Today I noted something I hadn’t seen before in a store I don’t often frequent – a floor scrubbing machine was roving around the aisles among the people, beeping and flashing a light, with no person riding or controlling it. These BrainOS devices apparently integrate in to regular sweepers, with addition of some sensors and a marked off, blocked off seat (saying, don’t hop up here and try to control this 🙂 And they have been doing so since 2018?
The odd thing that I noticed was that the interaction with people in the store. When the robot turned in to the aisle, people moved their carts from center to off to the right side… for a robot. Will a robot be annoyed to wait in an aisle to pass… is it on a schedule it must keep to wipe up the store within a number of hours? Whether they noticed this mechanized sweeper was missing a driver or not, they moved over to the side to allow it to pass…
The replacement of a fairly mundane job as slow sleep machine driver may seem unremarkable now, but there was an interesting report from CNBC that Bill Gates noted that AI would give free intelligence to masses – free good tutoring, good doctors for anyone available online?
Indeed, I found that asking Claude some somewhat obscure tax question, gave some surprisingly helpful information (information that can be verified elsewhere, of course, before believing it).
What do you think? Will this be leading to another industrial revolution or a dystopian sci fi/novel?