It is possible and has precedent. Raymond Lee Oyler was convicted of first-degree murder for starting the Esperanza Fire. Five firefighters died fighting the fire.
>Raymond Lee Oyler, 54, of Beaumont, was sentenced to death for starting the Esparanza Fire in October 2006. He was convicted of five counts of first-degree murder, 19 counts of arson and 16 counts of possessing incendiary devices.
https://kesq.com/news/2025/05/05/ca-supreme-court-upholds-de...
>If you insist on thumping your chest about your independence
Isn't that just basic conflict of interest disclosure? If he didn't say anything, that would be deceptive. As it is, I can make up my own mind and be aware of the link. Or should they just never write anything about Amazon? Your take seems to lack any nuance and present a false dichotomy. I can dislike the influence of large corporations over jocularism and also recognize that bias and influence do not mean 100% control over what every journalist writes.
People already buy robot vacuums to do a decent job of vacuuming a decent amount of their floors. It is a $4.48 billion industry. Roombas don't look like people. They don't even look like pets or animals. They look like big hockey pucks. I have one and I have it run as soon as I leave for work because I don't want to interact with it, I want to have clean floors. If there was a robot that could fold clothes, load and unload the dishwasher, dust, and general purpose clean, I would have it run when I wasn't home too and would prefer if it folded up into a little box in the corner when I was home.
Roomba uses AI in some of their models, but people aren't trying to have a relationship with them. Because it is AI to serve a utilitarian purpose that does not involve imitating human behavior. People have relationships with chatbots because they are specifically imitating human behavior. Putting googly eyes on your Roomba isn’t the same as falling in love with a chatbot.
Cars are very very publicly visible, so they are used to project some sort of image to others; like the clothes people wear. Most people don't wear clothes or drive cars for purely utilitarian purposes. Often people will buy clothes or cars that look utilitarian to project an image about themselves. People buy furniture and decorate their homes to project an image. People do not buy their water heater to project a certain image about themselves. Robot vacuums are frustrating to watch. They get the job done in the end (most of the time) but their random zig zags or difficulty navigating around objects is something most people don’t want to see. They just want the result. Huminoid robots will be like that for a significant amount of time, where they can empty the dishwasher, but it will be painfully slow, odd looking, and very unhuman-like. People won’t want to see this but they will want the job done so they don’t have to do it. A robot that can perform utilitarian household chores would be a huge industry and would be used by most people like a dishwasher or water heater, primarily for its utility.
A robot that reaches the level that it could be a companion, operating visibly with/around people (bringing you and your guests refreshments rather than slowly, awkwardly folding clothes alone in a bedroom while you are at work or downstairs watching a movie) would very likely have a huge pressure to fit cultural and gender dynamics.
That seems like more of a reversal of causation. Women are more likely to be maids or home care workers because "domestic" work is perceived as women's work. Maids are often young women, "teenage girls" as you say, or older women because they either haven't started a family yet or have already raised their children to adulthood. This is because many women are expected to take on the majority of unpaid domestic labor while men take on the traditional wage-earning paid labor.
The sexualization of young women working domestic labor is the result of the general sexualization of most young women in most contexts. It isn't that domestic labor is some sort of pretext to get a young woman into the home. It is that once they are there, men sexualize them.
>Just look at how many corporations and research labs had decades-long strategies to build human-like AI that went nowhere.
They didn't go nowhere; they just didn't result in human-like AI. They gave us lots of breakthroughs, useful basic knowledge, and knowledge infrastructure that could be built off for related and unrelated projects. Plenty of shoot for the moon corporations didn't result in human-like AI either, but also probably did go nowhere, since they were focused on an all or nothing strategy. The ones that do succeed in a moonshot relied on those breakthroughs from decades-long research.
I'm not going to get into what Musk has been doing because I'm just not,
It is not the gears, motors and copper wire that are bottlenecking robots. It is the software and computing. We can already build a robot hand that is faster, stronger, more dexterous, etc. than a human hand. What we can't do right now is make the software to perceive the world around it and utilize the hand to interact with it at human levels. That is something that needs computing power and effective software. Those are things that get, and will continue to get, cheaper every day.
> It is not the gears, motors and copper wire that are bottlenecking robots.
It is those things that are bottlenecking the price of robots.
The price of something tends towards the marginal cost, and the marginal cost of software is close to $0. Robots cost a lot more than that (what's the price of this robot?).
Edit: In fact Figure 03 imply marginal costs matter:
Mass manufacturing: Figure 03 was engineered from the ground-up for high-volume manufacturing
Yes, but the two (software and hardware) scale very differently.
Once software is "done" (we all know software is never done) you can just copy it and distribute it. It is negligiblehow much it costs to do so.
Once hardware is done you have to manufacture each and every piece of hardware with the same care, detail and reliability as the first one. You can't just click copy.
Often times you have to completely redesign the product to go from low volume high cost manufacturing to high volume low cost. A hand made McLaren is very different than an F-150.
The two simply scale differently, by nature of their beasts.
China has shown that they don't scale all that differently. Yes the tooling is hard to build but after that you hit go and the factory makes the copies for you.
It's not quite startrek replicator but much closer to that than the US view of manufacturing where you have your union guy sitting in front of the machine to pull the lever.
This was somewhat true at once point but is a highly outdated view. Labor is no longer cheap in China relative to other nearby countries and there's a huge amount of automation with some factories that don't even turn on lights because they are effectively 100% automated.
The reason drivers are able to drive like that is the design of the streets themselves. Things like raised crosswalks[1] and corner extensions[2] slow cars down and force them to pay attention. A lot of intersections in my area are the opposite, where they lower the whole curb to road level so cars can cut onto the curb to make the turn faster. There are lots of ways that the US builds infrastructure in ways that make it much more dangerous for pedestrians and bikers.
But the NSA isn't your local police department. Your risk from the NSA is, at the very least, different than from your local cops, and almost certainly smaller. In my day to day life, I am not worried about being jammed up by the NSA, I am worried about some local police department.
I am also less worried about some random NSA analyst going rogue to come after me. If the NSA is going to abuse its power, it is probably going to be as a whole institution. But some local cop breaking the law because he has a hair up his ass about someone happens literally every day.
>Raymond Lee Oyler, 54, of Beaumont, was sentenced to death for starting the Esparanza Fire in October 2006. He was convicted of five counts of first-degree murder, 19 counts of arson and 16 counts of possessing incendiary devices. https://kesq.com/news/2025/05/05/ca-supreme-court-upholds-de...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanza_Fire