91–100 of 182 posts
> For any chore it doesn’t know, you can schedule a 1X Expert to guide it, helping NEO learn while getting the job done. Is this a humanoid robot that's controlled by someone in a call center remotely doing your laundry? Putting aside ethical reservations about how much they are probably paying per task, that feels like wash and fold with extra steps.
That one doesn't have to do, hence the appeal.
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I hope you do! I'm skeptical of v1 of this technology, but I could imagine a mature version of this technology could be great. And $500/mo for essentially an always-available housekeeper seems very reasonable. Where I live, having a housekeeper come for a few hours once a week costs about $100 a week, or $400/mo. Having a robot that could potentially always be there to: * Tidy up. * Clean * Do laundry * Help with oth…
> And $500/mo for essentially an always-available housekeeper seems very reasonable. Maybe, but you should factor in that many chores can't be done at all, and those that can be done will take ~10x as long.
Sure, my old washer could wash a load in say an hour and the dryer could dry that load in 2 hours. So 3 hours per load. Except that was only true for the first load. The second load has to wait for the dryer to be done with the first load, so it actually takes 2 hours to "wash" and then 2 hours to dry, so 4 hours total. And that assumes that I'm home or available at just the right moment to swap the loads. And forget running a load overnight. I mean I can, but why would I want to leave a sopping wet mass of clothes sitting waiting to be thrown into the dryer. The new one takes anywhere from 4-6 hours for a cycle to run. Seems like a terrible trade off, except I can start a load at 11 at night, and have a cleaned and dried load in the morning. I can throw a load in before I leave for work, and it will be cleaned and dried when I get home. It doesn't matter than it took an extra 3 hours because I wasn't there waiting on it, and I didn't have to swap the loads.
A side and unexpected benefit of this machine too is that it's actually faster at drying loads of bedding. The big problem with a classic tumble dryer and bedding is that it spins in one direction constantly. Early on when the bedding is all wet and heavy it starts rolling into a ball, and no matter how good your dryer's sensors are, you will almost inevitably open that dryer to a mass of hot on the outside bedding and damp on the inside. You'll unravel the mess, and throw it back in for another round or two. Because the drum unit for the all in one is the same as the washer unit, it spins in both directions while drying, just like the washing machine does. As a result, bedding never gets wrapped and balled up during the drying phase and the bedding comes out dry first time every time.
I love the FAQ that for some reason tells you this thing cannot cook but it doesn't tell you what it can actually do
* Water Plants
* Turn off lights
* Get the door
* clean up trash
* Load/Empty dishwasher
* Tidy House
* Laundry
* Bartend Party
* Feed Pets
* Play music as the most over engineered Bluetooth speaker
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Per the keynote video, the bodysuit is machine washable. As long as 1X stays in business or enthusiasts exist, I have to imagine there will be some option to clean/replace the head covering on the $20,000 robot.
Will it wash itself? Would be totally ironic if we had to strip the robot of its clothes and wash it :)
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The fact that it feels like we're really getting there. The product is not perfect, and most importantly not shipped yet, but it's one of first humanoid robots I saw with a price tag and customer focus. Point being, we might be at an iPhone-like pivotal moment for home robots.
Don't be too confused by the shape. The 1X isn't so different from the robots of the 1980s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-LrNAKWZfI
If you showed a 1980s EE any component taken from the Neo, it'd look like science fiction. Some of the least sophisticated parts (motors & batteries) are still an order of magnitude better than anything available 40 years ago; the most sophisticated (processors, memory, camera sensors) are at least six orders of magnitude better. The Pentagon of the 1980s would have fought a small war to get their hands on a few of the MEMS IMU chips that we put in video game controllers.
Surely the overlap between people with both the wealth and the preference for industrial machinery remote controlled by an underpaid worker from the Philippines in their house (around their children) over an organic house keeper is vanishingly thin, no? The total addressable market for giant fighting robots on the other hand...
For purpose of this discussion I'm ignoring ethics (other than slaves and there I resorted to legal concerns to sidestep the issue) - If it was possible for me to get an affordable human in my house I would no longer be able to ignore those issues.
Oof. The roomba guy said that the form factor of robots inform customer expectations. I keep thinking about that and wincing when I see these humanoid robots. Even if there's impressive engineering that goes into them, people are going to expect they can do human things. When they can't, they're going to be disappointed. I expect my robot vacuum to vacuum the floor, because it's a little wheeled disc on the floor. It…
Humanoid only seems useful if it can do stairs - something many form factors fail at. Though I'd expect a centaur form factor could do stairs better and probably is cheaper.
Since it is remotely operated anyway, it would be much more practical on a stable wheeled base and a pair of DEX-EE hands.
We've seen that people behave worse when you introduce indirection. People act worse on the internet. Soldiers have an easier time killing with drones than in person. The ethical issue is in both directions: its inhumane to the operator, but I also don't want to feel like a fake person on a video screen to them.
This is then exacerbated when you realize that the people operating this machine are almost certainly not being paid well, creating obvious and legitimate negative incentives. Then you plop them into the households of people with the insane wealth required to afford this. You might think that I have just described the situation with maids (and to some extent, I agree! I have never really felt comfortable that dynamic either), but this is actually different, because you are adding in the indirection and making actions and interactions feel less "real" to both parties: the clients are likely to treat the robots worse than they would a human helper, and the operators may feel these rude clients they see on their monitors aren't as real as the people around them.
Their teleoperator position from 3-11 PM, M-F, pays between $22 and $31 an hour with benefits and is onsite in Palo Alto.[1] I'll be curious if they move those positions to a lower cost-of-living area as they scale up. 1: https://1x.recruitee.com/o/robot-operator
This is the next gig job. Poor people working as servants for rich people halfway across the world.