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I think the state of the art has gotten pretty good, but still nowhere near as good as people thought it would be fifty years ago. More importantly, as of a year ago AI is literally everywhere, hundreds of millions of regular users and more than that who've tried it, almost everyone knows it exists and has some opinion on it. Compare that to even moderately mobile, let alone general, robots. They're only just starting to be seen by most people on a regular basis in some specific, very small geographical locations or campuses. The average person interacts with a mobile or general robot 0 times a day. Science fiction as well as informed expert prediction was always the opposite way around - robots were coming, but they would be dumb. Now it's essentially a guarantee that by the time we have widespread rollout of mobile, safe, general purpose robots, they are going to be very intelligent in the ways that 20 years ago most thought was centuries away.

Basically, it is 1000x easier today to design and build a robot that will have a conversation with you about your interests and then speak poetry about those interests than it is to build a robot that can do all your laundry, and that is the exact opposite of what all of us have been told to expect about the future for the last 70 years.



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