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I invented Roomba and assure you, robots won’t take over the world

nautil.us

1–10 of 65 posts

Re: I invented Roomba and assure you, robots won’t take over the world

#2
Why do some things get "invented" and others being simply developed ? Roombe is based on other ideas and concpets.

Even according to the timeline in the article itself the Swedish Electrolux Trilobite [1] was already press released when iRobot had their first proof of concept.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolux_Trilobite

Re: I invented Roomba and assure you, robots won’t take over the world

#5
There are a lot of jobs that are suitable for people with disabilities or lack of college education or other issues -- those jobs jobs are being taken over by "software robots". My employer and lots of other similar companies are using them to automate stuff so that those people are no longer needed.

Robots are not taking over your world -- just some jobs which mean the world to some people who have those jobs!

Re: I invented Roomba and assure you, robots won’t take over the world

#6
post #2

Why do some things get "invented" and others being simply developed ? Roombe is based on other ideas and concpets. Even according to the timeline in the article itself the Swedish Electrolux Trilobite [1] was already press released when iRobot had their first proof of concept. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolux_Trilobite

[deleted]

Re: I invented Roomba and assure you, robots won’t take over the world

#8
There is no point made here that robots won't take over the world, he just belabors the point that it is hard to make robots replicate exactly what humans do.

Automation will eat everything, it's just a matter of time. Even his problem of 'visually identifying weeds and uprooting them' does not come across as a massive problem, but one that can probably be solved with enough time and demand.

Platitudes like these give false hopes to workers who should be training and preparing for the next phase of industry, and IMO serves people like the author who need complacent workers to give them time to come up with their money-making solutions.

Re: I invented Roomba and assure you, robots won’t take over the world

#9
So OK, it's a good criteria for robotics companies: Do a valuable task, do it today, do it for less. And companies following that, and i'll add - aiming for B2B, even when failed, we'll see their competitors and industry succeed.

You can see it from his list of failed companies, where only Unbounded robotics(smart robot hand), Rethink(collaborative robotics), Blue workforce(collaborative), Aria insights(drones) have seen their work continue successfully in their industry.

But yes, robots for the home are much harder.

So maybe robots won't take over the world, but they might take over businesses.

Re: I invented Roomba and assure you, robots won’t take over the world

#10
Before spreadsheet software (Excel, etc) showed up, some people were using actual physical spreadsheets (very large pieces of paper). Spreadsheet software appeared to make that job obsolete. And indeed it did. Nobody uses the paper spreadsheets anymore. But how many people use the computer spreadsheets? Hundreds of millions?

It's going to be the same with robots. Maybe actual lathes will disappear, but there will be computerized things that will perform that job, and people manning the computers. Some of the jobs will be automated (think Excel macros), but many will require human interaction and iterations.

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