[maxaw]

Techie people, myself included seem chronically unable to understand why people prefer inefficient, higher level tools over the efficient low level ones.

Low level tools require an investment of time and brainpower to configure. Consider the time it takes to set up a dishwasher- research, buying, installing, reading the manual. Vs telling your humanoid robot “go wash the dishes”. People will pay a lot more and put up with a lot worse results in exchange for that kind of simplicity.

In a better world we would all be craftspeople and invest time into more efficient things but that ain’t human nature

[lelandbatey]

Yes, but there's also a limit. For the dishwashing, consider that you can already exchange money for a maximally efficient, maximally flexible solution: you can hire someone to do your dishes. How much would you pay for a live in, automata like servant who washes all your dishes for you? What about if they could do many other things? $1k? $5k? $100k? What about the maintenance? What're the ongoing costs like?

Sure, if a dishwasher is $1k and the robot has a high success (not many broken dishes) rate AND can do other things AND is priced like a nice used car (up to $35k) then yeah, maybe? But there's so much of "it depends" in there that it's hard to say for sure. In curious what price/generality/reliability you have in mind when you say "many people would prefer..."

[maxaw]

On reflection, inefficient and high level vs efficient low level is far from the only dimension to evaluate these tools on :P

Clearly humans are of the first sort, just like this robot.

To the current example you gave - I would argue that humans require a huge amount of configuration/maintenance - far more than any machine. Of course they are definitely effective at tasks once they get going.

As to what price/generality/reliability level I think people would really prefer - I guess we'll have to wait and see when these come on the market, if they ever do. It's nearly midnight where I am and my morning confidence in humanoid robots has waned a little

[maxaw]

Also applies to hiring real people - humanoid robots may be more expensive ph and perform worse but you avoid all the messy things that come along with hiring people (not that I think this is a good idea, just thinking from a bean counting perspective)