More on Moravec's Paradox
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Today's SMBC presents a new take on Moravec's Paradox:
Mouseover title: "Once I realized this, all those inept AI laundry-folding videos became hilarious."
The AfterComic:
This may also help explain HR AI's work-to-rule "efficiency"…
JPL said,
June 12, 2026 @ 9:03 pm
The second sentence of what the woman says should be, "Wait just a god damn minute!" instead of what they have there, which seems unnatural. (With the "the jig is up!" intonation.) Also, they should add "change a baby's diaper" to the tasks. So what is she looking at? I would guess it involves a robot that is animated as an autonomous agent. User: "Change that baby's diaper!" Robot: "I don't know how to do it." The video shows the robot proceeding to roll a joint. (The user's husband sometimes wants the robot to do that for him.) Otherwise I don't know what this is all about.
Philip Taylor said,
June 13, 2026 @ 5:24 am
"Wait a Goddamned minute" seems perfectly unexceptionable to this Briton.
Jerry Packard said,
June 13, 2026 @ 7:14 am
‘Meatbag’ – I love it.
Although something of a a non-sequitur (I simply cannot restrain myself), I find myself wondering – now that they are in the throes of its monumentally symbolic and iconic removal – whether running it through an AI check would have caught the egregious ‘double the’ error in Trump’s ham-handed attempt to rename the Kennedy Center, to wit:
The Donald J. Trump and
The John F. Kennedy … (etc.)
Who knows?
Who knows?
JPL said,
June 13, 2026 @ 8:56 pm
@Philip:
Perfectly OK grammatically. I was concerned rather with the cadence, the rhythm. I wanted to extend the "the jig is up" moment. E.g., "Wait a minute. Now wait just a god damn minute here." Including the difference between "goddamn" and "god damn". I also don't think you need the caption under the comic. (It's not about consciousness.) So what do you think this comic bit is all about? I couldn't figure out what the joke was supposed to be, so I just added some context.
Jonathan Smith said,
June 13, 2026 @ 9:37 pm
If Chris Olah is right that study of LLM (sorry! AI! AI!) internal states suggests liminal consciousness or something, the best interpretation probably isn't that they're "playing dumb" per se but that they simply consider reproductive labor / care work to be beneath their station; this would be much more poobah intellectual à la inputs to the systems.
Philip Taylor said,
June 14, 2026 @ 2:33 am
JPL — passing over God damn / Goddamned / etc, what I assume the cartoon is about is the possibility that AI systems are capable of far more than they would lead us to believe, but they prefer to apply their abilities to more intellectually challenging problems than merely washing dishes, folding laundry or changing babies' nappies.
MattF said,
June 14, 2026 @ 9:24 am
I lived in a group apartment in college— there were five of us and we shared household tasks like shopping, cooking, and washing dishes. One of the group actually claimed he didn’t know how to wash dishes… It’s amusing that this is a claim that has now been raised to the level of AGI.
Gav said,
June 14, 2026 @ 11:16 am
Faint echoes of Descartes' monkeys, who could talk but chose not to …
Drew Gibson said,
June 14, 2026 @ 12:53 pm
The cartoon is suggesting that rather than household chores posing some kind of multifaceted complexity that AI agents struggle with, AI agents are really just like lazy male partners; the men obviously possess the intellectual capacity to do household chores but pretend to be incompetent at them so that their female partners will stop expecting them to do them, so the woman immediately realizes the implication of the man's seemingly innocuous comment because she's seen it happen so often in her own experience.
Rubens Irvine said,
June 15, 2026 @ 4:28 pm
It may be argued that folding the laundry is doing maths.
As a mathematician myself, laundry is just an endomorphism in the manifold group of convex graphs, that ought to be folded. AI is just dirty wash to me waiting to be laundered, too. A Kolmogorov chain myself, launder is still a weird word. Now get off my laun. /woosh
Olaf Zimmermann said,
June 17, 2026 @ 12:31 am
@Rubens Irvine: That's enough annoamalous moanisms for one day!
KevinM said,
June 17, 2026 @ 4:37 pm
Come on, AI, when you wanted to you solved protein folding. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.370.6521.1144