Funnily enough my Roomba is the ONE thing I rely on to argue against the “robotic uprising”. When people fawn over 1X’s Neo or Tesla humanoid I can happily testify that as relatively long term mobile robot owner… it sucks! In theory it’s amazing right, in theory you program it, go out while it clean the place, go back to charge itself, etc. So much free time for you now, right?

No… you need to make way for it. You need to actually setup the place for such a basic task. Think you can just “wing it” and let it work while you sip on a cocktail outside? Sure, come back to find it in an enraged BDSM session, rope all over it as it pulls over a char with cable entangle deep inside.

Honestly it’s like AI more broadly : the concept is so simple to understand and the result is something we ALL want… that every single time there is an improvement, no matter how small, we love to speculate that truly this time we are getting “close” to make it work. Truth is, we have no idea of the complexity of the problem.

Related https://rodneybrooks.com/why-todays-humanoids-wont-learn-dexterity/ who did make Roombas and more.