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Why It's Almost Impossible To Teach a Robot To Do Your Laundry
An anonymous reader writes with this selection from an article at Medium: "For a robot, doing laundry is a nightmare. A robot programmed to do laundry is faced with 14 distinct tasks, but the most washbots right now can only complete about half of them in a sequence. But to even get to that point, there are an inestimable number of ways each task can vary or go wrong—infinite doors that may or may not open."
The article assumes that a laundry robot has to work exactly like a human with machines and environment designed for a human, in a big house. Clothes most likely have radio tags in their washing labels in the future enabling high speed separation, and automatic temperature and program selection. The washing machines and the rest of the home will co-operate with any household robots. There might not be any laundry basket. On and on it goes.
It's called the washing machine. Laundry is a task that took a fair amount of time per item and was really hard on cloths a century ago. 98% of that has been moved to a robot.
You're right of course, but that's the SIMPLE PART. The harder part is judgement. Even the stupidest human being has a vast amount of common sense, masses of rules of thumb which they have internalized and a deceptively deep understanding of context. How would a robot even know how to classify things as clothing or not clothing? Or more to the point washable or not washable? All but the stupidest humans would hesitate to throw piece of clothing with a large wet ink stain into a laundry machine with other clothes for instance, and said humans could reason this out from first principles (IE an understanding of how the washing process works, what ink is, etc). The level at which even the most sophisticated software operates is nowhere near robust enough make those sorts of reasoned decisions except in very carefully set up situations.
And then there are the higher level dimensions to the whole thing. When is it appropriate to wash things and when not? Which things do you have a RIGHT to wash and which things do you have a RESPONSIBILITY to wash? Since the 1950's people have gone on about the "3 laws of robotics", but Asimov would have been the first to point out that such things couldn't possibly ever be imbued into a machine. Its not even just the logical and epistemological limitations of those sorts of strictures themselves, but simply that we cannot define the situations wherein they would operate or determine when they were being violated. We can't make a self-driving car because we would have to teach it things like "Its better to run over the old man than to run over the baby when you cannot avoid them both." Obviously we'll live with robot cars that simply do one or the other by chance, but to imagine that anything short of a fully conscious general AI could make that sort of decision in a 'human-like' way is patently ridiculous, and we haven't got even the slightest idea how such an intelligence would be developed.
You say 20 years, but I say 100 years. We've barely set our foot on the first step of the path to understanding how to make something like that, and the most critical challenges involved have barely been imagined.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
I like machine assisted dish cleaning so much, all of the dishes we own are "dishwasher safe" except for a couple wine glasses. They aren't all labeled dishwasher safe, but in those rare cases when the dishwasher destroyed something, I made sure not to buy another dish with that weakness.
Likewise, all of the clothing I use on a regular basis have survived trips through the washer and dryer.
For me, a complete laundry system would take the clothes out of the hamper, wash and dry them, and put them away. In order to put the clothes away, the robot would need to know where they are supposed to go and how to prepare them for storage. I am not afraid of RFID tags, but if I were, there are many other options for creating labels a robot can read.
Folding clothes isn't hard once the clothing is identified, flattened and positioned. The robot readable labels take care of the identification. In exchange for something else doing the work, I am not adverse to having ferrous rings sown into key points, so the system can magnetically grab those points to spread out and align the garment in the folding station. I am not adverse to having clothes rolled up, if that turns out to be easier.
I don't require that a robot adapt to my garage sale dressers. I just need the right clothes in the morning. There are many pick and place technologies. If for some reason it is easier for the cleaning system to deal with cartridges, I can live with that. The cleaning system can load an underwear cartridge. The transport system can load the cartridge into my dresser replacement. Then the dresser replacement can dispense underwear as needed.
I married mine. She does the work quite well, hardly malfunctions but requires the occasional of hardware upgrade.
The problem is the other way. No amount of intelligense can make a man figure out how to do the laundry exactly the way a woman want. It is IMPOSSIBLE, there is no logic to it, you just have to know it for every single piece of laundry in every possible combination of dirty it may be. Of course no robot can ever do it, not even a man can do it!
well thats because guys have 2 state. clean, and dirty (we will negate the middle levels of "clean enough" and "probably shouldnt"
all our clothes go in the washing machine at the same time, on cold. then it all goes in the dryer - on high
women have all sorts of clothes that need different settings and if we do it wrong we destroy everything.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
I subscribe to the theory of natural selection when it comes to clothes. The purpose of the washing machine is to supply evolutionary pressure. Clothes that don't survive die off and don't reproduce (i.e. I don't buy similar ones in the future). Eventually my wardrobe is full of clothes that are fit for their environment. The same applies to crockery and the dishwasher.
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