Part of the tradeoff there is efficiency. I like my dishwasher because it's as good at getting things clean as I am but it does it using less water and less soap, and at scale, it takes less time too. It's just a great use case for machine automation because you can do clever stuff w/a dishwasher that's hard to replicate outside of that closed environment.
I struggle to imagine a scenario where a 1-2 person household would get the same benefits from something like a laundry-folding robot. I hate folding my laundry and I still can't imagine buying one since I simply don't do laundry that often. If I really wanted to spend less time doing laundry, I could spend the cost of that laundrybot on a larger collection of clothing to wear, for that matter.
Robot vacuums are a good comparison point since vacuuming is something you (ideally) do frequently that is time and labor intensive. I do own one of those, and if it got better at dealing with obstacles thanks to "AI" I would definitely like that.
I think it would have to be a general-purpose robot, and doing the laundry would just be one of many things it can do, similar to how running a particular program is only one of many things a computer can do. More than that, I believe it would actually require a general-purpose robot to handle all contingencies that can arise in doing laundry.
As someone who does laundry about twice a week, it would certainly be nice. But it’s a pie in the sky at this time even just on the technological side.
I struggle to imagine a scenario where a 1-2 person household would get the same benefits from something like a laundry-folding robot. I hate folding my laundry and I still can't imagine buying one since I simply don't do laundry that often. If I really wanted to spend less time doing laundry, I could spend the cost of that laundrybot on a larger collection of clothing to wear, for that matter.
Robot vacuums are a good comparison point since vacuuming is something you (ideally) do frequently that is time and labor intensive. I do own one of those, and if it got better at dealing with obstacles thanks to "AI" I would definitely like that.