Wow, when you put it like that I realised there must be a market for this kind of thing, given that cost and speed of operation are incremental changes that wil

Wow, when you put it like that I realised there must be a market for this kind of thing, given that cost and speed of operation are incremental changes that will plausibly improve over the midterm. So you'll have upper-middle class people own a robot and whenever they want a task done they order it from basically a call-centre somewhere in the world... reminds me of the etymology of "robot" - from the Slavic for "slave"... You're right there are ethical issues, but hardly new ones for this context. In response to your question, > Should employers be able to outsource low-skill physical labor to actual humans abroad to circumvent wage and immigration laws? This is a very pertinent question ethically, but this already undergirds our current globalized society, where the the clothes most of us are wearing, the coffee we've been drinking, much of the food we've been eating today, and so on, are produced exactly by such labor. This is the way the world works, for the time being. And it's unfair. But these robotic possibilities don't add to the unfairness in my view, although they definitely would give it a new twist. Given current trends I wouldn't bet against increased twistedness..