alt Hacker NewsUntil we get robots with really good hands, something I'd love in the interim is a system that uses _me_ as the hands. When it's time to put groceries away, I don't want to have to think about how to organize everything. Just figure out which grocery items I have, what storage I have available, come up with an optimized organization solution, then tell me where to put things, one at a time. I'm cautiously optimistic this will be doable in the near term with a combination of AR and AI.
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Dunno, I would not want to bleed my mental faculties for doing even simple planning work like this by outsourcing it to AI. Reliance on crutches like this would seem like a pathway to early-onset dementia.
Sounds like what's described in Manna: https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
I fully agree, building something like this is somewhere in my back log.
I think the key point why this "reverse cyborg" idea is not as dystopian as, say, being a worker drone in a large warehouse where the AI does not let you go to the toilet is that the AI is under your own control, so you decide on the high level goal "sort the stuff away", the AI does the intermediate planning and you do the execution.
We already have systems like that, every time you use you tell your navi where you want to go, it plans the route and gives you primitive commands like "on the next intersection, turn right", so why not have those for cooking, doing the laundry, etc.?
Heck, even a paper calendar is already kinda this, as in separating the planning phase from the execution phase.
This is almost literally the first chapter in Marshall Brain's "Manna" [0], being the first step towards world-controlling AGI:
> Manna told employees what to do simply by talking to them. Employees each put on a headset when they punched in. Manna had a voice synthesizer, and with its synthesized voice Manna told everyone exactly what to do through their headsets. Constantly. Manna micro-managed minimum wage employees to create perfect performance.
I imagine a something like a headlamp except it's a projector and a camera so it can just light up where it wants you to pick something up in one color or where it wants you to put it down in another color. It can learn from what it sees of my hands how the eventual robot should handle the space (e.g. not putting heavy things on top of fragile things and such).
I'd totally use that to clean my garage so that later I can ask it where the heck I put the thing or ask it if I already have something before I buy one...
A good AI fridge would be already a great starting point. With a checkin procedure that makes sure to actually know whats in the fridge. Complete with expiry tracking and recipe suggestions based on personal preferences combined with product expiry. I am totally unimpressed with almost everything I see in home automation these days, but I'd immediately buy the AI fridge if it really worked smoothly.
You already have one: a brain.
Your solution sounds like the worst cognitive load for getting home from the grocery store and wanting it all to be over.
You want to outsource thinking to a computer system and keep manual labor? You do you, but I want the opposite. I want to decide what goes where but have a robot actually put the stuff there.
so the kiva-amazon model?
Yeah there’s more to it than that. Do you want a can of beans to be put in the utensil draw just because it would fit? If it was done as you describe the placement of all of your items would be almost random each time, the bot need to have contextual memory and familiarity with your storage habits and preferences.
This can be done of course, in your statement the phrase “just figure out” is doing a lot more heavy lifting than you allude to
Maybe I don't understand exactly what you're describing but why would anyone pay for this? When I bring home the shopping I just... chuck stuff in the cupboards. I already know where it all goes. Maybe you can explain more?