Contrarian point of view -- (edit) this clever device overall takes too much capital and solves no real problem, meanwhile pressing and urgent problems needing tech, remain unaddressed, year after year. For centuries, real, physical actions in home life were improved with (mainly mechanical) devices subject to patent. The industrial revolution provides vast flows of consumer goods. Finance prospered (mainly) with loa…
> get-rich personal consumption devices
I guess you don't have any disabled friends/family.
> he hopes to see the robot deployed in home environments, It will need bigger wheels or legs then because it would be stuck in one room in my house because of the thresholds at each doorway and the rugs and carpets. And my house has three stories so I would need three of them because it can't climb stairs. It's getting tiresome to read crap like this because while it might work in a dwelling purpose built for it it…
With three stories you can afford three robots. Imagine being the operator waiting for these things to go up and down stairs, that sucks.
move to Singapore then. they have full-time, live-in maids from indonesia or phillipines that can cost as low as USD 300-400 a month. i grew up in Singapore, where I had 3 maids on staff at all times, and they took care of everything, 24/7.
Not everyone is ok with treating a fellow human like a robot.
I use a good weekly cleaner, and she does not organize my stuff. If anything, hiring her has forced me to organize more frequently so my stuff is not in her way when she comes to clean. It's a totally different use case to have a labor-saving device available 24/7. For example, I did not stop using my dishwasher when I hired a cleaner, and my cleaner does not do my dishes or put them away.
My dream house includes a kitchen with enough dishwashers that they function as the cupboards for the dishes as well. then when the dishes are down they're already away.
Just replace your shelves with a couple of desktop dishwashers. The water use isn't great but soap and food waste isn't a heavy chemical. The obstacles to home ownership are problematic, however.
What happened to gas lighters when street lights were replaced with electric lights?
Well, what did happen to them? The implication of your statement was that they were obviously totally fine, but is that a given? It's possible they were miserable and then died. Switching careers is not always easy and smooth.
Survivor's bias says even for the ones for whom it wasn't smooth and died a horribly gristly death that we wouldn't hear from them.
Things it can't do: - go up stairs - get up after a fall / reset itself - pick up heavy objects - precise motion (so no cooking) - interact with buttons or touch screens (so laundry might be hard) The one use case I think it might be worth it is if the robot can take a room full of toys and return everything back to where it belongs. Kind of like a one click, reset this room. If it can help me keep organized and clea…
I'd gladly pay 5k for a robot that can auto-organize my stuff around the house
Cheaper option might be to have less stuff in the house :P
a human cleaner isn't really a perfect substitute for a robot. people might feel uncomfortable with having a human worker in their house for a variety of reasons. most people I know actually clean their whole house before the cleaning service shows up. you don't have to feel guilt/embarrassment at the state of your house when the robot starts working. I could imagine a lot of people might be willing to pay a premium…
There's something darkly funny about people so embarrassed to have a cleaning person in their house, that they create a solution that would put most cleaning people out of a job. The knowledge workers automate jobs away, leading pundits to say the future for low-skilled workers is to provide boutique services for the upper class. The end being that the upper class is too ashamed to actually consume those services if…
Not to brag, but my house has a a machine (and a room!) dedicated to cleaning a very embarrassing thing. I'll go even further and brag that I use this room and machine daily! Western society has normalized using the toilet, thankfully, and for a long time now, but it wasn't always the norm.
Are any tele-robots used in agriculture? I could imagine using AI to get the robot hands within a few inches of each piece of produce or a desired task and then one operator could quickly swap between many robots.
I think some tractors have tele-operation capability, but the farmer typically sits within them to monitor operations