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Consumer robotics strikes me as an engineering tar pit so deep it leads to hell. If full self driving is hard due to the long tail of unusual special cases, thi
by api 8mo ago
Consumer robotics strikes me as an engineering tar pit so deep it leads to hell. If full self driving is hard due to the long tail of unusual special cases, this is orders of magnitude worse.
Take FSD but multiply the number of actuators and degrees of freedom by at least 10, more like 100. Add a third dimension. Add direct physical interaction with complex objects. Add pets and children. Add toys on the floor. Add random furniture with non-standard dimensions. Add exposure to dust, dirt, water, grease, and who knows what else? Puke? Bleach? Dog pee?
Oh, and remove designated roads and standardized rules about how you're supposed to drive on those roads. There are no standards. Every home is arranged differently. People behave differently. Kids are nuts. The cat will climb on it. The dog may attack it. The pet rabbit will chew on any exposed cords.
We've all seen those Boston Dynamics robots. They're awesome but how durable would they be in those conditions? Would they last for years with day to day constant abuse in an environment like that?
From a pure engineering point of view (neglecting the human factor or cost) a home helper robot is almost definitely harder than building and operating a Mars base. We pretty much have all the core tech for that figured out: recycling atmosphere, splitting and making water, refining minerals, greenhouses, airlocks, and so on. As soon as we have Starship or another super heavy rocket that's reliable we could do it as long as someone was willing to write some huge checks.
And of course it's a totally untested market. We don't know how big it really is. Will people really be willing to pay thousands to tens of thousands for a home robot with significant limitations? Only about 25% of the market probably has the disposable income to afford these.
You'd have to go way up market first, but people up market can afford to just pay humans to do it.
- foobarian 8mo agoI think if they are teleoperated they could make sense, or at least more than the device-local versions
- duskwuff 8mo agoA teleoperated robot is little more than a human worker with extra steps. (And an expensive, clumsy human worker at that.) I can't imagine many situations where that would make sense instead of having a human do the work in person.
- api 8mo agoThe only places it does is where humans can't easily go: space, underwater, hazardous industrial sites, etc. It can occasionally make sense for high skill stuff where the shortage is people who can even do it, like remote surgery. In your house? That's silly. It'd be 100X more expensive and complicated than just hiring a housekeeper so you could... hire a remote housekeeper?
- TylerE 8mo agoExcept the remote house keeper can be in some super locl 3rd world country where the prevailing wage is a few bucks a day.
- duskwuff 8mo agoThat's a pretty profoundly dystopian concept. If the only way this technology is viable is as a way to exploit labor at a distance - count me out.
- TylerE 8mo agoWe're living in a dystopia.
- decimalenough 8mo agoThe person in a third world country is not a slave, they're doing the job for a few bucks a day because it's still better than other options available to them.
- XorNot 8mo agoThat's not necessarily exploitation: a worker in another country paid a far lower rate in absolute terms may in local terms be earning good money. If that job is "monitor the remote robots from a desk" then that's likely also a fairly good job.
- api 8mo agoThere's an indie sci-fi film called Sleep Dealer about this. It's not bad.
- mekdoonggi 8mo agoAlso, how will these robots make money? They are a less capable human. Humans who aren't skilled don't make much money.
- RankingMember 8mo agoOnce large swaths of the planet have been rendered uninhabitable from human activity, we'll require them to continue extracting profit from those areas. (this is a downer comment but also realistically the first thing that came to mind when trying to think of a use for them).
- Saline9515 8mo agoAlmost all developed economies are running into a fertility crisis right now, with labor shortages already appearing in the frontrunners of the trend, such as Germany. Human work is going to cost more in the future, and immigration from countries such as Thailand or Vietnam is already slowing down. Even a mediocre robot will be sought after if it is the only choice you have.
- mekdoonggi 8mo agoI understand that. It's my personal opinion that one of the causes of low birth rates is that we continually choose to have robots solve our problems instead of choosing a human. I think we could increase birth rates by making a taxation scheme in which the most marginally effective way to solve a problem is with a human, paid a wage which allows for that occupation to be a lifelong career.
- jfyi 8mo agoHumans who aren't skilled require training regardless of how "unskilled" the task is. Humans that are chronically unskilled also don't learn well, somewhat as a rule. Humans that don't make much money have a high turnover rate from burnout. Additionally, those that can learn typically leave for greener pastures. The bar isn't terribly high. Efficiency of scale in production will solve this eventually. I think the likely outcome is robots building themselves first.
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- throwawayqqq11 8mo agoThe first MVPs dont need to reach parity to human autonomy, they only need to enforce that humans do the cheap work.
- thewebguyd 8mo ago> Will people really be willing to pay thousands to tens of thousands for a home robot with significant limitations? The answer to that is no, probably for the foreseeable future. The robot demos we have no can't even fold laundry or put dishes away without being teleoperated. Both extremely basic tasks that any household robot would be required to do, along with other messy jobs that put it at risk as you said: taking out the trash, feeding the pets, cleaning up messes, preparing or cooking food, etc. The price it would have to cost with current tech would be astronomically more than just hiring a human, and they would almost certainly come with an expensive subscription as well, whereas I can hire a human to come in and clean my home weekly for about $200/month.
- lallysingh 8mo agoIf a robot can do basic cleaning, laundry, and dishes, that's worth a lot to a lot of people. Dual-professional households have the money, and not having to do this housework could save some marriages.
- stickfigure 8mo agoNobody has yet demonstrated a stationary robot that can do these things. They're all legs. The impressive demos are just show, not useful.
- SpicyLemonZest 8mo agoI don't think it actually is worth a lot to people. I know dual-professional households who don't even use their dishwasher consistently, and multiple companies have gone bankrupt trying to bring automated laundry folding (which does exist in industry) to the consumer market.
- NetMageSCW 8mo agoThere are a lot of maid services that imply (to me) otherwise.
- SpicyLemonZest 8mo agoMaid services are generally expected to handle "everything" for a pretty expansive definition of everything. They pick up scattered stuff and put in a sensible location, they arrange everything visible in an aesthetically pleasing way, they take out the trash, if there's some weird dirt that's hard to clean they creatively problem solve to find a way to get it off. I don't think there's a market for a service that can only handle basic cleaning. (Will someone eventually invent a machine that can do all of that and more? Yes, probably, and they'll make billions when they do. But Tesla has offered no reason to believe this is on their horizon, and the focus on a humanoid form factor strongly suggests that they're optimizing for media appeal over practical capabilities.)
- mvdtnz 8mo ago