I wouldn't trust a robot - especially an *AI* robot - inside my house that has the strength to unload plates from dishwashers, lift laundry, etc. in close proximity to humans at any speed. There's a reason that industrial control robots are all behind yellow hazard lines. You're talking a literally crush/injury hazard.

Fold laundry? Not a chance it would be able to do the computer vision to do that with any accuracy.

Same for dusting, unless you found a kind of air-jet or similar.

Unload the dishwasher? It would be cheaper and easier to NOT BOTHER... just make the dishwasher twice-height. Lower is the dishwasher. Upper is storage on a sprung rack like in a restaurant. You now have a "cupboard" full of dishes stacked in their place, and you have integrated into the machine that washes them and which need only "raise" them out of the dishwasher into the storage section.

Puts away the groceries? Not a chance. Again, it's just easier to say "here's a modular grocery cart that gets delivered in a standardised way, here's a special cupboard that is labelled, here's a fixed, dumb robot that can put one into the other". No AI involved, no computer vision, no customised bespoke per-customer setup, no hazards, obstacles, confusions, choices.

I think a FEW people would pay through the nose to get a gimmick AI piece of junk that's not very good at the job.

Literally the closest we've had to any of your suggestions was that robot that was put into a burger joint at great expense, and unless a human lined up the ingredients perfectly for it, it wouldn't work at all, and most of the time it was slower, less able to cope, and easy to confuse, jam, break, etc. Didn't they shut that one down in the end?

I love my robot vacuum, don't get me wrong. The same principle as you state... I turn Bob (I named him, if you don't anthropomorphise your computers, you don't care about them enough) on before I leave for work. He does a good few hours of random-path vacuuming over several surfaces, avoids stairs, bumps off walls, then when his battery is low, he self-homes. That "time-saving" is enormous.

But he get 95% of the floor debris. He's not great on corners. He gets stuck under the radiator. I have to booby-trap the bathroom so he can't approach the penguin floor mat that he likes to shag (he literally gets stuck on it, and then his wheels try to reel it in so it looks like he's devouring the poor animal).

However, vacuuming 95% of my floor debris, every day, for the press of one button, means that vacuuming is no longer a chore and even when I want to go "all out", I only have the other 5% to worry about.

There is no way that in just 10 years we will progress AI to have even a handful more domestic chores be automated, let alone 40% of them. And each time, they can be outclassed by a dumb machine half their cost just doing a decent enough job. I don't want a robot butler who walks around and waters my plants. I want a small, cheap irrigation system with dumb, cheap hardware, so that nobody has to. Bob is dumb. Sensor-controlled. No "floor-maps". No "lasers". Even the self-homing is just two blinky IR LEDs like a Wiimote bar on his charger and he wanders randomly until he spots them and then uses them to home in. It doesn't NEED to be AI to be useful and get the job done.

Same way I don't need a robot arm to unload my dishwasher. I could just have a dumb mechanism in the dishwasher move the "clean plates" baskets up into an empty cupboard above it, for me to select a plate from next time I'm cooking like it's just a shelf full of plates. A fraction of the cost, far easier technology, same effect, literally available now if someone could be bothered to build one (a dishwasher, a cupboard, a sliding motorised rail, and a couple of relays.

Waiting for AI for this stuff is *dumb*. Using *dumb* technology to actually change how we live is *smart*.

Same for "smart cars". I don't want smart cars. I want a dumb car that runs on rails and doesn't need to interpret the road at all. I want individual rail pods that navigate fixed, well-defined, well-controlled, simple rail systems that follow every major road, where the control between you and the "car" in front is a mechanical linkage that means they cannot collide.

Simpler, safer, cheaper, available with current technology.