Contemplative? Hardly.

Capital P. Illuminated ornaments : selected from manuscripts and early printed books, from the sixth to the seventeenth centuries. 1833.

Solar panels envisioned almost a hundred years ago. Le petit inventeur. January 1929. Children's magazine, cover detail.

Just some guys (colossal hyper-aggressive herbivores) being dudes (defending valuable grazing grounds)

Because for organic systems - humans, other animals even - the ability to communicate in language is a super high level thing. In order to get there, with our meat brains, you have to have already gone through all the levels of cognition below, like "recognize birds" and "perform simple tasks but in multiple uncontrolled settings, reacting to changes of circumstances" and so on. In order to talk, as a human, by whatever method you talk (words, text, sign-languages, whatever) you have to do all those cognitions first, and also have probably done a solid sideline into theory of mind.

And so we assume that because "AI" can generate language, can put together sentences in order that we associate with complexity, according to common patterns, that it must be "intelligent" (or at least surely on the way to becoming so), that this ability to move words around into syntactic patterns represents the same thing for the computer as it does for us.

It just doesn't. The computer program is not working on the same physical sequence and rules as the animal (and thus human) brain. The chat program doesn't have to actually build an entire sequence of sapience and meaning and shit, built in turn on massive amounts of subconscious reactions to circumstances and so on, before it becomes possible for the computer program to move words around into ways that are deceptive to humans (because we only just keep feeding it words).

This becomes painfully obvious when you try to get these programs to actually do things. To actually react to anything outside the carefully controlled environments of the IT lab. It's why "AI" can appear to talk about existential issues, but can't actually power a robot that you can rely on to load your dishwasher.

It is NOT a question of possibility. It's a questiob of making it affordable.

And I still think it could be done. It would need to have a robotic arm and the shelves within reach. The dishwasher already has a computer, it would only need upgrading with the arms software.

The thing is

It would not make your life easier.

The robot would need maintenance. It would need repair. It would need electricity. All of these are expensive even for dishwashers.

So instead of upgrading the dishwasher, jusz upgrade your life surrounding the dishwasher.

For example: there's lndustrial dishwashers which take about three minutes for a program. You have one tray where you put things on. If you add cabinets which hold trays instead of china, you can take a tray out the washer and store it in the cabinet.

The entire place is hyper-designed to make absolutely sure that nothing upsets, confuses or disrupts the programmed patterns of movement and action that the robots then use to make the car, and no new element of confusion is added to the whole process. The humans overseeing things are there for essentially that purpose: so that the process is maintained, the environment controlled, and if something does go askew the whole thing is stopped and that thing is fixed before it causes a breakdown all the way through the chain.

The human overseers are kept for that purpose . . . .because that's something human cognition can do!

So like yes: you could design your entire life around allowing a mechanism to cause dishes to be done. But that's not really what people mean when they say "I want a robot to do my dishes."

They want a robot to go around their home as it exists - their home full of the messy chaos of a human living in it, leaving dishes on desks and bedsides and tables, with a cat and the cat's box and that pile of unfolded clothing - and washes their own dishes, that they already have, without breaking them or the machine or causing property damage. And without washing anything they have out on surfaces that are available to the robot that looks like a dish, but is actually a decoration. And also without leaving behind things that turn out to be dishes (or dish related mess) but are not recognized as dishes. Presumably most people want this without super-invasive "smart" tagging on everything they own (designed to tell the robot what is and isn't a dish that should be washed).

So like yes: you can set up an environment that allows an automated process, even a very complicated automated process, when you've optimized that environment, and then leave that process to run with only minimal human supervision (which still amounts to "someone sitting in the oversight booth more or less all day" and still involves a loooot of fiddling, and code-fixing, and repair to the system, and redirecting of the system).

Yes that's correct. The physical dexterity it takes to manipulate a variety of unknown 3D objects of highly variable weight and friction, from a constantly changing environment full of other objects they're not supposed to touch, and getting them all into the right area without breaking them or anything else, is a phenomenally complicated task. Much, much more difficult on every level than Spicy Autocomplete. A writing algorithm doesn't even need to be able to move! It's got no arms!

Sirens at night.

@sssslimysswampghostttt