No. The French Revolution was a revolution of lawyers, writers, and administrators, the elite who were shut out of the very highest positions. And it was unstable. The great majority of people were just cannon fodder for Napoleon.

This is true surprisingly often.

It also fails to point out the temporal fallacy, that energy that is available only at certain times, and not reliably so, is a substitute for energy that can be reliably and safely stored for decades and used when needed, not when generated.

The robotics Turing test: change the nappies of the designer's and company owners' baby daughters or grand-daughters.

I'd already be fine with some decent laundry folding in general.

I think the idea is that before they sell it to the public they should trust it with their own loved ones.

There's a video of the founder of Figure robotics trusting it enough to let it do laundry next to his kids

https://x.com/adcock_brett/status/1950685253447913798

The first phase is likely don't let the kids go near it since it could easily hurt a human by accident.

Is it automated or is it like when they demoed that neo humanoid robot and it was actually just a dude driving it with vr goggles.

Notably it does not show the robot turning on the washing machine?

That requires the ProMax subscription at $2500/month.

Stockton Rush trusted his submarine with his own life.

> He criticized the Passenger Vessel Safety Act of 1993 as "needlessly prioritiz[ing] passenger safety over commercial innovation".

:-)))

Or to put it another way, before selling it for laundry folding, make sure it won't fold the baby that was left on the wrong table.

Other fun things. Living in apartment with only the robot doing any tasks or picking up any inputs like arriving packages.

Nuclear war is immanent to our civilisation and human nature, but perhaps not imminent.

Domestic appliances were extremely disruptive. (vacuum cleaners, fridges, washing machines, air conditioners, ...) Domestic servants were eliminated. But there was no paradigm shift.

People still live in houses and prepare and store food, and clean their houses and clothes. Minor tasks of domestic servants (making beds, tidying, etc.) were folded in to the job of the homemaker, who was demoted from a supervisory role.

Mainframe computers emptied out accounts departments in large companies, eliminating invoicing clerks, general ledger clerks, stock control clerks, payroll clerks and many more specialised roles. No paradigm shift. Accounting is still accounting.

Typing pools were emptied by the introduction of the Lasrjet printer and the personal computer. Their minor tasks (spell-checking, grammar correction, etc.) were taken over by other people. No paradigm shift, just a task automated.

Telephone operators were eliminated by automatic exchanges (central and customer-premises). No paradigm shift, that came later with digital radio phones ("smartphones"), and didn't cause wholesale job elimination.

The binary distinction between task replacement and paradigm shift is flawed. Reality is much more varied and fluid.

Domestic appliances killed domestic service jobs.

Telephones killed messenger-boy jobs.

The automatic telephone exchange killed telephone operator jobs.

Movable-type presses killed the job of scribes despite the huge expansion in book production.

Various farm machines together killed arable farm labour.

The Laserjet and Wang word processor killed typist jobs.

Mainframe computers killed invoicing clerk, general accounting clerk, and inventory control clerk jobs.

We could go on.

In each case, the minor tasks in each job that were not automated were just folded into other jobs.

Focusing on ATMs and claiming no impact is egregious, tendentious cherry-picking. Machines almost always eliminate occupations.

> Last I checked, the tractor and plow are doing a lot more work than 3 farmers, yet we've got more jobs and grow more food.

We do not have more jobs for horses.

In this context we are the horses.

> they're paying for someone to _figure out_ their exact needs,

Back in the 1980s this was called "systems analysis". The role disappeared a bit before the web came along, and coders were tasked with the job or told to just guess what the exact needs are, which is why so much software is trash.

I don't know, though, Claude Opus is most of the way to being a good systems analyst, and early reports say that having an AI provide descriptions/requirements to a fleet of code-writing AIs gives better results than having a human do it.