Comment by ceejayoz
5 days ago
> The company says the robot completes Laundry Flow and Daily Reset tasks autonomously by default, but uses teleoperation assistance when needed to guarantee task completion.
Suspiciously absent: a rough idea of what percentage of tasks need the assistance.
Tele-operation through a video feed(?) inside my home. Yeah that sounds pretty creepy
If I wanted someone taking a look at all the stuff in my home, I'd just pay a cleaner here instead of one behind a desk in what I assume is a low-labor-cost locale. For $50/hr I can have them come in every day for 160 days, and they can manage stairs.
They’re also much less likely to film their activities and upload it to the Internet…
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Paying for someone to clean your house? Thats so last year.
Why an AI company cleaned my New York City apartment for free
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpwerjy20kyo
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Except these ai fucks are trying to put cameras on all such labor to train future world models and businesses are okay with it since they get paid for doing nothing extra. So yeah they can manage stairs but they might also be recording everything they do
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It'll be about a week before the first reported incident of some operator sending it into bathroom/bedroom while occupied to watch.
... and under an hour before the first phone camera recording hits twitter
I am sure one of these companies will fuck up and do that. But for the most part, that kind of problem is pretty easy to avoid. Any company using computer vision knows that now, and has high standards of operation (usually by contracting with companies that then have that incentive) to stop that from happening.
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Can you imagine all the customer support calls asking why it keeps showing up next to the shower?
Think of 90 y.o. lonely people who can't care less about some company seeing the interior of their house. Surely, it is a risk, but being without any help and assistance.
Most 90 year old lonely people would probably benefit more from an actual human carer than some clanker that can't do stairs, any kind of mobility assistance and can't even make them a cup of tea.
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The clothes folding is almost certainly a person.
This sort of menial task would likely be given to someone in a poorer part of the world, who ironically will be some of the first to master the first generation of remotely operated high tech robots.
The revolution against the rich will be led by poor precariats armed with robots.
> The revolution against the rich will be led by poor precariats armed with robots
If anything, robots will make rich people richer and their position more secure. Once again, you're hoping for a technological solution to non-technological problems
How? If something like that would happen robots would be disabled in 5 minutes.
Like how operating systems get disabled when someone launches a DDOS? :P
Even if robots do get disabled in just 5 minutes, 30 seconds of surprise is plenty for a coordinated decapitation strike (both literally and metaphorically) once enough of the leadership (national or business, take your pick) normalise having these around them, in their homes, preparing things for the next morning while the owners sleep.
Even on a small scale, some random hacker's going to turn one of these into "Mr Stabby the 100% Deniable Assassin". I'm fairly confident this prediction will be ignored until it happens, and moderately confident that when it does some newspaper will find this quotation and use it as their headline.
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I feel like this is the sort of thing William Gibson should write...
There's a pretty good 2008 Mexican scifi film "sleep dealer" that covers this topic more or less
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> The revolution against the rich will be led by poor precariats armed with robots.
$7,999 a clanker. I can totally imagine hordes of poor people driving around in turret-equipped F-150s packed with robots in evil facemasks.
- Hey, bankster, hands upon the fucking wall!
If it were to get to that point, they are already inside your house, paid for by you.
I’m not sure you understand the comment
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I watched the promo video somewhere and when folding the blanket, the video cuts and edits were very suspicious. I doubt it can fold a blanket at all.
They do show it folding shirts, which I'd think are harder than blankets.
Is your doubt caused by blankets being bigger than shirts?
(I didn't see it folding a button-up shirt, only tee-shirts. That's an extra degree of difficult and I do doubt that it can do that.)
I think blankets are harder simply because of their size. I often have to "whip" the blanket to get the other end to properly fold on itself. I also use a much large space because of the size (often the floor). Could a robot fold a big blanket? Probably? But what is the success rate going to be? If I just have to refold it 50% of the time, is that actually worth it?
Yeah, again the WYSIWYG model of AI: if you see a robot folding a shirt, that robot can fold that shirt. Maybe it can fold another that's very similar, maybe only different in colour, but don't bet your money on it.
A robot folds a shirt and you think it can fold a tee? Not unless it's explicitly trained to fold that one tee, too.
Every single one of these robot plays are going to try pivot to having someone do you laundry remotely for a dollar a day.
If they ever get the tech down (I doubt it), they will then try move to broader labour replacement.
This is why all the robots need to be humanoid.
Curious why you feel they won’t get the tech down? I think these products are all data plays right now.
Manipulating soft bodies is exceptionally difficult to do with robotics.
moving a soft object from a to b is doable, folding/separating/sorting at any kind of speed is very much an area of active research.
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But the $1 per day is soooo cheap. You can't even run a local LLM for that price.
Latency, unless we get instantaneous comms working there will always be lag.
Annoying when you play games, likely expensive when the robot keeps breaking things.
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Given how incapable my robotic vacuums and lawnmowers have proven to be, even after several years of iterations, I’d almost prefer if it was all teleoperation and it would hopefully unlock a huge amount of additional tasks it could preform. This would essentially let me hire a human housekeeper at a global vs local wage which is very appealing.
Your robotic vacuums and lawnmowers are at a much lower price point that can't afford to run an LBM or computer vision to learn how to do a good job. Because those tasks are too specialized, it's unlikely anyone would pay $8000 for one that did a great job, but the technology is totally there.
The key is when the robot can use all the same tools you can, the generalist robot has a value high enough to pay for this technology.
I’ve paid over $3000 for a lawnmower and over $1000 for a vacuum before. So I’m already halfway there and with a fraction of the benefits as a general device.
I’d need more diligence but would certainly pay $8k on a mower that did a great job consistently. A service cost me $5000 per year so it has a reasonable break even if it’s built well. Robot mowers are pretty hands on, I’d almost rather just diy it.
I feel like this is blowing smoke a bit. If this better tech was possible it would be available, there’s always a market even if it’s at the high end. Do you have anything specific to point to? Any builders/makers that have done this? I feel like this stuff gets touted as “oh if they just had affordable lidar” or whatever then it would solve it, but IRL the variety of homes and yards is so large that it still doesnt generally perform well.
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The robot has a two pronged gripper. I wonder what teleoperating that to do complex tasks would be like.
IMO, hard part is likely the lack of haptic feedback, not that it's just a simple gripper. Small and big feedback, so you don't break eggs (not accidentally at least), and also don't pick up a heavy load that makes the robot topple over and give the remote operator motion sickness in the process.
There's a surprising number of labour simulators sold as VR headset games:
https://skyhookgames.com/lawn-mowing-simulator-vr-is-out-now...
https://www.futurlab.co.uk/games/powerwash-simulator-vr
https://gg.deals/game/bartender-vr-simulator/
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I could sweep, mop, vacuum, etc with just my thumb and index finger if needed. But I agree, it’s a limiting design. Probably something they will want to grow beyond eventually. They’ve intentionally handicapped this version, but if they went with a human operated system then maybe they would have seen more potential and given it extra attention. Also, would be interesting if this thing could swap out its “hands” as different jobs may do better with different designs.
It's not a bad business idea, but has dystopian vibes. The human doesn't have to travel to the job site, they don't need to be paid a wage that allows them to exist in an expensive city, and they can watch N screens simultaneously, intervening only when needed. Maybe 1 OOM greater throughput per human-hour. The human teleoperator is also valuable non-public training data, which is part of the learning flywheel. That training data can be sold or kept as a private moat.
How is it any more dystopian than any other offshoring that exist primarily as labor arbitrage?
My in-laws have a full time live in housekeeper that costs $500 per month. And where she’s from, this is a huge opportunity that she went to “maid school” for and many consider excellent compensation. She’s able to send this money home and provides for many family members and has amassed a bit of a real estate empire back home. But, she is absentee. She lives away and rarely gets to visit only about 2-3 weeks a year. So I feel that’s quite sad. They obviously don’t live in the US, because this employment would cost many times more here and probably impossible to even get the proper visas.
Now if this maid was able to live in her village, with her family, and make the same income but perform her tasks through a robot then I think she’d see immediate value in that. So would consumers in America who would love to have housekeepers but can’t afford the local labor rates. Even if you can afford some here, you could get much more for the same budget. A lot of Americans pay this rate for 1-2 cleanings per month, that’s dumb money if you could spend it on something that would sweep up every crumb the day it hit the ground.
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Oh 100% haha. Looking at that video on their website I'm pretty sure it's mostly just remote control.
The conditions are ripe for a builder.ai esque scam but with robotics.
Same, I suspect its awful and their strategy is to improve and rely less on it, which would be fine to me if they'd be transparent about it.
Can't wait for the Uber version, where anyone with five minutes to spare can fold your laundry from their home.
Holy dystopian shit, you might be right. This might just be their new favorite answer when people ask what are all the jobless humans to do after the AI takeover? This... live in squalor, hooked up to VR headsets and doing menial work remotely for the oligarch class, while the AI learns the last few non-automated tasks from them. It's a theme I've seen in many movies over the years.
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Nah. At least with Uber the driver has self-preservation as an incentive to not just fuck around. What incentive would a freelance nobody have to not do the funniest shit possible inside a stranger's home at least once.
Do I care? The job gets done and I don’t have to bother with letting someone physically into my home.
As a parent this seems godsent if it works as advertised just for its overnight reset.
Now if they can’t make the autonomy work to maintain the economics then I’d need an exit clause but other than that, have at it boss.
The risk is that this does not scale, they run out of money, the robot won't work any more, and you payed a lot for nothing.
Not for nothing. None of these companies are going to prioritize difficult physical prevention of you running your own OS, and there are already open source robotics companies where you can run your own stack. A lot of the brain hardware in these things is going to be Nvidia Jetson.
But you'd get to keep the robot, no?
Yea I would hope for sustainable teleop unit economics and then VC money for autonomy.
But I don’t need high percentage autonomy out of the box was my point.
If I'm gonna be an early adopter and give them such valuable training data, they should at least give me stock options
I think they're giving you the robot at half price.
How much does the monthly subscription cost?
$449
Thanks. Then it could definitely be remote controlled often enough.
> Suspiciously absent: a rough idea of what percentage of tasks need the assistance.
This will almost certainly depend on the customer and residence. I don't think subscription pricing will be fair, but it can at least be budgeted for out of pensions and such for the people needing to pay for assistance.