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Comment by matt_morgan | Hacker News Reader

I always thought this is how we should clean our houses (when we pay other people to clean our houses). Robovacs are great for smoothish floors, but most other cleaning tasks are too complicated for autonomous robots. With a good humanoid robot controlled by someone living anywhere, it would be easier.

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I don't really understand why, but the idea of somebody sitting behind a computer somewhere, controlling my vacuum is just really weird and unsettling. I also understand that this could help handicapped people or people in less fortunate countries earn a decent wage, but then again, it feels odd. Also, paying for a vacuum and then paying a fee to the person using it feels weird... Even though hiring a cleaning lady is pretty much the same thing.

Thanks for this, now I'll be thinking about this all day. And I'll probably have intense discussions with people about the ethics and their feelings toward this idea at parties... Because I know I'll bring it up.

I feel the same unease. In China, blind people are often given jobs as piano tuners and masseuses. In a country with few resources and opportunities for disabled people, I first viewed these types of jobs positively. However, people can be pressured or even forced into taking on these careers in order to be less of a burden on their families.

>However, people can be pressured or even forced into taking on these careers in order to be less of a burden on their families.

You could argue that able-bodied people are also pressured or even forced to take on careers. What fraction of piano tuners, sighted or not, could quit their jobs and live without being a burden to their families?

I frequently muse about how I was coerced into a 20 year "career" in software. I liked computers, but this is not what I liked. I've refound that balance and it's going well, but at no way do I feel like there was ever another road. I tried tons of things. To quote a popular cartoon, "It's like slavery with extra steps!"

This sounds pretty common sadly. People need to make money so they get a job. At some point they get so into whatever they're doing it's difficult to switch.

Most people don't like their jobs. Most people tolerate it and appreciate it though because for most people having a job is a lot better than not having a job. However I can't say I really know anyone who would continue doing their job if they weren't paid to do it.

One issue is jobs are generally all or nothing. An equivalent pay cut for an extra 4 weeks off a year is appealing. But, most companies hate the idea of someone working 10 months a year vs 11 months a year.

Well, all the simple jobs that you can drop into and out of like that are being automated, so competition for the remaining jobs is fierce and accordingly pay and conditions are terrible. The remaining jobs are all, to some degree, knowledge jobs, and there are significant sunk costs in bringing each employee up to speed. Would you rather spend $50-$100k (minimum) to train one full time employee, or $100-200k to train two part-time employees to cover that same role?

I can’t think of any company that pays for that kind of training. Due to frequent job hopping company specific on boarding costs are generally kept fairly low.

More widely people truly work alone, companies need redundancy in the case of illness, vaction, or other such matters. Further, their is a benifit to be able to staff a team with a non integer number of people without splitting focus across multiple projects.

I'm not talking about formal training, I'm just talking about the fact that when you take on an employee in a knowledge job, it's usually quite some time before they start contributing positively, let alone reach their potential. In software, generally it seems to be around 6 months before a new player is a full member of the team, and the first 3 months of that they're a net negative because they're taking up more team time asking questions than they're saving by doing work.

3 months at say -10% productivity and 3 months at say 50% productivity does not add up to 100+k for most employees.

On top of that, new people really should be a net gain by week 3-4. It’s not about what they get done but the time they save other people. Inexperienced people may take longer to get up to speed, but they also cost less.

I'm concerned because I feel that society has already decided that blind people can only do these certain types of menial jobs, that these jobs are "good enough". They neatly tuck away blind people while giving them a function in society. And as a consequence there are few other opportunities given to the blind, the blind are expected to only be piano tuners and masseuses. Yes, we all must work, but we have some measure of control over our lives and can improve our situation through education and hard work, provided we have the opportunity to do so.

> However, people can be pressured or even forced into taking on these careers in order to be less of a burden on their families.

I mean.. in a way almost everyone is pressured into working. The vast majority of people work because they need to in order to survive.

Maybe I'm just dense or missing context but I don't really see why that would make you view the jobs in a negative light.

I think it's just that the disability added another layer of empathy for GP. Sort of like when people react more strongly to children suffering, or how D.C. freaked out over the Kashoggi murder. Everyone else's suffering is just as bad, but humans aren't logical about our emotions.

> I don't really understand why, but the idea of somebody sitting behind a computer somewhere, controlling my vacuum is just really weird and unsettling.

Understandable. But if there is a good value proposition many people could probably get over that.

Make it so the vacuum camera can only be aimed at the floor, and 95% of my problems are gone.

Until someone from 4chan figures out how to use reflections and patterns of lights and shadows on the floor (or who knows what else) to figure out exactly what's in your house, and where it's at.

Until someone from 4chan figures out how to use reflections and patterns of lights and shadows on the floor (or who knows what else) to figure out exactly what's in your house, and where it's at.

Oh come on you paranoid luddi-

https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-new-science-of-seeing-aro...

Computer vision researchers have uncovered a world of visual signals hiding in our midst, including subtle motions that betray what’s being said and faint images of what’s around a corner.

Oh shit! So much for aiming the camera at the floor, unless you want to be watched and overheard.

It does seem unsettling to have a high tech cleaning robot that is simply an extension of a person. Privacy aside, I think it might be because it seems like kind of a waste of all that technology. I would feel less uneasy if it weren't a 1:1 relationship and the robot could do some of the work without a human controlling it.

For example, maybe the human trains the robot so the robot can do some of the work itself and the human just fills in the more difficult work or the work that is never the same. For example, it would probably be hard to train a robot to put away clothes and toys in my kid's rooms, we'll get there eventually of course, but a human could do that part of it and then they could trigger the vacuum to run when they're done with the hard stuff. The human would also need to be "on call" to sort out a problem when the robot gets stuck or can't perform a task.

With the current state of robotics, a robot would either be incapable of cleaning my apartment, or would be capable of doing serious damage to it, or, realistically, both.

Maybe in a few decades, but right now, the last thing I want is an ai-controlled, or remote-controlled robot that is capable of scrubbing tile and cleaning caulking, moving my crap around, and wiping down hard-to-reach surfaces inside my apartment.

Unlike humans, if it is using too much force for the task at hand, it will have no awareness that it's likely to cause damage.

The hard part of cleaning isn't pushing a vacuum cleaner around.

Wait, how would a roomba seriously damage your home? Just curious because I’ve never thought mine could but maybe it could.

A roomba[1] can't, but something that can put in the elbow grease to scrub tiles in my bathroom can trivially destroy the caulking, or damage the drywall.

Something that can reach up to dust the moulding on my ceiling can trivially knock over a standing lamp/potted plant/etc.

Even something as simple as the pin that switches my bathroom from shower to bathtub mode needs to be handled carefully (Otherwise, you'll snap the bathtub faucet off.)

Futzing with my dishes? Thanks, I'll figure out how to do it myself.

[1] And as I said, vaccuming is not the time-intensive part of cleaning. I have disposable income to blow on toys, I hate cleaning, but I'm not remotely interested in a roomba.

I've mulled getting one from time to time. But they'd do a fraction of my house. I'm sure they'd have issues with cords and stuff lying around waiting to be packed or to be put away. Etc. And that's just vacuuming. Properly doing my kitchen floor requires a mop (or a wet Roomba version) as well as a vacuum or broom. And we've still just talking about floors.

The wet version of the Roomba is the Scooba. The Roomba is a broom (anagram), and the Scooba is the mop.

We have received both as gifts, and while they are slower and less powerful than the manual tools and electric vacuum cleaners, they can be tasked to clean the same area for much longer than my attention span for cleaning. It is also true that it is much easier to clean a mostly-clean floor than a more-filthy one. If you let the mop robot clean up for two hours, you can service the robot and then manually mop up the parts of the floor it couldn't do properly, in less time than manual mopping alone. With the sweeper, you never have to repeatedly vacuum over the same bit of popcorn, trying in vain to get the cleaner to pick it up, because all the larger floor debris are already in the robot's tray. And you don't need to worry about coins or Lego blocks in the vacuum bag.

But yes, cords are the Roomba's kryptonite. At best, it temporarily halts the cleaning process. At worst, it destroys your cords and also renders the floor sweeper inoperable. This alone destroys most of the utility. The sweeper cannot be left to operate unattended, because given enough time, it will always find a cord and try to commit suicide with it.

My "solution" about a month ago was to get a slightly older cordless Dyson on sale. I realized that my issue with vacuuming wasn't so much that I minded pulling out a vacuum for a few minutes now and then. Rather it was hauling my big canister vac downstairs, screwing around with the cord and hose, etc. Now I can pull out the Dyson in about 30 seconds and vacuum things for a minute or two.

(I also don't have kids or dogs and don't stress out if I can't eat off the floor so having a very imperfect robovac that will run itself every day isn't a particular win.)

Instead of at the consumer level, I can see this being viable at a commercial level. Robot vacuums and floor cleaners that clean office and retail building surfaces controlled by those who are not physically able to do so.

Why not employ a human being directly?

Then that human being has to actually travel to your house and do the entire job start to finish. The idea of a robot vac (or similar) that can do 80% of the job itself but ask for help from a trusted operator over the internet is really interesting.

So this solves the problem of rich people who don't want to live near poor people but do want their labor.

Yuck, that is a good point. At the same time, is the need to house residential cleaning staff really what drives the creation/maintenance of integrated neighbourhoods?

For my part, I live in a pretty blended downtown neighbourhood (Kitchener, Ontario), and balancing the need for affordable housing with the constant pressure to "clean up" certain areas and turn brownfields into glitzy new condo towers seems to be something that's largely managed at the city council level.

Maybe less now. It used to. Look at cities like London (UK, not Ontario), and you'll see lots of "mews" (1) that are rows of stables with associated housing for servants tacked onto the back of large housing and backing onto "service streets", so the rich could have their horses and servants housed where they were needed.

Today, of course, most mews have been converted into expensive standalone housing units, and most new integrated neighbourhoods are the result of council planning offices.

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mews

Why yuck? I bet if you flipped it around and said "that opens the door for poor people to score lucrative contracts in richer markets which would be otherwise unavailable to them" then you'd think it was alright.

As the cafe job for disabled people, this also opens up the possibility of remote work for people with social anxiety, people in very rural areas with a lack of opportunity and so forth.

According to the article the waiters are paid about 9$ an hour. For a person in a destitute, remote small town jobs like this could be a really sweet side gig. It's not like they somehow would meet insular rich people anyway.

There's no reason to be cynical about this. Closing physical distance, which is one of the big contributors to lost opportunity is a good thing.

Finally?

And most “rich people” want to live in desirable neighborhoods and poor people cant afford to do so, the residents also want their houses clean

It is currently incredibly unproductive to get your house cleaned

It is simply going to be much more efficient to let Pakistanis on Fiverr control your automaton

It solves the problem of not letting random strangers into your house.

And you think that a random stranger controlling that bot is less likely to cause damage on your property?

Even if the portal authenticates everyone... They'll still be one hack away from doing whatever they can to cause something to break for giggles

though you could probably blur/censor many details automatically before sending the images, which might be a decent enough solution to the problem

That's an interesting thought - optical character recognition and obfuscation to blur things like text on paper from a live feed.

Yes, I'm quite certain not having a person in my place will be less risky than having one.

You sometimes see the idea that if a security feature can potentially be defeated, that is equivalent to that feature not existing.

That's true for a small class of problems, but in general it just shows an inability to see nuance.

Expensive in most of the developed world, possibly higher risk and less reliable depending on the specifics of the employer and employee(s) in question.

Interestingly. You could remotely train a robot. Which things go where. After that the robot could do a lot on its own. And you could remotely manage a fleet of robots.

Cue NieR Automata

My vision of the future for the cleaning service industry:

Robot at home on stand by a la I,Robot movie

:"Good morning Mr. Anderson, our remote cleaning specialist is ready to clean your home, do you comply?"

pass code confirmation needed

:"Thank you, our services will take approximately 45 minutes. Please stand clear while we complete our task. Thank you Mr. Anderson. Have a Wonderful day!"

:"Please note that your next remote cleaning will require a renewal of your service agreement. Please take time to fill in the survey, confirm your subscription, and adjust your cleaning times, and thank you again for being a valued customer here at CleanTech"

LOL day dreaming is fun.

What if we took it to the next level and made it a game where two players compete to clean the most debris via remote controlled vacuum cleaners. A map would show areas cleaned and point values.

You're saying service robots will be Ubik-uitous?

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