About whether robots will soon do housework and let people live without working.
Has this happened?
Yes 0 (0%)Not sure 5 (5%)No 103 (95%)
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Hacker News has set AI a lot of challenges over the years. Which ones has it met?
About whether robots will soon do housework and let people live without working.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
There's a simple litmus test for these sort of nearish future dystopias - how long before you have an 'AI plumber' or an 'AI electrician'? I'm not just listing random skilled trades, but listing jobs that are extremely complex, 100% context sensitive in a way that just doesn't generalize well, requires a mixture of high dexterity and high strength, and a million other things. To say nothing of the numerous [oft extremely expensive] task specific tools you also need.
And those are only two of the jobs for maintaining households. If those two things aren't automated, we're not having these 'robo households' - period. Instead I think the future holds mostly the present - glorified clappers [1] and ad-tech masquerading as some sort of something that mostly does a mediocre to awful job of whatever it's supposed to be, Alexa.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTNuJXi6UUk