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Shift will clean homes for free to train future robots

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Re: Shift will clean homes for free to train future robots

#31

Post by Bender »

autoexec wrote: post #14
sonofhans wrote: post #5

”We get training data.” E.g., photos of your children, an inventory of your books, the contents of your medicine cabinet. They may not have plans to sell this stuff, but whoever acquires them certainly will.

Exactly and any "future robots" that are actually capable of cleaning your home will be doing the same thing. It'd be streaming 24/7 audio/video/sensor data of everyone and everything in your home back to the company where all of it will be analyzed and used to make assumptions about you and your family which will be sold and resold. At this point I wouldn't allow an internet connected roomba into my home, I'm sure a…

I think an interesting case would be if the data was provided to law enforcement directly or indirectly and they use it to gain access to a home if they see drug paraphernalia crack pipe or other items of interest illegal weapons under exigent circumstances or similar laws. Autonomous robots could become the ultimate snitch.

Would a robot report a wife beater? Child abuser? Could a robot legally physically intervene if a human cries for help from another human? Will the robots be hacker proof? Will robots assassinate people in their sleep?

Re: Shift will clean homes for free to train future robots

#32

Post by autoexec »

slicktux wrote: post #20
autoexec wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly and any "future robots" that are actually capable of cleaning your home will be doing the same thing. It'd be streaming 24/7 audio/video/sensor data of everyone and everything in your home back to the company where all of it will be analyzed and used to make assumptions about you and your family which will be sold and resold. At this point I wouldn't allow an internet connected roomba into my home, I'm sure a…

I’m a little more hopeful that the future will allow for local (network free) frontier AI technology. Being that I’m a tech enthusiast and computer science nerd I tend to live less on the bleeding edge of technology because of privacy infringing hardware. Take for example meta glasses. So many people have adopted them because they don’t care about privacy as much as I do. So they get to live with the latest and great…

I fully agree that the only hope is offline/open source systems that we can verify are working for us and not anyone else. The more complex the hardware is the more difficult it'll be to keep them safe. To avoid bugging my home it's easy enough to open up my PS5 controllers to pull the two microphones out, but I imagine it'll be a lot more work to make sure there are no radios connected to a SoC tucked away somewhere in a household robot.

I'm not sure I'd call meta glasses the "latest and greatest". Even if there were no privacy concerns I wouldn't feel left out when it comes to giving facebook the ability to plaster ads on every surface in your field of vision. The tech has a lot of potential, but the product people are using today is trash I feel better off without.

Re: Shift will clean homes for free to train future robots

#34

Post by AlexandrB »

Lol, not a chance. I'm sure whatever agreement you click through when you agree to this has all kinds of limitations on liability and an arbitration clause, so when they leave pictures of your house in an open S3 bucket you have no recourse to seek compensation. I'd rather let a stranger off the street live in my house - at least they have human emotions like shame.

Re: Shift will clean homes for free to train future robots

#35

Post by nlh »

jrmg wrote: post #24
hsnv wrote: post #6

I've always found the idea of letting strangers clean my home strange. Maybe I grew up in the wrong tax bracket. I see cleaning your own home, as well as other chores (dishes, laundry) as an act of self-hygiene. If you want a robot to do your chores, that gives me the same feeling as desiring a robot to bathe you, wipe your bottom and genitals after the toilet, brush your teeth for you etc. Of course these are not ap…

I thought the same until we started getting our house cleaned every two weeks. It’s so freeing . It feels well worth even a few hours of my work to pay for the time of the (so efficient) cleaners. So much better value than things most people don’t think twice about paying for (streaming services, faster Internet, a nice car, etc…)

I'll take it one step further - we have a 2-year-old toddler and recently I realized that I was spending a full, solid, real 1-1.5 hours per day doing the same kitchen & play area clean-up. Every day. No matter how hard I tried, the daily chaos of my wife & I working from home, preparing meals, and our family spending time in this part of the house meant it just needed this work.

I hired a lovely person recently who comes to the house for exactly that hour a day every day and now does this task for us. It's the most "luxury" labor service I've ever hired, and it, easily and without question, the best use of $$ I have ever spent on a service. I have an extra hour to hang with the family now and our kitchen & play area are now fully reset and spotless every night when we go to bed and every morning when we wake up.

It's not streaming service cheap, and I'm thankful that my business can generate enough $ to allow me to pay for this service, but man is it freeing and wonderful.

Re: Shift will clean homes for free to train future robots

#37

Post by pinkmuffinere »

aleyan wrote: post #29

"I always thought that Homejoy were planning to automate as much as possible, if not everything, related to cleaning services using robotics and stuff, and that humans were only a temporary measure while developing technology." -devgutt 2015 [0] This quote about robots doing home cleaning has been living in my head rent free, and refusing to cleanup after itself, for over a decade. It seemed so crazy to me in 2015 th…

> here we are in 2026 and robots could plausibly clean our homes beyond vacuuming and mopping.

It is very bold to just assert this is true. Certainly it will be possible eventually, but there's still _lots_ of disagreement in the industry about what is realistic within 3-5 years. See this rodney brooks article for a good overview of the difficulties: https://rodneybrooks.com/why-todays-humanoids-wont-learn-dex...

The fact that devgutt was talking about this in 2015 gives some hint at its unique combination of [seems really easy] and [is really hard].

Re: Shift will clean homes for free to train future robots

#39

Post by autoexec »

Bender wrote: post #31
autoexec wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly and any "future robots" that are actually capable of cleaning your home will be doing the same thing. It'd be streaming 24/7 audio/video/sensor data of everyone and everything in your home back to the company where all of it will be analyzed and used to make assumptions about you and your family which will be sold and resold. At this point I wouldn't allow an internet connected roomba into my home, I'm sure a…

I think an interesting case would be if the data was provided to law enforcement directly or indirectly and they use it to gain access to a home if they see drug paraphernalia crack pipe or other items of interest illegal weapons under exigent circumstances or similar laws. Autonomous robots could become the ultimate snitch. Would a robot report a wife beater? Child abuser? Could a robot legally physically intervene…

Considering we already have Apple wanting to scan your devices for whatever their AI thinks is child porn we're heading in that direction. There was one report of Amazon Echo reporting a domestic violence situation to 911. The Sheriff said that it happened, Amazon said that it didn't but failed to explain how the 911 call happened saying that the echo isn't even capable of calling 911 although it can place phone calls, and Alexa Emergency Assist and Echo Connect are/were both capable of reaching 911. (https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/amazon-alexa-c...). If one of those services wasn't in use, I'd guess an employee was listening and called putting amazon into damage control mode.

Re: Shift will clean homes for free to train future robots

#40

Post by catapart »

ljsprague wrote: post #27
catapart wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how long it will be before we see politician/celebrity houses with full 3d walkthroughs made from gaussian splats that source from this kind of "every type of interior in the world" mass data set. I wonder if that will prompt some kind of legislative action against this type of service.

There’s a scandal/controversy occurring right now after someone leaked photos of the inside of Ariana Grande’s apartment.

yikes! that's pretty gross. I hope there's some appropriate consequences.
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