8 ms·

I'm bearish that they'll be economically viable in the house for a very long time. For businesses the bar for adoption is very low: If the thing can work repet

by qurren 3mo ago

I'm bearish that they'll be economically viable in the house for a very long time. For businesses the bar for adoption is very low: If the thing can work repetitive jobs for 24 hours a day and replace 3 shifts, the purchase bar is nominally anything less than 3 x human salary if your budgeting horizon is 1 year. That's a high number, and probably fairly easy to achieve. For homes, it's a very different bar. You'd have a hard time convincing most American families to purchase anything with a >$1000 price tag. Currently that's pretty much impossible for a humanoid.

heaney-555 3mo ago
>You'd have a hard time convincing most American families to purchase anything with a >$1000 price tag. Like cars, they'll likely purchase them through finance deals, with a monthly payment. Or perhaps even rent/lease them.
- meowkit 3mo ago
  Much easier to remotely brick a robot too I imagine
- mbil 3mo ago
  Leasing seems like it could make sense given rapid upgrades in the technology. Why spend $15k on a home robot that will be obsoleted in the next few years?
  - garbageman 3mo ago
    Leasing is out, but locked-in subscriptions are in!
- qurren 3mo ago
  Cars are an absolute necessity in the US unless you live in one of the small handful of cities that have viable public transit. Different thing altogether. Robots aren't a necessity, and for a price tag in the tens of thousands, most people will just mop their own floors and do their own laundry.
  - georgemcbay 3mo ago
    > Robots aren't a necessity, and for a price tag in the tens of thousands, most people will just mop their own floors and do their own laundry. And (regardless of the costs involved) if I were going to pay money to not do this stuff myself, I'd rather pay a human to do it because I know there are humans out there that could use the work and I value them much more than I value Google and other corporations making even more obscene amounts of money selling future e-waste.
  - micromacrofoot 3mo ago
    $45k cars are not neccessary though, and that's the average american car loan today
    - bigfishrunning 3mo ago
      That's really more of a financial literacy problem though. People don't see $45k car, they see $600/mo payment. And car dealers very much sell on the payment and not on the actual price.
      - pessimizer 3mo ago
        Why would it be different for a robot?
        bigfishrunning 3mo ago
        People *need* a car, and a salesman manipulates them into buying more car then they need. People aren't convinced they *need* a robot. increasing your spend by 25% is a smaller change then increasing your spend by infinity%
    - drusepth 3mo ago
      nit: 45k is the average car loan for a new car, but average for a used car is $25k. Purchasing a car is a necessity but purchasing a new car is a luxury.
- michaelmrose 3mo ago
  People are financing small consumer goods with 3 digit price tags because they can't afford their mediocre already leveraged life. They borrow high 4 to low 5 figures for a car because they can't get to work to earn money so they don't have to join the bums sleeping on the cardboard. They will not be borrowing high 5 figures to low 6 figures for Rosie the Robot. If Rosie was the only output she would never happen. Rosie might happen as a side benefit of replacing American workers but only for the rich people. The vast majority which may be replaced would probably be better off burning down the factory rather than celebrate their upcoming domestic helper.
  - randomNumber7 3mo ago
    If you have a robot doing household work you can spend more time at work /S
- kelvinjps10 3mo ago
  At that point why not have a human cleaning service it will probably be cheaper
  - luckydata 3mo ago
    it's not cheap at all and the privacy and logistical implications of letting a stranger inside your house is something not everyone wants to deal with. I would rather have a robot.
    - stirfish 3mo ago
      I don't trust a robot with my privacy, but I know Linette isn't building a profile of my shopping habits and Wi-Fi traffic. She is also careful to not let my cats out.
    - blacksmith_tb 3mo ago
      Not to pull on the tinfoil hat, but I would assume most commercially available home cleaning robots will be covered with cameras, mics, and other sensors, and connected to their manufacturer's cloud... I don't pay for housecleaning, but I would vet humans quite differently.
    - infinitezest 3mo ago
      Suggesting that a robot is the more privacy friendly option is an interesting take.
      - Marha01 3mo ago
        Why not? A recording from a robot can be potentially viewed by a real human, if the company is not reputable (happened with robotic vacuums). But by default, no humans will view it. A human house cleaner by definition is a real human looking at your home every time.
        defrost 3mo ago
        One human, with a single set of human eyes and a limited network of associates with few immediate criminals looking to take advantage (although, yes, that does happen). Versus a small army of roomba's and equivalents mapping out floor plans and tangentially exposing human occupation times with that large data set almost certainly exposed to criminal and surveillance networks that will almost certainly use some of that choicer data to their advantage. It's literally trade offs in both cases.
- lovasoa 3mo ago
  Of course we'll rent them! I don't even want to keep a robot in my flat all the time. But that means speed does matter after all. The renting company will need to clean as many flats as possible with a single robot in a single day.
neutronicus 3mo ago
I mean, a twice-monthly house-cleaning service is running you ballpark 5k/year and people treat that shit as non-negotiable. I tried to claw back that line item after our second baby was born (wife didn't want them in the house anyway when we had a newborn), and it was completely unsuccessful. She claimed misery and all our friends were on her side. So the lifestyle stayed inflated.
- qurren 3mo ago
  Yes, but: 1. 80%+ of Americans can't afford house cleaning services. I'm a software engineer in silicon valley and even I clean my own house because I don't think I can afford it. My rents have gone up by more than 5K in the last year, my salary hasn't, so that's coming out of my house cleaning budget. 2. Even if you can afford 5K/year on it, the cleaning service is not an upfront commitment. You can bail anytime when you get laid off and clean your own house. 3. Consumers don't budget rationally. Businesses do.
  - neutronicus 3mo ago
    Well, to be honest, a cleaning service is a much more logical purchaser for a cleaning robot. Since you can truck it all over creation, work it 60 hours a week, and undercut all the human cleaning crews on price. As opposed to a household which might not have enough work to fully utilize it, or just have trouble scheduling times where it can work without causing disruption.
- soperj 3mo ago
  > ballpark 5k/year How big is your house? When we had a cleaning lady it was $70 a go. Under $2000 for every second week.
  - pertymcpert 3mo ago
    I have a 1300 sqft house, 3b2b. Costs me around $200 for a cleaning.
    - 3mo ago
tootie 3mo ago
I think domestic robots will make a lot of incremental progress and that few, if any, will be humanoid. We'll see a laundry folder and sock picker-upper and they'll be more like roombas or just big cubes. And tethered.
- kibwen 3mo ago
  The more likely scenario is that the hucksters currently hyping the idea of humanoid robots will gradually move the goalposts so that, when we eventually get a big, soft, stationary cube with six inflatable robot arms they'll point to it and say "behold, a humanoid robot!" and declare their predictions vindicated.
jameshart 3mo ago
Robot lawnmowers are mostly over $1000 already and they only do one thing. Heck, a lot of lawnmowers are over $1000. You can pay over $500 for an automatic cat litter box. Robot vacuums can be cheap but run to $600 or so. Household appliances is a robust sector where people have a proven track record of spending a lot of money.
- memonkey 3mo ago
  For all of these things, then what's the point of having a humanoid robot then? The last thing is a folding laundry bot that I would happily also pay $1000 for.
  - lowbloodsugar 3mo ago
    My wife hates having other people in our house and we both hate cleaning. If it worked, we’d drop $5k no problem. It’ll be $5k and a $50/mo sub? Sold!
  - mrexroad 3mo ago
    > folding laundry robot This is my dream for a house chore robot. If I could dump hampers of clothes into a receptacle and get stacks of folded clothes out, I’d happily pay $1k. Household of 5; my kids each produce 3-4 sets of clothes a day (sleep, school, sports, after school). I run wash in AM so dryer finishes before 3pm (pg&e ToU) and then I’m focused on other things for rest of day. More often than not, I get to bed to find a near full hamper of clothes dumped where I sleep and then have to sort/fold/deliver. Bonus points if robot can sort different items to different stacks/bundles. I don’t need AI/robotics to save me time from having to think, research, or code… I need AI/robotics to save me time so I can think, research, or code.
    - deleted 3mo ago
      [deleted]
    - imtringued 3mo ago
      A foldimate costs a fraction of your $1k.
si1entstill 3mo ago
I'm not sure. I think house cleaning/chores require at least a "part-time" job's work of work for the average household (especially with children). We may be atypical, but my partner and I don't want to hire out a cleaning service and deal with the whole human component. But, I think we'd gladly pay 15k+ if it allowed us to take on the additional gainful workload. Even at a 20k price tag, I suspect we would likely have made up the difference in under a year.
- qurren 3mo ago
  If you can even afford 20K you're in the top 10% of the US population. It's not a very big market, and even selling to that market is hard. Probably only 10% of that 10% will actually buy, and all of a sudden you're selling to 1%. Selling to businesses is much easier, 99% of businesses can afford 200K if it replaces 3 x 70K humans.
  - nsvd2 3mo ago
    Actually the high income households are becoming a greater and greater share of spending, referred to as the "K shaped" economy. For example, the top quintile of households accounts for about 40% of all consumer spending.
    - underlipton 3mo ago
      But they only need so many robot housekeepers. And their standards are going to be higher than the average consumer's. If you're targeting that demo, slumming it with a $20k robot won't do; with the performance, bespoke service and maintenance, and other considerations, might as well bump up to $100k or more. But, in the current zeitgeist, you're not making an aspirational product, you're just creating another icon of class warfare that turns off the consumers you were hoping to eventually reach.
  - jfaat 3mo ago
    Your napkin math only shows that the market is identical. There's about 35m businesses operating in the US. So by selling to 10% of those you sell the exact same number of robots...
nearbuy 3mo ago
Unitree's R1 humanoid robot is only about $6000, and it's still a nascent, smallish scale technology. They will come down. If the future home robots are any good, it saves you from buying a dishwasher and robot vacuum. It can replace a maid/cleaning service and gardener/lawn-mowing service. For anyone paying for those services, it pays for itself. $1000 isn't that high. Probably about a third of American households have an appliance over $2000, which is still a massive market.
- monknomo 3mo ago
  I doubt it'd save you from purchasing a dishwasher - those things are very efficient and not very expensive. Perhaps it'd save you from loading and unloading a dishwasher
  - xnx 3mo ago
    Have 2 dishwashers, and you never need to load or unload (as an extra step).
  - nearbuy 3mo ago
    I have a dishwasher and I still usually just hand wash. It takes about 10 seconds to wash a dish. The side benefit is all your dishes are always available. With the dishwasher, up to one full dishwasher load are dirty at any time, which means you need more dishes and more cupboard space than someone without a dishwasher. If the robot is going to clear your dishes and wash them for you right away, what's the dishwasher for? To save the robot 10 minutes?
    - imp0cat 3mo ago
      Mostly to save water and energy. I have a hard time believing the robot would be more efficient washing dishes by hand.
      - nearbuy 3mo ago
        That's a good reason to use a dishwasher, and you should keep doing it. But the overall waste is small and people aren't going to care. I'm not saying people who already have a dishwasher will throw it away. But a robot makes installing a new dishwasher much less tempting. At my utility prices, it costs about 5¢ to hand-wash one serving (plate, pan, glass, utensils, and a bowl) with running water. That's not nothing, but it's dwarfed by the energy use of using the oven and the supply-chain energy and water use of the food if it includes meat. People will casually waste 10x that energy without a second thought when they don't need to just because it's convenient, or because they're used to doing things that way. The dishwasher looks more unfavorable if you're considering installing one in a small apartment or condo. Apart from the cost of the dishwasher, you need space to install it, and more cupboard space to keep more dishes, glasses, etc. For an extra 4¢ per person-meal, having your robot do the dishes buys you the convenience of skipping all that and having all your dishes clean and ready all the time.
jaccola 3mo ago
Another huge blocker (that is essentially just cost too) is maintenance. These things are like 1000x more complex than a car, need to work in a diverse range of environments, handle water, household chemicals, different humidities, kids, etc… maybe eventually robots will service robots but that seems very hard! And talking of kids, these will have to be exceedingly safe, a 6ft machine falling on a child is probably a worry most households could do without.
- tartoran 3mo ago
  We'll probably get there in some shape or from but I agree, we're absolutely not there yet. I don't see humanoid robots normalized in households anytime soon but at the same time they'll probably be a thing outside the home.
luckydata 3mo ago
if you give me a robot that cleans the house and can do dishes and laundry I'll easily pay the cost of a compact car for that. I know a LOT of working families that would feel similarly.
salemh 3mo ago
[dead]
jonplackett 3mo ago
Yeah if you can afford the probably 10x it will actually cost, you can also just afford a cleaner to come twice a week and be able to do a wider variety of tasks (anyone going to trust this with ironing?)
f6v 3mo ago
Self-driving car brings a robot cleaner to your door step once a week.
codegeek 3mo ago
You never know the future but imagine the people who were bearish on personal computers when it wasn't a thing yet but was being discussed. Imagine Email, Internet etc etc. Now they are commodities. I am sure one day AI Robots will be a commodity that we could buy for $1000. May be 10 years from now. But it is coming.
pessimizer 3mo ago
> You'd have a hard time convincing most American families to purchase anything with a >$1000 price tag. They all have cars. Turns out you can finance things, and turn them into forever debts. Paying $30K to never have to do chores again, or maybe even cook again, and live in a clean neat environment is not only an amazing proposition that opens up a lot of free time for people, but will also have a lot of social pressure behind it. We have social pressure that causes people to buy >$1000 phones to virtually no marginal benefit over $20 phones. They will be paid off at $500/mo over 10 years, and most renters might just use the one that came with their apartment. If they're more like $80K or $100K I could see having a problem selling them. But if they basically turned apartment buildings into hotels, they would be a bargain for landlords; just give them the keys. edit: of course, sci-fi has already rehearsed this. You can watch any number of movies and tv shows with families walking through a robot showroom guided by a guy in a cheap suit offering to give them the best deal. I'm sure you could find written examples from the 40s.
supern0va 3mo ago
> For homes, it's a very different bar. You'd have a hard time convincing most American families to purchase anything with a >$1000 price tag. There are plenty of white collar employees in cities paying $500+/month for someone to come clean their home. As one of those people, I could easily see paying low five figures for something like this if it actually worked well and could replace most household labor.
- qurren 3mo ago
  Most consumers don't think like that. Businesses do. Part of the reason is upfront commitment is scary and risky for personal money, but not scary for a business.
  - supern0va 3mo ago
    Most consumers? Sure. Upper middle class consumers? They're the sort more likely to buy cars with cash if they're dissatisfied with the value of the financing offered. As with most things, it'll cater to that demographic and then filter down.
lanthissa 3mo ago
if all it could do was operate a lawn mower and a shovel, the annual value to a homeowner in the north east is ~1-2k depending on lawn size assuming they value their free time at the same amount as their hourly wage. what you have to keep in mind is homeowners salary is way above avg salary so anything you can do to effect them has a much larger impact than it would seem at first.
verdverm 3mo ago
I think ~car is a more likely range, there's a lot of value in cooking / cleaning, Americans buy cars pretty frequently
qsera 3mo ago
If someone can make a robot that can keep a house and surroundings clean and pretty, it is going to sell like hot cakes..
badpun 3mo ago
They could be shared, and work practically non-stop (minus nights, as that would wake people up). That'd bring the per-consumer cost down by a large fraction. The sharing would likely be organized by a commercial third-party, but still, it could be much cheaper than human cleaners. Having said that, it could still be decades till the robot is ready to be released into human homes unsupervised. The variation in human homes, what people store in them etc. is not easy. However, it could be ready for hotels much sooner.
Dumblydorr 3mo ago
Price point: they’ll be very low volume and very high price. There’s enough inequality and plenty of cash at the top to support such luxury robots. Everyone else will be doing their chores the old fashioned way, with their own hands.
phyzix5761 3mo ago
Just slap an Apple logo on it and you can charge whatever you want.

by qurren 3mo ago

heaney-555 3mo ago

>You'd have a hard time convincing most American families to purchase anything with a >$1000 price tag. Like cars, they'll likely purchase them through finance deals, with a monthly payment. Or perhaps even rent/lease them.

meowkit 3mo ago
Much easier to remotely brick a robot too I imagine
mbil 3mo ago
Leasing seems like it could make sense given rapid upgrades in the technology. Why spend $15k on a home robot that will be obsoleted in the next few years?
- garbageman 3mo ago
  Leasing is out, but locked-in subscriptions are in!
qurren 3mo ago
Cars are an absolute necessity in the US unless you live in one of the small handful of cities that have viable public transit. Different thing altogether. Robots aren't a necessity, and for a price tag in the tens of thousands, most people will just mop their own floors and do their own laundry.
- georgemcbay 3mo ago
  > Robots aren't a necessity, and for a price tag in the tens of thousands, most people will just mop their own floors and do their own laundry. And (regardless of the costs involved) if I were going to pay money to not do this stuff myself, I'd rather pay a human to do it because I know there are humans out there that could use the work and I value them much more than I value Google and other corporations making even more obscene amounts of money selling future e-waste.
- micromacrofoot 3mo ago
  $45k cars are not neccessary though, and that's the average american car loan today
  - bigfishrunning 3mo ago
    That's really more of a financial literacy problem though. People don't see $45k car, they see $600/mo payment. And car dealers very much sell on the payment and not on the actual price.
    - pessimizer 3mo ago
      Why would it be different for a robot?
      - bigfishrunning 3mo ago
        People *need* a car, and a salesman manipulates them into buying more car then they need. People aren't convinced they *need* a robot. increasing your spend by 25% is a smaller change then increasing your spend by infinity%
  - drusepth 3mo ago
    nit: 45k is the average car loan for a new car, but average for a used car is $25k. Purchasing a car is a necessity but purchasing a new car is a luxury.
michaelmrose 3mo ago
People are financing small consumer goods with 3 digit price tags because they can't afford their mediocre already leveraged life. They borrow high 4 to low 5 figures for a car because they can't get to work to earn money so they don't have to join the bums sleeping on the cardboard. They will not be borrowing high 5 figures to low 6 figures for Rosie the Robot. If Rosie was the only output she would never happen. Rosie might happen as a side benefit of replacing American workers but only for the rich people. The vast majority which may be replaced would probably be better off burning down the factory rather than celebrate their upcoming domestic helper.
- randomNumber7 3mo ago
  If you have a robot doing household work you can spend more time at work /S
kelvinjps10 3mo ago
At that point why not have a human cleaning service it will probably be cheaper
- luckydata 3mo ago
  it's not cheap at all and the privacy and logistical implications of letting a stranger inside your house is something not everyone wants to deal with. I would rather have a robot.
  - stirfish 3mo ago
    I don't trust a robot with my privacy, but I know Linette isn't building a profile of my shopping habits and Wi-Fi traffic. She is also careful to not let my cats out.
  - blacksmith_tb 3mo ago
    Not to pull on the tinfoil hat, but I would assume most commercially available home cleaning robots will be covered with cameras, mics, and other sensors, and connected to their manufacturer's cloud... I don't pay for housecleaning, but I would vet humans quite differently.
  - infinitezest 3mo ago
    Suggesting that a robot is the more privacy friendly option is an interesting take.
    - Marha01 3mo ago
      Why not? A recording from a robot can be potentially viewed by a real human, if the company is not reputable (happened with robotic vacuums). But by default, no humans will view it. A human house cleaner by definition is a real human looking at your home every time.
      - defrost 3mo ago
        One human, with a single set of human eyes and a limited network of associates with few immediate criminals looking to take advantage (although, yes, that does happen). Versus a small army of roomba's and equivalents mapping out floor plans and tangentially exposing human occupation times with that large data set almost certainly exposed to criminal and surveillance networks that will almost certainly use some of that choicer data to their advantage. It's literally trade offs in both cases.
lovasoa 3mo ago
Of course we'll rent them! I don't even want to keep a robot in my flat all the time. But that means speed does matter after all. The renting company will need to clean as many flats as possible with a single robot in a single day.

neutronicus 3mo ago

I mean, a twice-monthly house-cleaning service is running you ballpark 5k/year and people treat that shit as non-negotiable. I tried to claw back that line item after our second baby was born (wife didn't want them in the house anyway when we had a newborn), and it was completely unsuccessful. She claimed misery and all our friends were on her side. So the lifestyle stayed inflated.

qurren 3mo ago
Yes, but: 1. 80%+ of Americans can't afford house cleaning services. I'm a software engineer in silicon valley and even I clean my own house because I don't think I can afford it. My rents have gone up by more than 5K in the last year, my salary hasn't, so that's coming out of my house cleaning budget. 2. Even if you can afford 5K/year on it, the cleaning service is not an upfront commitment. You can bail anytime when you get laid off and clean your own house. 3. Consumers don't budget rationally. Businesses do.
- neutronicus 3mo ago
  Well, to be honest, a cleaning service is a much more logical purchaser for a cleaning robot. Since you can truck it all over creation, work it 60 hours a week, and undercut all the human cleaning crews on price. As opposed to a household which might not have enough work to fully utilize it, or just have trouble scheduling times where it can work without causing disruption.
soperj 3mo ago
> ballpark 5k/year How big is your house? When we had a cleaning lady it was $70 a go. Under $2000 for every second week.
- pertymcpert 3mo ago
  I have a 1300 sqft house, 3b2b. Costs me around $200 for a cleaning.
  - 3mo ago

tootie 3mo ago

I think domestic robots will make a lot of incremental progress and that few, if any, will be humanoid. We'll see a laundry folder and sock picker-upper and they'll be more like roombas or just big cubes. And tethered.

kibwen 3mo ago
The more likely scenario is that the hucksters currently hyping the idea of humanoid robots will gradually move the goalposts so that, when we eventually get a big, soft, stationary cube with six inflatable robot arms they'll point to it and say "behold, a humanoid robot!" and declare their predictions vindicated.

jameshart 3mo ago

Robot lawnmowers are mostly over $1000 already and they only do one thing. Heck, a lot of lawnmowers are over $1000. You can pay over $500 for an automatic cat litter box. Robot vacuums can be cheap but run to $600 or so. Household appliances is a robust sector where people have a proven track record of spending a lot of money.

memonkey 3mo ago
For all of these things, then what's the point of having a humanoid robot then? The last thing is a folding laundry bot that I would happily also pay $1000 for.
- lowbloodsugar 3mo ago
  My wife hates having other people in our house and we both hate cleaning. If it worked, we’d drop $5k no problem. It’ll be $5k and a $50/mo sub? Sold!
- mrexroad 3mo ago
  > folding laundry robot This is my dream for a house chore robot. If I could dump hampers of clothes into a receptacle and get stacks of folded clothes out, I’d happily pay $1k. Household of 5; my kids each produce 3-4 sets of clothes a day (sleep, school, sports, after school). I run wash in AM so dryer finishes before 3pm (pg&e ToU) and then I’m focused on other things for rest of day. More often than not, I get to bed to find a near full hamper of clothes dumped where I sleep and then have to sort/fold/deliver. Bonus points if robot can sort different items to different stacks/bundles. I don’t need AI/robotics to save me time from having to think, research, or code… I need AI/robotics to save me time so I can think, research, or code.
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
  - imtringued 3mo ago
    A foldimate costs a fraction of your $1k.

si1entstill 3mo ago

I'm not sure. I think house cleaning/chores require at least a "part-time" job's work of work for the average household (especially with children). We may be atypical, but my partner and I don't want to hire out a cleaning service and deal with the whole human component. But, I think we'd gladly pay 15k+ if it allowed us to take on the additional gainful workload. Even at a 20k price tag, I suspect we would likely have made up the difference in under a year.

qurren 3mo ago
If you can even afford 20K you're in the top 10% of the US population. It's not a very big market, and even selling to that market is hard. Probably only 10% of that 10% will actually buy, and all of a sudden you're selling to 1%. Selling to businesses is much easier, 99% of businesses can afford 200K if it replaces 3 x 70K humans.
- nsvd2 3mo ago
  Actually the high income households are becoming a greater and greater share of spending, referred to as the "K shaped" economy. For example, the top quintile of households accounts for about 40% of all consumer spending.
  - underlipton 3mo ago
    But they only need so many robot housekeepers. And their standards are going to be higher than the average consumer's. If you're targeting that demo, slumming it with a $20k robot won't do; with the performance, bespoke service and maintenance, and other considerations, might as well bump up to $100k or more. But, in the current zeitgeist, you're not making an aspirational product, you're just creating another icon of class warfare that turns off the consumers you were hoping to eventually reach.
- jfaat 3mo ago
  Your napkin math only shows that the market is identical. There's about 35m businesses operating in the US. So by selling to 10% of those you sell the exact same number of robots...

nearbuy 3mo ago

Unitree's R1 humanoid robot is only about $6000, and it's still a nascent, smallish scale technology. They will come down. If the future home robots are any good, it saves you from buying a dishwasher and robot vacuum. It can replace a maid/cleaning service and gardener/lawn-mowing service. For anyone paying for those services, it pays for itself. $1000 isn't that high. Probably about a third of American households have an appliance over $2000, which is still a massive market.

monknomo 3mo ago
I doubt it'd save you from purchasing a dishwasher - those things are very efficient and not very expensive. Perhaps it'd save you from loading and unloading a dishwasher
- xnx 3mo ago
  Have 2 dishwashers, and you never need to load or unload (as an extra step).
- nearbuy 3mo ago
  I have a dishwasher and I still usually just hand wash. It takes about 10 seconds to wash a dish. The side benefit is all your dishes are always available. With the dishwasher, up to one full dishwasher load are dirty at any time, which means you need more dishes and more cupboard space than someone without a dishwasher. If the robot is going to clear your dishes and wash them for you right away, what's the dishwasher for? To save the robot 10 minutes?
  - imp0cat 3mo ago
    Mostly to save water and energy. I have a hard time believing the robot would be more efficient washing dishes by hand.
    - nearbuy 3mo ago
      That's a good reason to use a dishwasher, and you should keep doing it. But the overall waste is small and people aren't going to care. I'm not saying people who already have a dishwasher will throw it away. But a robot makes installing a new dishwasher much less tempting. At my utility prices, it costs about 5¢ to hand-wash one serving (plate, pan, glass, utensils, and a bowl) with running water. That's not nothing, but it's dwarfed by the energy use of using the oven and the supply-chain energy and water use of the food if it includes meat. People will casually waste 10x that energy without a second thought when they don't need to just because it's convenient, or because they're used to doing things that way. The dishwasher looks more unfavorable if you're considering installing one in a small apartment or condo. Apart from the cost of the dishwasher, you need space to install it, and more cupboard space to keep more dishes, glasses, etc. For an extra 4¢ per person-meal, having your robot do the dishes buys you the convenience of skipping all that and having all your dishes clean and ready all the time.

jaccola 3mo ago

Another huge blocker (that is essentially just cost too) is maintenance. These things are like 1000x more complex than a car, need to work in a diverse range of environments, handle water, household chemicals, different humidities, kids, etc… maybe eventually robots will service robots but that seems very hard! And talking of kids, these will have to be exceedingly safe, a 6ft machine falling on a child is probably a worry most households could do without.

tartoran 3mo ago
We'll probably get there in some shape or from but I agree, we're absolutely not there yet. I don't see humanoid robots normalized in households anytime soon but at the same time they'll probably be a thing outside the home.

luckydata 3mo ago

if you give me a robot that cleans the house and can do dishes and laundry I'll easily pay the cost of a compact car for that. I know a LOT of working families that would feel similarly.

salemh 3mo ago

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jonplackett 3mo ago

Yeah if you can afford the probably 10x it will actually cost, you can also just afford a cleaner to come twice a week and be able to do a wider variety of tasks (anyone going to trust this with ironing?)

f6v 3mo ago

Self-driving car brings a robot cleaner to your door step once a week.

codegeek 3mo ago

You never know the future but imagine the people who were bearish on personal computers when it wasn't a thing yet but was being discussed. Imagine Email, Internet etc etc. Now they are commodities. I am sure one day AI Robots will be a commodity that we could buy for $1000. May be 10 years from now. But it is coming.

pessimizer 3mo ago

> You'd have a hard time convincing most American families to purchase anything with a >$1000 price tag. They all have cars. Turns out you can finance things, and turn them into forever debts. Paying $30K to never have to do chores again, or maybe even cook again, and live in a clean neat environment is not only an amazing proposition that opens up a lot of free time for people, but will also have a lot of social pressure behind it. We have social pressure that causes people to buy >$1000 phones to virtually no marginal benefit over $20 phones. They will be paid off at $500/mo over 10 years, and most renters might just use the one that came with their apartment. If they're more like $80K or $100K I could see having a problem selling them. But if they basically turned apartment buildings into hotels, they would be a bargain for landlords; just give them the keys. edit: of course, sci-fi has already rehearsed this. You can watch any number of movies and tv shows with families walking through a robot showroom guided by a guy in a cheap suit offering to give them the best deal. I'm sure you could find written examples from the 40s.

supern0va 3mo ago

> For homes, it's a very different bar. You'd have a hard time convincing most American families to purchase anything with a >$1000 price tag. There are plenty of white collar employees in cities paying $500+/month for someone to come clean their home. As one of those people, I could easily see paying low five figures for something like this if it actually worked well and could replace most household labor.

qurren 3mo ago
Most consumers don't think like that. Businesses do. Part of the reason is upfront commitment is scary and risky for personal money, but not scary for a business.
- supern0va 3mo ago
  Most consumers? Sure. Upper middle class consumers? They're the sort more likely to buy cars with cash if they're dissatisfied with the value of the financing offered. As with most things, it'll cater to that demographic and then filter down.

lanthissa 3mo ago

if all it could do was operate a lawn mower and a shovel, the annual value to a homeowner in the north east is ~1-2k depending on lawn size assuming they value their free time at the same amount as their hourly wage. what you have to keep in mind is homeowners salary is way above avg salary so anything you can do to effect them has a much larger impact than it would seem at first.

verdverm 3mo ago

I think ~car is a more likely range, there's a lot of value in cooking / cleaning, Americans buy cars pretty frequently

qsera 3mo ago

If someone can make a robot that can keep a house and surroundings clean and pretty, it is going to sell like hot cakes..

badpun 3mo ago

They could be shared, and work practically non-stop (minus nights, as that would wake people up). That'd bring the per-consumer cost down by a large fraction. The sharing would likely be organized by a commercial third-party, but still, it could be much cheaper than human cleaners. Having said that, it could still be decades till the robot is ready to be released into human homes unsupervised. The variation in human homes, what people store in them etc. is not easy. However, it could be ready for hotels much sooner.

Dumblydorr 3mo ago

Price point: they’ll be very low volume and very high price. There’s enough inequality and plenty of cash at the top to support such luxury robots. Everyone else will be doing their chores the old fashioned way, with their own hands.

phyzix5761 3mo ago

Just slap an Apple logo on it and you can charge whatever you want.