Between my regular rotation of Bastards/Cool People/ICHH, I've been slowly making my way through
Better Offline's coverage of CES. Technically this is work-related and I should be listening on work time (obviously I'm not) but if you want like 20 hours of coverage about what's new in tech (spoiler: not very much), AI crammed into everything, and robots that still can't fold laundry, it's worth checking out.
It's really interesting from more than just Ed Zitron's usual professional hater perspective—which, to be clear, is something I appreciate as a professional hater myself. Because with something like CES, the questions of "who is this for" and "what is the use case" are actually critical and in your face. It's the
Consumer Electronics Show, after all. So while robots in manufacturing are obviously a thing, the use case for household robots is a bit more questionable. The most successful household robot, the Roomba, recently went out of business, because as it turns out, they're not useful for 1) most households, which have things like furniture and sometimes stairs, or 2) the parts of your floor that you really don't want to vacuum, like tricky corners. They are good for scaring cats or if your cat is not scared of them,
transportation.
The episodes are full of even more absurd technology to solve problems that aren't real, like fridges that open for you, meant to automate the parts of your life that you actually want to enjoy. We want machines to do menial tasks, leaving creative work for us. As it turns out, they're quite good at menial tasks in a factory, where you're doing the same thing repeatedly, but not in a house, where you have to do a lot of little annoying things.
But what we (normal people) want is very different from what techbros want. Remember, these are people who have not had to experience challenges in real life, so when they think about what a person might need, they come up with things like "what if I didn't want to cook and I got my fridge to open for me and dumped a bunch of ingredients in a pot and it would make food, and also a robot read a bedtime story to my child?" The fantasy, of course, is having a slave. But that is not the fantasy that normal people have, and there's an incredible disconnect between where tech is heading and actual human needs.
Anyway, I am working through it very slowly because, as I said, 20+ hours, but it's worth a listen. Also if anyone can find pictures of Robert Evans in an exoskeleton I would like to see that for reasons.
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