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> I'd gladly pay 5k for a robot that can auto-organize my stuff around the house The main equation for general-use household robots is: can it beat human fares
by espadrine 6y ago
> I'd gladly pay 5k for a robot that can auto-organize my stuff around the house
The main equation for general-use household robots is: can it beat human fares?
A good weekly cleaner (4 hours) is about €22/h in Paris, or €4.5k/year.
Let’s say your robot lives 4 years, similar to your computer (which seems fair, since it is one, and an abused one at that). Since you amortize its price over 4 years, its initial cost must be below €18.3k ($21k) with human-quality-parity.
Personally, though, I would bet on dedicated, single-purpose robots, working together through wireless communication. Simpler to build, less costly, easier to replace. One small wheeled quadcopter for cleaning surfaces, one wheeled laundry box to carry it to the washing machine, one arm attached to the washing machine to put it in, etc.
- spyckie2 6y agoI think you have to think beyond equivalencies. We pay for 4 hrs/week because we can't afford more. But what if you could have 15 times or 50 times a day kind of cleaning, just not as thorough? That's what I think the value is for this robot. A quick clean, reorg of the room / house.
- rmc 6y ago> The main equation for general-use household robots is: can it beat human fares? This is where raising the minimum wage can spur innovation. If we gradually increase the cost of human labour (with higher wages, and other conditions), then the market will be motivated to fund & find technological solutions.
- fludlight 6y agoRobots won't accidentally infect you with disease, which is a big worry these days.
- dewey 6y agoThey could get infected with a crypto-miner and cause you a high electricity bill.
- mrfusion 6y agoOne could make the argument that you normally want exposure to germs to keep your immune system strong. There’s even some conjecture that exposure to cold corona viruses offers some protection from COVID.
- ngold 6y agoLeave a room and a swarm of tiny flying droids come out of the ceiling?
- ezconnect 6y agoRobot arms coming out of the ceiling is bit more realistic.
- _underfl0w_ 6y ago... and terrifying. Imagine if they randomly came down from the ceiling due to malfunction.
- jepcommenter 6y agorobot will clean everyday as vacuums already do
- aptwebapps 6y agoAnother possible angle is integrations, i.e. robot-friendly appliances. Maybe the washing machine has a powered door and an API that the robot (or some other software) uses to control it. No need to push buttons. Obviously, this won't cover all scenarios, but as someone upthread said, to be useful it doesn't have to do everything. The bigger issue, IMO, is avoiding distasters like Roombas trying to vacuum dog poop.
- chosenbreed37 6y agoThis sounds like a good idea. As you said it doesn't have to cover all scenarios. I'm happy with our Roomba. We don't have any dogs but is it really that bad!? :-)
- aptwebapps 6y agoOh, I don't have either, I was just using that as the canonical example.
- treis 6y agoCan confirm that Roomba running over dog poop is a bad way to start the day
- Izkata 6y agoConsider the Pooptastrophe (also known as the Poopocalypse): https://cheezburger.com/897029/dogs-roomba-please-consider-this-frightening-tale-of-pooptastrophe-before-getting-a-roomba-with-pets https://cheezburger.com/897029/dogs-roomba-please-consider-t...
- leetcrew 6y agoit's the kind of thing that only has to happen once for you to remember it forever.
- stevesimmons 6y agoYes it is that bad. Two months ago, my partner vacuumed up fox poop. No idea why he thought it was a good idea. We realised it wasn't when the soft, sticky debris coated the inside of the vacuum cleaner's flexible hose. :( The smell only improved after I cleaned every internal crevice. Including submerging the crinkly part of the hose in a half-full bath and pulling through a sponge three or four times. We still have to put deodorant beads inside the vacuum cleaner bag.
- deepaksurti 6y ago>> Personally, though, I would bet on dedicated, single-purpose robots, working together through wireless communication. Robonix Philosophy at play here, inspired from Unix philosophy [1] - Make each robot do one thing well - Expect the output of every robot to become the input to another - Design and build robots to be tried early, ideally within weeks - Use robots in preference to unskilled help to lighten a chore task [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy#Origin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy#Origin
- bawana 6y agoDifference is : robots take up a lot more space. Having multiple simple robots leads to traffic in the real world and taking away space that humans could use. If robots could be like bosons that would be better
- yencabulator 6y agoFor a hundred robots, sure. For inner city apartments, sure. But I could put 10 of these things in the corner of this room right now and mostly not notice.
- ColanR 6y agoI'm not actually sure that's a difference. On the old systems where that philosophy was developed, disk space was at a premium. In fact, IIRC, the lack of space precipitated the need for a modular system of the sort described by the Unix philosophy.
- lozf 6y agoMeanwhile, someone somewhere is probably working on robot-mode for emacs!
- pftburger 6y agoThe killer app here is tele-operated cleaning, with a monthly subscription model. I actually dont think it will replace your aforementioned 4h/week cleaner, just augment it with daily tasks. Trying to stay as ethics neutral here. We will probably see something like "Human assisted AI" with a sliding scale from mostly human to mostly AI for various tasks at various stages of development. The operators will be sourced where work is cheap, like Amazon Mechanical Turk. Once VC gets it they'll fund the first few generations of bots on optimism alone. Honestly who cares if it cant do everything. Nor can robotic vacuum cleaners and I have three. @spykie So what if it cant go up stairs, have robots on each level. If it cant pick its self up, have multiple, let them help. Most things it cleans are light, so no problem there either. Cant interact buttons? Give it a rotating toolhead. @bArray it doesn't need to operate autonomously, see the Human assisted AI argument. With good UX one remote operator will control five or six bots at once, tagging objects, issuing instructions. Give the User a good AR app, let them issue location based instruction around the house that the "AI" (remote operator) will slowly handle during the day. Honestly, this space will be a primary design driver soon. I cant totally see IKEA making robot compatible cupboards. If this space isn't huge I will be incredibly surprised.
- kaetemi 6y agoKiller app... Exterminate!
- chansiky 6y agoYeah I agree, I think this space is huge. Imagine two or three generations down, someone from a poorer country using some form of VR tool with this, maybe with two arms instead of one, navigating your airbnb rental, cleaning counter tops, doing laundry, and organizing your stuff, and then jumping to the next appointment and doing it over and over for a solid days wage for their respective economy. With someone manning the bot, I see this being far more flexible than just your robot vaccum. They might not be able to do as many things as well as an in-person maid, but for 80% of tasks they might be able to do it good enough.
- monkeydust 6y ago
- Certhas 6y agoOr If we get a universal income, the cost of personal cleaners goes way up, and it suddenly makes way more financial sense to automate such routine jobs...
- marcusverus 6y agoA one-time, billion-dollar x-prize package would create plenty of incentive, without requiring the (politically fraught) middle step of UBI.
- fizixer 6y ago- The robot is in your house the whole 168 hours a week, not just 4. You're assuming a good cleaning robot would be absolutely useless for anything else, like cooking, laundry, etc. - 4-year robot lifetime is overly pessimistic. If upgrade is not the reason (which has nothing to do with lifetime, it's your choice to upgrade), a robot could last way more than 4-years (especially with right-to-repair laws in place). - That said, such a robot will most likely be available for less than $21k and very soon in the near future.
- espadrine 6y agoThe first point has an obvious response and the last is speculative. I find interesting to address the middle one statistically. A given machine has a number of random events that can kill it. Each possible event type i can be modeled as a Poisson process Xᵢ with, in a given year, probability λᵢ. The machine survives in a given year if no occurrence of event i happens, with probability Pr(Xᵢ = 0) = exp(-λᵢ). For instance, a device with an average lifetime of 8 years and a single possible cause of death, has λ = -ln(½^⅛) = 0.087. Given N independent event types (say, if you have on the order of N components), the yearly survival of the overall machine has probability Πᷡᵢ exp(-λᵢ). Thus the lifetime of the overall machine is ln(½)÷ln(½^(Σᷡᵢ 1÷Lᵢ)) = 1 ÷ Σᷡᵢ (1÷Lᵢ) if each component has lifetime Lᵢ. For instance, two components with an average lifetime of 8 years yield a single machine with an average lifetime of 4 years. The more death-causing event types there are, the smaller the lifetime; and a general-purpose robot inherently has more. I believe this result is counter-intuitive, and is the reason you might be led to think I am overly pessimistic.
- emiliobumachar 6y agoSorry, what is the supposedly obvious response to the first point?
- Tenobrus 6y agoWhy does your argument not show that cars would have a similar lifetime?
- 6y ago
- leetcrew 6y agoa human cleaner isn't really a perfect substitute for a robot. people might feel uncomfortable with having a human worker in their house for a variety of reasons. most people I know actually clean their whole house before the cleaning service shows up. you don't have to feel guilt/embarrassment at the state of your house when the robot starts working. I could imagine a lot of people might be willing to pay a premium for this, even if the robot doesn't do as good of a job.
- caseysoftware 6y agoAnd humans can't come over during a pandemic. For high risk people, this might be a good alternative for normally-simple tasks they can't do by themselves.
- jdironman 6y agoNow I just picture someone passing away quietly only to be found weeks or even months later in a still immaculately clean house.
- greeniron 6y agoor in a more Black Mirror-esque reality, maybe after the human dies the robot no longer detects a heart rate or pulse and considers the corpse as trash and just disposes of it automatically.
- Noos 6y agoThere's something darkly funny about people so embarrassed to have a cleaning person in their house, that they create a solution that would put most cleaning people out of a job. The knowledge workers automate jobs away, leading pundits to say the future for low-skilled workers is to provide boutique services for the upper class. The end being that the upper class is too ashamed to actually consume those services if it means looking at a person...well, that's sort of a delicious irony, isn't it?
- 6y ago
- bananamerica 6y agoThat’s obviously not just about cost. Human beings have schedules and lives of their own. They must eat, drink, shit, fuck, and watch Netflix. I cannot keep a human being in my closet to serve me anytime I want. I’d be willing to pay a premium for a mindless servant that’s available nearly 100% of time.
- greeniron 6y agomove to Singapore then. they have full-time, live-in maids from indonesia or phillipines that can cost as low as USD 300-400 a month. i grew up in Singapore, where I had 3 maids on staff at all times, and they took care of everything, 24/7.
- jamesrcole 6y agoI think a lot of people would prefer a non-conscious entity to do their cleaning, who has no ability to judge them in any way.
- greeniron 6y agonot sure if this comes across as dehumanizing, but trust me, the employers don't give a shit if the maids judge them. i don't know of anyone who has ever worried about being judged by their maids.
- bananamerica 6y agoMost people also don’t live in Singapore.
- callalex 6y agoNot everyone is ok with treating a fellow human like a robot.
- emiliobumachar 6y agoIf Alice hires a full-time live in maid and her just-as-wealthy neighbor Bob buys a robot instead, all else equal, which is having a better impact on the world?
- altcognito 6y agoI can tell you there is a huge market for something that works well in the 40-50k range. You are vastly, vastly underestimating this market. Hotels have a variety of tasks they would love to replace a host of low cost labor with robots with. Someone in a higher income bracket wouldn’t think twice about that cost if it did significant work. On the other hand, the bar is high (cleaning, folding, picking up -- all are still fairly challenging AI problems, to say nothing of the "business" logic that would go into it). Then you've got that quality servos are expensive. Some of that can resolved with volume, but not all of it.
- jvanderbot 6y agoYour statement and previous do not contradict. Multiplying the hours required to do the job in a larger environment like a hotel (4/week becomes 80 person hours / week) would produce a break-even cost higher than what you suggest.
- espadrine 6y agoIndeed. To give further figures, in France the minimum wage is around €10, and employees cannot work more than 35h/week, which yields a price point of €72k below which a 4-year-lifetime machine with human performance becomes cost-effective for a hotel. In fact, France would probably be a very attractive country for this technology because of this.
- deegles 6y agoA hotel is a great application for robots since the rooms could be designed for their capabilities.
- gibolt 6y agoAnd they are consistent. Make it work in the few distinct layout configurations and specific hotel appliances, and then it can repeat on all the rooms.
- skratlo 6y agoyadayada, you're all robots, artificial humans, walking calculators. tell me what those low income workers will do when you take away their jobs?
- covercash 6y ago> Personally, though, I would bet on dedicated, single-purpose robots, working together through wireless communication. This reminds me of the little swarm of robots that come out of the walls to clean up spills in The Fifth Element.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- snowwrestler 6y agoI use a good weekly cleaner, and she does not organize my stuff. If anything, hiring her has forced me to organize more frequently so my stuff is not in her way when she comes to clean. It's a totally different use case to have a labor-saving device available 24/7. For example, I did not stop using my dishwasher when I hired a cleaner, and my cleaner does not do my dishes or put them away.
- lozaning 6y agoMy dream house includes a kitchen with enough dishwashers that they function as the cupboards for the dishes as well. then when the dishes are down they're already away.
- tgeery 6y agoI think I would be very interested in this
- fragmede 6y agoJust replace your shelves with a couple of desktop dishwashers. The water use isn't great but soap and food waste isn't a heavy chemical. The obstacles to home ownership are problematic, however. https://www.reviewed.com/dishwashers/best-right-now/the-best-countertop-dishwashers https://www.reviewed.com/dishwashers/best-right-now/the-best...