> 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.
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.
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
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.
I get that it's funny, but that's almost never true. And the business risk is on the robotics company. That's why I'm saying maybe somewhere it happens once, but it's just like safety and Uber drivers, the scrutiny on the brand causes really good incentives. Uber is way way safer than taxis ever were, or are. Women even drive for Uber - they could never have been safe driving taxis.
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.
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.
There are at least two companies out there that can fold some laundry in a controlled environment already. At this point it's just a matter of categorizing fabrics and shapes and expanding that knowledge. Two years at the outside until it can fold 80% of your laundry.
Totally agree but the idea is this gives you a teleoperation environment that is truly on policy and not some artificial lab. The idea is that these robots, like those Amazon stores, are predominantly just controlled by actual humans.
Hey I totally agree I do not want a teleoperator looking into my house, it’s just so deliciously tempting to get in home on policy data. Not sure the reason why they are super interested in home environments vs business or public spaces.
This is basically a solved problem. Humans have latency, more than your Internet connection. We predict what's going to happen based on the shapes we see. Computer vision and LBMs do the same thing.
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
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.
>> Sleep Dealer depicts a dystopian future to explore ways in which technology both oppresses and connects migrants.[2] A fortified wall has ended unauthorized Mexico-US immigration, but migrant workers are replaced by robots, remotely controlled by the same class of would-be emigrants.
Upon re-reading it, yes, I apologize, got it wrong. An army of poor people remotely controlling an army of robots already implanted into rich houses would be fun.
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.
Interesting. I'm curious if you've seen this in operation and can vouch that it actually performs exceptionally better than residential products? I ask because the marketing claims all sound very similar; vision based object avoidance, mapping, and so on. So, I am skeptical this actual does anything much better besides the mow quality itself. It looks like this is good for large mostly open spaces and it basically knocks that out while the minimal lawn crew focuses on the trimming, edges, and cleanup. All to say, it looks bigger not better from a tech perspective. I still see the value for a commercial crew.
I don't know a thing about it other than that it and others like it exist in the market today. My point is only that there's no market for a residential buyer of a $20,000 mower.
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.
I'm not sure I'm understanding your opaque comment correctly. But I'm assuming you saying the goal is to crush the already lowest levels of labor wages around the world? Because nobody's building this with the express intention of putting pressure on already low wages. They're building it because if they can make that labor productive and in demand, put it to work, they can monetize it. Labor rates may actually increase. Operating these things may be a specialty of its own with levels of skill. Then it's an economy of it's own and some of the demand may move to where the now-lower labor is in the future.
Good points. It can match willing buyers and sellers of basic household labor that couldn't have happened previously due to economic frictions resulting from distance. This can increase the size of the pie for everyone.
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:
I’m not sure remote operations needs to be like a VR sim or joystick control of every movement. It might be something more similar to prompts. “Go to front door” “bring in packages” “open packages” “sort trash into pile” <click for item select>”is not trash” “take trash to bin”. Once the house is mapped and a good deal of these routines are learned they can be executed with some fuzzy input to the automation. In my mind this is still full teleoperation
It would be great if the operator could say things like, in above example, “you forgot to close the door, make sure you never leave this door open, even if you have to open it for a task and it’s not explicitly said you should always imply the door needs to be closed after the task. As a general rule, the door should never be open longer than 1 minute longer than it needs to be for task performance” or something similar and this trains the model over time.
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.
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.
Alex Rivera's 2008 movie Sleep Dealer is not without flaws, but it left quite an impression on me. I watched it it after seeing it recommended here in a comments thread on an article about military drone operators, I should probably watch it again with fresh eyes.
EDIT: Jeez, it looks like that's an 11 years old thread. Time does indeed fly.
EDIT 2: The source for the claim is paywalled, but this is how the Cultural impact chapter of the movie's Wikipedia page closes:
> In 2025, Rivera noted that a tech CEO claimed the film had been an inspiration for his company to employ a remote labour force in the Global South in order to operate robots in the Global North, and that the film has been used in pitch decks for various start-ups.
... once again bringing to mind the "At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from the classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus" meme.
That's an ever-dwindling section of the population. Middle class and upper middle class is going away, we're very clearly heading towards ultra-polarization.
For some reason I always get pushback for pointing it out, but we are very quickly heading towards a bifurcated world like Elysium, possibly minus the space station, where a tiny ultra-rich class lives in luxury while physically separated and protected from billions who live in squalor. We're producing everything needed to build and enforce that world!
How is it worse compared with workers that are currently employed by the oligarch class? It's not like they don't have people doing menial work for them right now. And automation of menial work is a good thing!
Do you think the current AI automated menial work and left only the fun parts? It seems like the opposite, it took any fun from coding and left the drudgery of debugging code one didn't write intact.
Or maybe it can be used to provide job opportunities to people currently underserved, for example, if you are bound to a hospital bed you can get a VR telepresence job to make some money and help pay your medical bills.
We're doomed if regular people have fully absorbed the propaganda to the extent that they'd think asking invalid hospital-bed-ridden people to work remotely for the uber-rich rather than fixing the tax situation so that those uber-rich can buy one less golden toilet for their private planes (and the state can provide for those poor people) is a good idea.
The math doesn't math. You could tax all the ultra rich people at 100% and it wouldn't significantly change the social contract. The part people don't like hearing is that it's a lot of the middle class that has to pay much higher taxes if you want those guarantees of minimum living standards.
I think that's a very different goal post. We were talking about the social contract, publicly funded services. You must realize it's just not a meaningful amount, right? That was my initial point. If you want a real safety net, you have to tax the middle class, and a lot.
That's not really how that works. Almost all of that money is tied up in operating businesses. Most very rich people mostly hold investments in stock - and generally at large companies. That's debt, not an asset I think the way you're thinking of. Overall, taking that money out of market holdings reduces the value of those holdings, for everyone else as well. You really end up lowering the retirement savings value of everyone who has a retirement plan by some amount.
If you assume your taxation mechanism is actually perfect and actually gets you the theoretical maximum amount of money from the ultra rich, or even the fairly rich, it's still orders of magnitude less than it costs to make sure everyone is taken care of like the scenario we were talking about above.
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.
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.
> 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.
Suspiciously absent: a rough idea of what percentage of tasks need the assistance.