I'd have preferred it if the trucks/tractors were fully autonomous, now that would have been awesome :)
because it takes 7 years to dig out a single basement?
In addition to digging basements, there's also grass cutting, delivery bots in restaurants, hospitals, tractor driving.
Space is the obvious example (manned spaceflight might be a good thing politically, or for inspiring people, but no one contests that robots are far more efficient for almost any mission).
A closer to home example is commercial diving. They used to pay people $100-500k/yr to do saturation diving, fairly frequently, at deep sites. Maybe 3-6 weeks of prep, a ship, a transfer chamber, on-deck chamber, a team of support staff, a team of divers, and lots of equipment. Instead, now, they send down a ROV (usually operated from the ship above, but conceivably these could be centrally teleoperated someday too, or autonomous). Commercial divers are still used for smaller tasks, especially where they're not doing saturation diving, but the saturation diving industry in general has been increasingly restricted to shallower jobs or jobs requiring a large amount of work at a single site (involving lots of manual fitting). For the very deepest dives, ROVs and atmospheric diving suits (basically single-person submarines) have basically taken over -- the deep dive record was set in 1992 and no one has tried to match it.
There's also the EOD market (iRobot's packbot), hazmat environments, war zones, etc., where teleoperated equipment will get more and more popular.
Real time tele-operations are very expensive and require specialized equipment. Military drone ops cost billions of dollars. Bomb squad robots and law enforcement drones cost half a mil on up. Even the toy dump truck FTA costs $5000. In addition to the equipment cost, there is no way the latency could be compensated for over the regular internet. None of this would make sense for a residential excavation
It's actually really cheap to get a basement dug, in the midwest it's like $1500-$3000 to dig the hole, depending on the size. I've heard as little as $800 for a smaller basement.
Because this is the current state of affairs doesn't mean it has to be this way in 2 years. That's the very definition of disruption.
Mars rover is not real time, doesn't actually do anything, 5 of them failed, there is a team of highly trained scientists and engineers running the project and the whole thing has cost almost $1B.
I was talking about the bandwidth, not the rest. Yes, Mars rovers were stupidly expensive and difficult. It's freaking Mars. I'm pretty sure we don't need to launch a rocket to get stuff to Illinois, that we don't have a latency of 4h20m and that we can have one guy or two on the location to take care of any issue.
The current state of the art does not seem to suggest that it is possible for $1 workers in India to dig a basement in Illinois with a tractor controlled over the internet. It certainly is not possible for less than what it costs to just hire local workers to do it.
Frankly, without numbers I'm not persuaded either way. Consider the advances in farming vehicles it seems plausible to me.
#3 is a big deal. Planetary probes are way, way, way overdesigned compared to what you need on the earth, and all those "ways" cost exponential amounts of money. It probably wouldn't make sense to try to do everything on the job site remotely, but there's really no reason a teleoperated tractor has to cost substantially more than one with a guy in it.
* Unions
* The technology probably isn't quite there yet