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Comment by dougmwne | Hacker News Reader

Why bother programming these arms with near miraculous AI for household use when you could have pilots a world away clean your kitchen?

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This kind of completely horrifies me, but it's also not the worst idea I've ever heard.

I was more convinced by the author's pitch than I thought I'd be, but the problem I see is that the technology just isn't quite there yet. Thus it'll probably come out to be more like the early PDA's than the iphone.

Still, the general direction could have more promise than my first judgement of it based on the title.

Better operating telerobotics from India (well, Mexico where latency is lower) than being in a phone bank.

Gets around immigration rules too.

There is a fascinating, low-budget (almost ruined by its abysmal CG) movie from the 2000s called Sleep Dealer that deals with exactly this. I remember thinking it was unrealistic at the time, but given my presently much greater appreciation for the difficulty of robotics AI, it now seems prescient.

Lack of trust and integrity in most tech companies. I don't want my laundry folding robot to require access to the internet.

If that's the only reason then everyone with one of those smart speakers will buy one (smart speaker? haha, why not smart microphone?). However it does seem like there will be a lot of objections to having a person looking through a camera among a certain demographic who seem to put more faith in giant companies that employ people who they feel are people like them than they do in people who they do not feel are people like them. Let me try to phrase this more clearly. To someone who imagines Google as several thousand of themselves, having a Google microphone in their houses feels like having themselves in their house. To someone who imagines an Indian operator as very much not themselves, it would feel differently.

I have curtains and blinds on my windows because I don't want strangers (of any nationality) looking in.

Do you have a smart speaker? If not then you're not in the category of people who have a smart speaker but would not have a teleoperated maid robot.

> Do you have a smart speaker?

Even worse, I have a smartphone which can do everything a smart speaker does and more.

Well mainly because telerobotics still sucks. This is a hard problem. We haven’t devoted enough effort to solve it on a practical level beyond tech demos in academia.

It's probably necessary to some degree just like Waymo has operators who can login when the vehicle reports a problem.

The operators deliberately cannot, as we had to keep explaining when this came up on HN previously, drive Waymo's cars remotely.

They can reach into the car's model of the world to help it understand e.g. this thing that you decided is an ambulance is actually not an ambulance, so you don't need to treat it like one. Or, very simply, that road is shut, don't try to use it.

That seems like less of a distinction than you make it out to be. For regular people, the difference between driving and conducting is slight. For engineers and the implementation details it's a huge deal of course and makes a massive safety difference.

I could see a hybrid where the AI learns as the operator only takes over for tasks the robot can't handle.

I believe teleoperation will have a huge role indeed. It will be there in any case for remote support, but for startups it may make sense to start fully teleop until they nail autonomy.

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