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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."
I married mine. She does the work quite well, hardly malfunctions but requires the occasional of hardware upgrade.
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'm reading that article and it starts with "I've been doing laundry every week for almost a decade" - and then I read the number 1 on the list.
Well, there's your problem. You're a dirty slob.
As for point 2, there is no uncertainty.
Washing machines are rated for maximum load. So are dryers. So are combo machines.
A robot should be able to tell the force some object is exerting on its griper "hands" - so it doesn't rip off the door or various other objects. Voila - a built in scale.
And as we know the maximum possible amount of clothing all that is left to determine is priority.
You know... "HAL - wash my cape and my crime fighting uniform first, don't bother with T-shirts."
And the easiest and cheapest way to determine that is - bar codes.
Printed or on a label on the inside of the clothes. Which is another thing that's better done before dumping clothes in a hamper - turn it inside out.
Washing BOTH matching socks? Easy-peasy with proper QR codes.
Getting all your clothes out of the washer-drier? Again - robot knows EXACTLY which objects it has put in. If a sock gets lost... It's probably stuck in the machine and the machine might need servicing.
Inspect machine again and if object is not found alert proper authorities and move the fuck on.
"I'm sorry Dave. I couldn't find your other sock. Washing machine must have eaten it. Please don't deactivate me. I'll sing you a song. Daisy... Daisy..."
QR codes could even contain info for proper temperature and washing instructions.
Detergents already come with bar codes and in tablet/capsule/baggie form. No spilling.
There. All the programming done. No "uncertainty".
And the same QR technology can be employed on the outside of the washing machine to instruct the robot how to handle the machine properly. No need for network protocols or wireless connections or whatever.
AND it is backward compatible with old machines - just download the QR instructions from the internet, print them out and stick them to the side of your machine.
TA-DAH! Instant compatibility.
ONLY problems that actually need solving are the usual ones.
Seeing things, picking them up, handling mechanical buttons and levers.
Putting clothes in the dresser/closet though...
1 - that is not the part of the washing clothes problem.
2 - unless people start living in uniform domicile containers, this one will wait for robots that can either learn by looking at a human completing the task or some even better AI.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens