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There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]

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Re: There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]

#131

Post by mlhpdx »

physPop wrote: post #127
ern_ave wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What will be the first device to bottle up AI and other modern technologies in a package and become widely in-demand One problem I see is that corporations insist on collecting and reselling our data. As a result, a lot of people are reticent to get much automation. They seem to accept it with TVs, but other devices - it's just too much of an intrusion. I say "a lot of people" but I don't know how many people it is…

HN crowd is not representative of the world at large. consumers don't care. cost and convenience are primary motivators.

As far as I can tell, many “regular” people do care and alter buying decisions based on privacy concerns. They use words like “creepy” instead of technical ones, but the underlying discomfort is the same.

Re: There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]

#132

Post by MSFT_Edging »

specialist wrote: post #73
laszlojamf wrote: post #66

The most interesting thing about science fiction to me isn't the things the authors get right, but what they get wrong. Like, the whole house talking in a ChatGPT voice, intelligent appliances, etc: brilliant prescience. But he still thought we'd be having linoleum on our floors...

Linoleum became the premium option, now named marmoleum. https://www.forbo.com/flooring/en-us/commercial-products/lin... If fossil carbon ever becomes (commercially) scarce, vinyl might end up the premium choice. I predict plank will always suck.

I've actually considered premium linoleum for the give underfoot. LVP is such a terrible flooring. Sure it's cheap to buy and install, but man you feel that cheapness.

Re: There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]

#133

Post by worksonmine »

nahuel0x wrote: post #95
mbernstein wrote: post #91

Nature won't know or care if humanity erases itself.

As far as we know life is only present on Earth, we presuppose that in the vastness of Cosmos there are other instances of it or that it can re-emerge from almost zero, but the reality is that we simply don't know. So maybe there is a possibility that wiping out all the life on Earth also wipes it from the entire Cosmos, forever.

"Humanity" is far from "all the life on Earth". Nature will be better off once it happens.

Re: There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]

#134

Post by thrtythreeforty »

I read this story in 4th grade. It felt like the future. Now, it feels like most of the technology is within reach - at least, it could be built. The automated stove being the main exception.

But the most unrealistic part of this story is how all the IoT automation continues to work in the absence of the Internet.

Re: There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]

#137

Post by SkyeCA »

pfdietz wrote: post #99
kibwen wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The great sleight-of-hand of the 20th century is that it never went away, we all just collectively decided to stop thinking about the fact that at every given moment for the rest of human history we'll never be more than thirty minutes away from total nuclear annihilation.

The world doesn't have enough nuclear weapons for "total nuclear annihilation".

Perhaps not, but there's no functional difference to the millions (hundreds of millions even) of victims if you start hitting major population centres.

Re: There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]

#138

Post by zimzam »

throwawayffffas wrote: post #121
bigfishrunning wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the real problem with household robots is that they are either flimsy toys or dangerous machines, and there's not much in-between. If we were to build a humanoid robot that would just put laundry away (as described in a HN article a few weeks ago), it would need to be strong enough to lift a laundry basket, have advanced control systems to go up and down stairs, and also be safe/reliable/trusted enough not to hurt pe…

It's not expensive, it's an unsolved problem, the main issue for many years has been the modeling of cloth behavior. They already have a folding robot that means they have solved a significant chunk of it. But the generalization of behaviors is also a large problem. Pick and place is mostly solved I believe, but translating your housework to pick and place in your apartment is still a bit off.

I'm not convinced safety is solved: given how often LLM's hallucinate and automated cars get confused, what happens when something unusual happens and the robot thinks a person's arm needs to be "folded" and breaks it? Or a person's clothing looks like the wall and a robot tries to move their arm through a person's chest?

Sure, for each individual situation one can imagine a safeguard but being in close proximity to unpredictable humans means there are unlimited edge cases... if a humanoid robot is strong enough to do something useful it is also strong enough to be dangerous.

Re: There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]

#139

Post by darkwater »

intrasight wrote: post #108
schnitzelstoat wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Roomba made some of the first robotic vacuum cleaners and they were based in the US. Nowadays, they are just more expensive and inferior to the Roborock ones though. But thanks to the wonder of protectionism soon the customer won't be able to pick the better product.

What's "better" for the individual is not necessarily better for the society. Also I think a better policy than blocking Chinese imports (which is probably not sustainable anyway) would be to require that the software be audited and comply with regulations. Same rules and regulations should apply to robots from all countries.

> What's "better" for the individual is not necessarily better for the society.

Are you a commie? Everybody knows the free-market self-corrects itself if you are not performant enough or good enough, and that personal greed and egoism are the best proxy for society well-being. Nurture them and you will get the best possible society!

(yeah, I'm being sarcastic)

Re: There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]

#140

Post by bombcar »

WillAdams wrote: post #98

One thing which I find striking here is that a modern home and attendant conveniences roughly embodies 10--15 horsepower of effort, or the work of 40 or so full time house staff. Thus far, the only notable robots are little disks which vacuum up floors (and they're getting outlawed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49104371 ) and some innovations just haven't become widespread (an uncle of mine piped his home for…

We don't build robots because the "hard/boring part" for the human is often NOT the hard part for the robot.

Take the dishwasher, for example, loading it is very hard for a robot, but easy and quick for a human. Washing the dishes is boring for the human, but a robot gets a sort of sick and twisted pleasure from cycling that dirty water around for hours on end.

In fact, we've removed some labor-saving features of houses (laundry chutes went away decades ago, and only recently has "laundry on the bedroom floor" become somewhat standard) for "safety".

MAKE DUMBWAITERS GREAT AGAIN

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