alt Hacker NewsIt seems that he wrote that in a book published in 1953, but it's weird, I find, that he was imagining a robot driving a car. I would have thought he would have imagined that cars would become robots well before there would be humanoid robots wanting to drive them. So by the time you have a humanoid robot wanting to drive a car it's just one robot talking to another robot, electronically. And knives and forks are for eating, which humanoid robots presumably don't need to do, and is it likely that humanoid robots will need chairs in the same way that humans do? Altogether, a bad set of examples, I find. Perhaps the thesis would be more convincing with some better examples.
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Perhaps the samples were chosen specifically as things the audience would have universal familiarity/understanding of thus making his point resonate.
He didn’t craft it for literal interpretation on HN 70 years in the future.
I need to get on to one of the prediction markets.
I’m willing to bet we’ll have a humanoid robot that can drive a car before we have level 5 autonomous vehicles.
And by can drive a car I mean a general purpose humanoid robot that can do basic household chores like move the car and wash it with a foaming brush and a hose.
I don’t mean the robot will be capable of sitting in any regular car and doing level 5 autonomous driving.