At the recent Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, people in a town filled with gambling and flashy stage shows turned up to watch a robot very slowly fold a towel.
It reportedly took 30 seconds for CLOiD, a humanoid robot built by LG, to fold a single towel. A video of it taking a towel from a human and putting it into a washing machine – the machine courteously opened its own door for CLOiD – was excruciatingly slow.
Humanoid robots, we’ve been told for the last few years, are almost here.
Not judging by what’s on offer at CES. These are slow, inefficient, and have unknown safety parameters. If someone is willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars for the world’s most lackadaisical laundry folding, they still might have questions like “What happens if a child runs past the robot? Will it mistake my cat for a towel? Can’t I just fold these things myself in half the time, while listening to a podcast?”
The weird thing about the videos of humanoid robots doing laundry or cooking or vacuuming is that we’re essentially watching a robot use another robot.
Washers and dryers, dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, electric ovens and ranges, all of these tools replaced gruelling and often dirty work that humans used to have to do by hand.
Doing laundry for a household in the Victorian era was a two- to three-day job, every week. It involved heating water over fire, and using simple tools like washboards, tubs, and a mangle.
As far as replacing the remaining labour, like folding laundry, humanoid robots are one of the worst choices for this task.
Humans have incredibly dexterous hands at our disposal. But they’re generalist tools.
We can thread needles and sew, yes. But that doesn’t mean a sewing machine looks like pair of hands. When we custom-build a tool for a task, one we want done faster and more efficiently than a human can, making that tool look like a person is just holding it back.
And why human hands? If we’re building robots, why not emulate koala hands, which have two opposable thumbs and three fingers? Why not have a robot whose “hands” are bundles of tentacles, like the business end of a squid? Why two legs, a torso, a head at the top?
The tech industry is in the grip of anthropocentrism, which just means that we see everything through a lens in which humanity – including the human shape – is the most important thing there is.
I don’t know whether humanoid robots will ever be useful in my lifetime, but I doubt they’ll be as useful as a suite of robots that look nothing like people, each doing its own specialized job.
An optimal clothes-folding robot will not look like a window-washing robot or a cooking robot or a construction robot. We know what a vacuuming robot looks like – a big hockey puck.
The point of machinery is to eliminate dangerous, backbreaking, dirty, and tedious tasks. Making a generalist robot that looks like us feels like a strangely backward step towards that goal.