object manipulation on the robot's part, but unlike cooking it's relatively low stakes: little harm is likely to be caused to the robot, the environment, or bystanding humans if the robot screws it up. So it makes a pretty good research task that, when solved for, will make impressive demos at trade events.

lotsofpulp• 2 years ago

does anyone do laundry more often than once a week?

Yes, at least 3x per week. Young kids, toddlers, babies, workout clothes, sports clothes, work clothes, etc.

averageRoyalty• 2 years ago

I don't get it why focusing on clothes folding though, does anyone do laundry more often than once a week? Much more useful if it can do cooking since that's something you do at least once every day.

Lots of people do 3-4 loads per week. Some people don't cook at home at all. There are 8 billion people out there.

pzo3• 2 years ago

Some people don't cook at home but they still have to eat. Restaurants still have to hire people for doing cooking tasks.

rgbswan• 2 years ago

Small businesses like Cafes? They will hopefully get this to laundromats once this bot can iron, too. Not even once did I iron or fold my laundry back in university ...

semi-extrinsic• 2 years ago

does anyone do laundry more often than once a week

I can tell you do not have children. We frequently run 2 loads per day...

Also, I challenge anyone to look at that video from 2:00 to 2:45 (which is 90 seconds IRL) and tell me with a straight face this has anything to do with "intelligence". I have seen human babies at 5 months old severely outperform this thing.

saulrh• 2 years ago

Laundry is kind of the perfect demo for advanced motion planning systems. Fabric is, for all intents and purposes, completely intractable in classic motion planning paradigms; it's wildly non-rigid, which means that predicting its behavior is the domain of highly specialized and expensive dynamics simulators, it's nearly impossible to invert the problem to ask what motions would be required to produce a given result, and it's highly continuous and resistant to discretization even if you can predict it. You can't make the "folds have zero width" assumption you always see when reasoning about origami, for example. Clothing is extreme even for fabric, given that it's not only highly non-uniform but also fragile; every shirt is a different hideous bit of floppy topology covered in strange textures with complex and unpredictable local properties and it'll start popping stitches if you look at it funny. Ruffles, zippers, pockets, drawstrings, the list goes on. On top of that, laundry is something that everyone does so it's relatable and easy to set up in a lab, and humans can intuitively evaluate performance with a glance. Despite all the attention, nobody's been able to demonstrate convincing performance on it in like seventy years of work, which makes it a more difficult task than backflips or shooting hoops or loading a truck. All of that together means that, when you have a fancy new algorithm that can handle more than some blocks on a tabletop, you pretty much always point it at the laundry.

YeGoblynQueenne2• 2 years ago

And just to be clear, this is still not "convincing performance" since it is still the WYSIWIG model of robotics in the sense that it can only do exactly what you see it doing in the videos. It can fold a couple of shirts and a pair of pants and wouldn't, e.g., be able to fold my hoodies, never mind a bra or something else with straps.

The big advance here seems to be that the robot can pick the clothes out of a basket on its own rather than having someone set it all up neatly for it. I mean they sort of imply it here but you have to read carefully to understand what they refer to (folding a t-shirt that hasn't been laid flat on a table first):

Laundry. We fine-tuned π0 to fold laundry, using either a mobile robot or a fixed pair of arms. The goal is to get the clothing into a neat stack. This task is exceptionally difficult for robots (...and some humans): while a single t-shirt laid flat on the table can sometimes be folded just by repeating a pre-scripted set of motions, a pile of tangled laundry can be crumpled in many different ways, so it is not enough to simply move the arms through the same motion. To our knowledge, no prior robot system has been demonstrated to perform this task at this level of complexity.

TeMPOraL8• 2 years ago

does anyone do laundry more often than once a week?

Once you have a nonzero amount of kids, laundry becomes a continuous process will no defined start and end.

Much more useful if it can do cooking since that's something you do at least once every day.

Thing is, cooking is something a lot of people find deeply rewarding and humanizing (I don't, but I realize I'm an outlier here). Meanwhile, I challenge you to find anyone who thinks doing laundry is a worthwhile use of their limited time on Earth.

pzo3• 2 years ago

My point is from business perspective cooking is much bigger market since this applies to B2B as well (commercial laundry is not as big) - many restaurants would happily buy such robot and pay even more than typical home user. I also think solving cooking is simpler task than folding any types of clothes - they could even simplify further by focusing first on making burgers/pizza/sandwich/kebab only and be profitable much faster.

cruffle_duffle3• 2 years ago

Once you have a nonzero amount of kids, laundry becomes a continuous process will no defined start and end.

Pretty much this. You’ll be folding clothes while washing more at the same time.

And it isn’t just the folding that is a challenge. It’s putting it away. I’d gladly take a “put the clothes away” robot before I got a “fold the clothes” robot.

vasco4• 2 years ago

I got myself this perfect clothes folding robot about 8 years ago when I decided I would not fold or iron clothes ever again. Two useless activities forever gone from my life. There's more things like this around the house but folding and ironing are 100% useless. I pick the clothes from the rack, they come kinda folded in half but I don't even try, and all get dumped into drawers. I never lack space because I'll buy clothes only upon throwing out clothes, so the bigger volume of the clothes doesn't make a difference in storage space either.

tacocataco4• 2 years ago

I just leave the clothes on the rack. I can see what I have better and my clothes smell better getting aired out more compared to sitting in a drawer.

This also means I use less floor space as I don't need cabinets/dressers to hold them.

And yes, I have many racks on my walls. The rack life is good.

Falimonda3• 2 years ago

How long before we see this running on a fleet of excavators?

seydor• 2 years ago

These things can be huge for agriculture

sawmurai• 2 years ago

Maybe someone in the HN crowd knows that: Why are these robots moving so slowly? Is it for safety or does speed increase the difficulty significantly?

amelius3• 2 years ago

My guess is that speed is not their first concern.

imtringued2• 2 years ago

They are using a vision language model to generate the robot motions token by token. They are being bottlenecked by the inference of the VLM.

PostOnce2• 2 years ago

For factories and closed environments, stuff is getting good fast, but for the rest of the "real world", no robot or AI is practical without human supervision. I automate physical things for a living and have thus become convinced.

The first thing that robot will do is start a dryer that a toddler climbed into because it isn't that aware of the world around it.

And that will be the end of general purpose domestic robots.

That or knocking over candles or fucking up something else simultaneously trivial and terribly dangerous in context.

I dream the same dream of a general purpose machine, but I think it may never be possible, and if it is we're a long way out.

user901313134• 2 years ago

How about at first if we put camera on it and then someone from overseas checks around before performoning the task? for cheap but it can make it secure.

unsupp0rted• 2 years ago

I’d rather not have someone from overseas walking around my home via remote cameras

TeMPOraL8• 2 years ago

Sci-fi authors were worried about rebellions of enslaved robots, while the industry figures, why risk jumping into the unknown, when we can fake a smart computer with overseas labor and an Internet connection, and wage slavery we know how to handle...

Anyway, if we're going to fake smart robots this way, why not just honestly call it what it is? Remote household staff. Might as well give them better sensors and actuators, but I guess this is giving humans too much agency and risk; what if the operator decides to hurt the "robot" owners or something? The vendor would not have that. Cannot have that. Humans are too messy to deal with.

Or is this the short-term future of all automation? I look at my robotic vacuum cleaner now, occasionally pausing for a second or two while it figures out where to go, and I wonder - maybe in those moments, it's using some Protein Intelligence Chip to query a bunch of random humans somewhere?

HumanReadable2• 2 years ago

at that point, why not just have someone from overseas control the robot?

tantalor• 2 years ago

AI = actually Indians

chilmers2• 2 years ago

I recall reading many comments on HN confidently predicting that the moment a self-driving car caused an accident that killed someone, that would be the end of self-driving cars. But while they have caused accidents, and there has been resulting lawsuits and investigations by regulators, it hasn't put an end to them. And with the incoming US administration, I'm expecting far less legal and regulatory barriers to greater use of robots and automation.

PostOnce2• 2 years ago

Dying in a car accident is normal, but having your (robot) maid kill your children or burn your house down is not.

I think that will weigh on people's opinions of domestic general purpose robots when compared to robotic cars.

dtnewman• 2 years ago

To be fair, many many people die in car accidents every day. Yes, self driving car crashes are still newsworthy but you are up against a baseline that’s pretty bad.

On the other hand, virtually no one dies from laundry, that I’m aware of. So the reaction to a single accident might be quite different.

moffkalast• 2 years ago

Even if they need supervision, watching a robot hang up the laundry to dry is better than having to do it yourself.

Like that old quote: "I love work, I can watch it all day."

rwyinuse2• 2 years ago

I agree. So far I haven't seen production-ready robots doing even relatively simple agricultural tasks, such as picking tomatoes in a greenhouse and taking care of the plants. It's all done by cheap foreign labour. If that's too hard to automate, I'm not yet holding my breath for general purpose household robots either.

Admittedly the videos in this article do seem promising though, would love to see how this tech would perform in a greenhouse.

ac292• 2 years ago

So far I haven't seen production-ready robots doing even relatively simple agricultural tasks, such as picking tomatoes in a greenhouse and taking care of the plants. It's all done by cheap foreign labour.

While they aren't widespread, there are production robots being used in many types of agriculture. In fact, it was even trivial to find one working in tomato greenhouses: https://www.arugga.com/technology (this one is used to pollinate tomatoes instead of doing it by hand or using bees).

valval• 2 years ago

Oh yeah, the exact same way roller coasters got banned as soon as one failed and killed some people.

light_hue_1• 2 years ago

This robot cannot "do your laundry". It is the same toy as always in robotics. It works in very specific environments, with very specific laundry, as long as no one gets in the way and nothing bad ever happens, you've trained it to do your laundry, you never buy anything unusual, nothing gets tangled too much, etc.

They have an extremely specific definition of the word "laundry". Three specific shirts of size M, L, and XL, and two pairs of shorts of size 28 and 36. Then they do a mobile task on three specific shirts of size M, M, and XL, and two shorts of size 32 and 31W.

That's not "laundry" the way any lay person would understand.

It's sad to see yet another group hype their work for money. What they did do, is invest a tremendous amount of engineering effort to scale things up, to collect data, and to see what changes models need to scale well in this space. That's nice and useful. It's something that as academics we generally cannot afford to do. And won't be able to afford any time soon because they don't share their data and none of their results are reproducible.

PS: Where is this title from? "Physical Intelligence's first generalist policy AI can finally do your laundry " It's not in the article. It's very misleading.

imtringued2• 2 years ago

Sure, what you said is somewhat true, but you have seemingly misunderstood one key aspect here. They simply do not have enough training data to fold all possible laundry. If there was a way to fine-tune the robot on your own clothes, then it would be able to do your laundry just fine.

You're under the mistaken impression that this is just a scripted demo built around learning directly from teleoperation as was the case with mobile aloha. The VLA model here is capable of more generalization than you are willing to admit.

Terretta2• 2 years ago

No intention to mislead, but to fit their gist into an informing title. I was originally linking to X, describing their tweet with laundry vid, then changed to point to their source blog post, where their title doesn't fully convey the content.

So this title is firm name and blog post title, adding the "laundry" from their hero video under the title and featured video on their x.com post that links to this blog post, as well as the first featured/labeled "Laundry" task discussed in body (not to mention, answering HN commenters such as this, since "doing the laundry" is by now a meme):

I’m still waiting for a neural net that can do my laundry. -- sheeshkebab 11 hours ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42098153

The response to this, portrayed in both blog post and x.com feature videos, is in the third sentence of the blog post:

To paraphrase Moravec’s paradox, winning a game of chess or discovering a new drug represent “easy” problems for AI to solve, but folding a shirt or cleaning up a table requires solving some of the most difficult engineering problems ever conceived. To build AI systems that have the kind of physically situated versatility that people possess, we need a new approach — we need to make AI systems embodied so that they can acquire physical intelligence.

The synthesis is, this is about “doing your laundry”.

Finally, to take it out of air quotes, the article's first explicit and bold labeled text task description is:

LAUNDRY. We fine-tuned π0 to fold laundry, using either a mobile robot or a fixed pair of arms. The goal is to get the clothing into a neat stack. This task is exceptionally difficult for robots (...and some humans): while a single t-shirt laid flat on the table can sometimes be folded just by repeating a pre-scripted set of motions, a pile of tangled laundry can be crumpled in many different ways, so it is not enough to simply move the arms through the same motion. To our knowledge, no prior robot system has been demonstrated to perform this task at this level of complexity.

They hold they have demonstrated this robot doing the laundry.

YeGoblynQueenne2• 2 years ago

Mwell, the robot picking out the "laundry" from a basket next to the table is slightly more than I've seen before so at least they managed to combine two tasks that would previously be considered distinct (although note the very lengthy attempt to pick a corner of a green shirt in the "3x video" further down the article, which I think is the most honest of the bunch).

I agree this is still a tech demo showing a prototype robot solving a toy task. As usual we're supposed to think "if it can do that then it should be able to do this" but it never works that way in reality.

jonplackett• 2 years ago

Finally someone teaching AI to do all the stuff I _dont’t_ want to do.

lifeisstillgood4• 2 years ago

The (unspoken?) goal is to do my laundry - and all the other domestic tasks, because that’s where human satisfaction can be unleashed

Give me a moment

1. All economics / markers of value are about human happiness / satisfaction - we claim it’s money but it’s only given a value by humans who want it.

2. As soon as people get rich enough they outsource their domestic tasks - hire a maid or a cook, or buy ready meals.

3. In the western world companies over past fifty years got a free boost as women joined the labour force, and essentially companies were paying one guy the cost of a household now they pay two people the cost of household getting twice the workers for same price.

4. So most households have lost 35 hours a week, and also still have same amount of domestic duties to do

5. As we can’t give everyone a maid we might be able to give everyone a robot maid.

6. Most innovations / technologies find their way into homes - from bricks to heating to electricity we invent it and eventually find a way to make our lives more comfortable - see the point about economics is just humans liking stuff

7. I assumed that real robo maids would be a social shift - ie a different design of washing machine, people eating at other peoples houses every day, anti-dust surfaces. But this one looks … interesting

8. I know this is incredibly western middle class centric - but exactly what else are 6 billon people aiming for?

ktjag• 2 years ago

Where did the economies get a boost when women joined the labor force? In Germany the post-war economic miracle happened mostly without them.

In the beginning of the 1970s, when women did join the labor force in greater numbers, admittedly the macroeconomic conditions were bad (oil crisis), so it is hard to filter that out.

But still, mostly we have more workers, which lowers wages and leads to the creation of more bullshit jobs. To be clear, also men create and perform bullshit jobs!

Now it takes two salaries to finance a house and a family. Great progress.

At the supermarket, I boycott automated self-checkouts even if the lines are long so the nice cashiers keep their jobs.

simgt3• 2 years ago

That's clearly the "why" no one pushing for innovative products is answering. A couple decades ago one salary could sustain a family in most developed countries, now it seems to be a struggle with two for many, we have mass unemployment, productivity soared but somehow society also can't afford enough cleaners to keep places decent.

Is the solution really to replace even more workers by capital, or do we have an issue with how we measure value that we should fix first?

seniorivn2• 2 years ago

you should also try to avoid cars and electric lights, grooms and gas light maintainers need jobs too

Matumio• 2 years ago

I generally agree with you, if you want someone else to do the checkout for you because you don't like doing it.

But if you also buy clothes only made from hand-spun yarn, I mean, it was a problem for the yarn-spinsters back then, and by all means help them. But paying someone to do something that no longer needs doing is how you create bullshit jobs. No problem with spinning yarn for recreation, but if they have to do some complete nonsense to earn a roof and a meal... there are kinder ways to help.

kristianp• 2 years ago

Now it takes two salaries to finance a house and a family

Yes! I have been thinking this. So as an economic consequence of both parents being able to work, now the choice to stay home and care for the kids is an even harder one. The birth rate falls. Kids are raised by childcare workers, not their parents.

wslh3• 2 years ago

Where did the economies get a boost when women joined the labor force? In Germany the post-war economic miracle happened mostly without them.

I have a "hobbyist conjecture" that I'd love feedback on from people familiar with economics. Simply put, the idea is this: if you were to give every human around the world a million dollars (imagine this is easy and feasible), prices would inevitably rise. The poorest might experience some improvement in their standard of living, but not as much as one might expect. This effect seems to go beyond inflation alone. My intuition is that prices ultimately adjust based on social structures and expectations.

Similarly, we see a unique economic advantage in many dual-income gay couples who, statistically, achieve higher standards of living. Often, this is partly because fewer have children, which shifts financial priorities and spending capacities.

imchillyb• 2 years ago

Users of self check out are training cashier replacements.

Doesn’t matter whether a person chooses self check out or cashier check out.

What matters is the training.

When self checkout becomes nearly as accurate as cashiers the cashiers lose their jobs.

Which lane we choose has little to do with the replacement. Thousands of holdouts won’t affect the millions of shoppers training the replacements.

nobodyandproud2• 2 years ago

Post-war Germany relied on cheap, foreign-worker labor instead: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gastarbeiter

Note: The European guest worker model of the 1950s and 1960s doesn’t work for the United States, due to the birthright citizenship status.

doctorpangloss4• 2 years ago

At the supermarket, I boycott automated self-checkouts even if the lines are long so the nice cashiers keep their jobs.

I’m not sure this is Owning the Bots the way you think it is.

fjdjshsh2• 2 years ago

For this to be true, real wages would have had to collapse (at the very least ~50-70%) for a household of two workers to be less rich than the household of one worker x years ago.

This is just not true. If people feel worse it's because they want more things from life, not because they are able to afford less things.

(I'm talking about the last ~50 years. The last 20 years may be a different point, but it doesn't have to do with female participation in the marketplace)

lifeisstillgood4• 2 years ago

I’m not saying the continues got a boost - but companies were able to absorb extra workers and maintain the total outgoings per household for decades

Not sure how that shows up in the stats

vasco4• 2 years ago

The underlying real goal is to have sex with the robots, just as the internet was going to be the gateway to all known information but instead is for porn.

kelvinjps10• 2 years ago

Is both

lifeisstillgood4• 2 years ago

Ok. Fairy Nuff.

doctorpangloss4• 2 years ago

These Physical Intelligence guys are very talented, but they will never raise enough money to achieve their goals. Their problem is saying it costs $30m to develop such a technology, when it will cost at least $1b, and probably closer to $5b.

danbmil99• 2 years ago

Not $30M, they raised $400M, and I'm sure if their stuff works and gets adoption they can raise more

fjdjshsh2• 2 years ago

3. In the western world companies over past fifty years got a free boost as women joined the labour force, and essentially companies were paying one guy the cost of a household now they pay two people the cost of household getting twice the workers for same price.

If demand for work is fixed, then doubling the supply of work (male + female from the same household) would in principle decrease wages (not necessarily by half). However, the supply need not be fixed. This is what I like to call the "musical chairs theory of employment". Let's say there are 2x more working age people in 2024 than in 1954, does it mean each person earns less? When immigrants come to a country, does it mean that each immigrant causes a native to become unemployed?

The evidence tells us that's not true and that there are other changes in the economy that also increase the demand for work. Check the literature of immigration effects (even major short term shocks) on unemployment and wages to see a pretty clear picture. I'm not aware of a study of what more female employment has done (my guess is that it's much more difficult to study, because it's a phenomenon that has slowly happened over decades. As an aside, this has happened in plenty of places around the world, no need to restrict yourself to the western world. Plenty of other places are relevant)

llamaimperative• 2 years ago

Rent goes up.

nick__m• 2 years ago

The Canadian experiment have shown us that with enough unskilled immigrants GDP per person goes down.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-gdp-per-capita-rich-...

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/canada-immigration-per-...

macrolime• 2 years ago

Pretty sure that once the pre-trained models used for this are pre-trained on lots of video and get larger (2-3 orders of magnitude larger than this), things will quickly improve. This may already exist in prototype form behind closed doors. Think how LLMs have improved since gpt-2 and gpt-3. Though I imagike it in real-time and cost efficiently may be a challenge.

risyachka• 2 years ago

LLMs literally barely improved since gpt3

Philpax• 2 years ago

Be serious. Go retry GPT-3 and compare it to Claude Sonnet and come back here.

ribcage• 2 years ago

Let's automate everything, so we don't need to do anything just lay in our bed.

tacocataco4• 2 years ago

People should be free to enjoy life their way. Including if they want to be grandpa Joe from willy wonka.

consteval4• 2 years ago

Yes because clearly this is how automation works. Never mind that we've improved efficiencies many orders of magnitude over the last century and people still work the exact same amount of hours.

We could automate the world and then we'd all be stuck rolling a cube up and hill and back down. We will work, no matter what, even in the face of post-scarcity utopia.

joduplessis• 2 years ago

Man, watching that robot struggle with that green shirt made my eye twitch.

GistNoesis3• 2 years ago

The hard problem for a laundry robot is not folding the clothes, it's getting into the laundry room.

Living in European city, space is a hard constraint. The cost of rent is 30€ per square meter per month in Paris.

Laundry rooms are small. This robot is too wide and won't be able to go through the door of my laundry room. Ironing boards are foldable for a reason : they need to be setup every time. This robot can't do it, and also can't handle the softener bottle for the washing machine.

Having 1 square meter empty table (0.5 for the table and 0.5 accessible space for the robot doing the folding) dedicated to folding is a pipe dream for most. Laundromats are there because some don't have enough space to even have a washing machine.

Laundry room are a dedicated space for humidity and ventilation reason, so they have been designed on specific location on house plans probably more than 30 years ago on average, not having in mind robot accessibility, but rather be as small as functionally possible.

Quite often for people not living in flats, but in houses, the laundry room is located in the basement with only stair or single step access.

I don't think architect and construction accessibility norm will change fast enough, specially with bipedal robots right around the corner.

The slack necessary for home robotics emergence has already been eaten multiple time due to the high cost of space.

blagie3• 2 years ago

If you scroll down, this is a general-purpose robot. It can drive around and bus the table or fold a cardboard box.

I'm not sure it can't handle the softener, and V2 will likely be able to set up the ironing board.

In terms of size, even now, it's smaller than a fridge, washing machine, dishwasher, or many other household time-saving appliances common in most houses (although not necessarily historic cities with multi-century homes not designed for them). No effort has gone into shrinking it either; perhaps with clever engineering, it can be made much smaller if it moves out of the research prototype phase.

Another question, to me, is cost. Many robots like this run around $100k, and with good reason. Can this be brought down? I hope so.

GistNoesis3• 2 years ago

The water bottle is usually a common hard test for robots. The softener bottle raise the stakes even more. Because every time I handle it, I need to wash my hands afterwards.

Ironing board is bigger than the robot, and quite heavy, the torque in setting it up is a lot and probably greater than the torque necessary to break the expensive actuator when things go wrong.

Keeping a shared table clean so you can fold clothes on it is a not trivial but more manageable problem.

The home market is highly predatory. If people have enough to invest in a home robot, it means that they have some available money that other actors didn't grab. In France last time they remove 5€ per month of renting help, it was a struggle for lot of people.

You have lots of actors that call dibs on your home improvement money before you can improve your home. There is usually the landlord, then the building manager (or Home Owner Association) (which is usually already working in the kleptocracy domain), then there are local tax, and mandatory ecological improvements (thermal isolation, and windows), home improvement market (paints and kitchen), and of course everything is indexed on the current cost of energy, and uncontrolled inflation.

It's not a question of costs, otherwise all smart investment improvements that bring more than they cost on the relevant time-scales like thermal isolation and solar power infrastructure, collective infrastructure, not having to do the laundry every week..., would have been done already. It's more about determining who deserve the money.

scotty79• 2 years ago

Why would you think a laundry robot is something people who can't afford comfortable apartment with their own washing machine might use?

I think this might be eventually integrated with washing machine so that you buy one device where you put your dirty clothes in and take out clean and folded. It's not like the traditional washing machine is the expensive part that needs to be kept separate and in current form.

plopilop• 2 years ago

The cost of rent is 30€ per square meter per month in Paris.

Only for big enough apartments. 20m² appartements do not go for under 850€, ie around 42€/m². Granted these flats are too small to even have a laundry machine, let alone a laundry folding robot.

jazzyjackson• 2 years ago

Laundromats are kind of a drag since you have to hang around nearby for almost 2 hours to do the 5 minutes of labor that the machines don't do for you. Dropping off a sack of clothes for wash & fold on the other hand is a pricey luxury. Perhaps if the laundromats could automate the whole process it would bring down the price of wash and fold and fewer people would be inclined to have washing machine at home (as you say, taking up space for a machine that is used a couple hours a week)

Alternatively you can simply attach the laundromat to a cafe or bar, turning a chore into an opportunity to relax and socialize but most of the world is not prepared for that degree of civilization.

addendumthrow• 2 years ago

Yes and the laundromat user interface could simply be a package locker style wall and an app.

An adjacent use case is apartment buildings that currently have shared washer and dryer rooms that tenants book time slots for. Upgrade: drop off a tagged laundry bag anytime, pick up when convenient from locker. Only service technicians need room access so layout and washers and dryers can be robot optimized.

psychoslave• 2 years ago

So we will have robots building and making corve there, while humanity focus on making smart policies through continuoys education for all and involvment in direct democracy.

Or maybe we will have private army robots under the order of some random dictator disconnected from the reality of people.

Or some mix of these. Or finally no longer any war, in a world without any human though.

What a time to be alive.

sebastiennight• 2 years ago

I know very few people under 40 who fold and iron clothes, and I'm not sure I know people under 30 who own an ironing table and iron (or if they own one, it's busted, and if it's not busted, it's lost).

I think "doing the laundry" is getting obsolete faster than doing it yourself is. Kind of like people didn't give up on sewing their damages clothes by hiring a robot to do it... they gave up by throwing old clothes away and switching to fast fashion.

If this product addresses high-income people (which would probably be the case even if the price comes down from $100k to even $1k), then it still seems a lost cause for this reason.

SamoyedFurFluff• 2 years ago

Fast fashion clothing increasingly cannot be ironed. But also it’s increasingly hard to buy good quality clothes because of the influence of fast fashion. Even very expensive designers will have shit like unlined coats or thin sweaters. Part of this is that the supply chain for good quality clothing has been greatly reduced. Even if you wanted as a designer to acquire good quality fabric, you have to pay more for it than you used to.

transfire• 2 years ago

They need better hardware. Show me a robot that can button a shirt.

LoganDark• 2 years ago

Love to see mecanum wheels being used here. They're so much rarer to see than they should be! I go months to years between each instance of seeing them.

d-lisp• 2 years ago

There is something funny in the way it performs some of the moves in a sub-optimal manner. It reminds me of cats playing with small objects (earings on a beside table...). This is still quite impressive.

cruffle_duffle3• 2 years ago

Folding the laundry is “the easy part”. The actual hard part for me is putting it away. You can fold all you want but it does no good unless it gets put away into whatever closet/drawer configuration you’ve got.

j_timberlake• 2 years ago

Folding laundry is a tiny chore, the real holy-grail is robotic arms that can cook 24/7. The job-market will never recover from robotic arms in every fast-food joint, restaurant, hotel, hospital, military base, cruise ship, and everywhere else that preps food. The biggest winners might be grocery stores that sell hot meals prepared from their own produce, which are then drone-delivered to the nearby homes. I'm probably being way too optimistic though.

arcastroe• 2 years ago

Send your favorite recipe to any of the local robot chefs near you to get the exact dish you want, every time.

would restaurants with static menus even be relevant at that point?

Physical Intelligence's first generalist policy AI can finally do your laundry

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