The Coming Robot Home Invasion
andykessler.com
andykessler.com
There are a number of "cleaning challenges" which are really just conscientiousness or process problems.
"It's difficult to sweep the house"
- Often, this just means that the house is too cluttered. You own too many things, they're not put away, and so each time you need to sweep the floors, you need to spend time organizing first.
"The fridge is always getting dirty."
- Only clean things should be put in the fridge. If your shelves are dirty, it's because the bottom of the items you're placing on your shelves are also dirty. Do you let ketchup run down the side of the bottle? Is your counter dirty, and you've set a clean bottle of salad dressing on a dirty counter? In both cases, you have transferred dirt and/or oil into the fridge on the shelf. And then this compounds multiple times: do you always put the ketchup in a different place? Well now you've spread around the dirt. Do you clean the fridge but bot the bottom of the ketchup bottle? Well, now your clean fridge is immediately dirty again the moment you reload it.
- etc.
So many "messes" in the house are compounding problems; the worse you let it get, the bigger the problem you've made for yourself. Didn't put away the kid's toys? Well now you can't sweep that area. Can't sweep that area? Well now you can't mop that area. etc. One solution, which people might not think about with regard to cleaning would actually just be to make sure the kid has fewer toys, or at least fewer _available_ toys. If you nail this, the clutter --> sweeping --> mopping cascade starts improving without any additional work on your end.
Separately, I need to clean my fridge because then I can follow your great advice XD
This sounds like some useful advice but misses the bigger picture. What about the dust from the day to day of just being alive? I just wiped down my face wash and other toiletries on my bathroom shelf. They were already clean, they didn't have latent "material" from the bottle dripping on its side, yet when I cleaned it with a soapy sponge, the bottle became shiny again like it was brand new. It accumulated dust that got trapped on there due to the hot/cold cycle of a bathroom with a shower in it. You can think of essentially any location on the planet...it will get dirty and is naturally cleaned by either the weather or by humans putting in the effort.
Thats not to say there isn't wisdom in this advice, Marie Kondo talks about how each item is an additional burden. In our consumerist culture the act of purchasing an item is the only value many items our lives end up having. Maybe an item only kinda serves a purpose and needs to be paired with another item to be complete (Example: a shaver that is a cheaper model that doesn't quite serve all shaving needs but does do many of them)
>So many "messes" in the house are compounding problems; the worse you let it get, the bigger the problem you've made for yourself. Didn't put away the kid's toys? Well now you can't sweep that area. Can't sweep that area? Well now you can't mop that area. etc. One solution, which people might not think about with regard to cleaning would actually just be to make sure the kid has fewer toys, or at least fewer _available_ toys. If you nail this, the clutter --> sweeping --> mopping cascade starts improving without any additional work on your end.
Where does this end? Why not own anything? If you only own digital items then that itself gets cluttered and messy. Life is a series of maintenance tasks and then you die.
I live in a humid climate. If I take something out of the fridge, set it on a clean counter for five minutes, and put it back in the fridge without wiping it down it'll leave smudges of water and dust on the trays. The trays will look dirty after a few months even if I only put clean things in there.
I didn't use kids in my example to preach to parents. I used it because it's painfully top of mind for me currently.
This work is still worth doing of course, but sometimes it requires a lot of mental work (dare I say healing) from one or both partners.
I guess my point is that switching to this mindset can be hard; and it might not be up to you.
I do really like this comment; I think it's really valuable when couples get on the same page about this.
+ It becomes clutter in its temporary home making the things that belong there harder to see or access.
+ You’ll have to go looking for it when you need it which may take orders of magnitude more time than just putting it away properly. (And if you really need it and can’t find it you might buy another one, causing more clutter and costing money.)
+ Even if you remember where you put it you have to handle it twice to get it where it belongs, reducing efficiency over time.
I’m a huge believer in having things have a place they belong and making that process efficient. Every day frequent use things get priority.
My parents have dozens of (re-usable) plastic cups that just sit precariously balanced in a cupboard. They do use them for the occasional party but mostly they’re just a menace when you want a glass of water.
Solution 1: Keep 4 (or 6 or 8) cups in the cupboard. Store the rest in a box under the stairs until you need them for a party.
Solution 2: Re-home the extras completely and use Solo cups for parties. (Even ignoring the benefit of the extra space, this might be cheaper over time unless you really can’t leverage the space the plastic cups take by, say, buying consumables in bulk on discount.)
You shouldn’t be handling (or potentially handling) things you rarely use in order to access things you use every day.
Physical space has a use besides just storing more stuff…
I own a robot vacuum mainly because the floor gets hair in just a few hours. It doesn’t alleviate me from cleaning, but it improves the baseline.
As neat as the idea sounds, the practicalities and edge cases keep this in the science fiction category right now and for the foreseeable future.
Even if the thing fell over it could inflict serious injury. =3
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/UpXKZEgrB6Q
There was a clip where it almost fell down a set of stairs but it caught itself. I cant seem to find it.
There is this though: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/8Drm_v3_iG4
Giant robotic house spiders make far more sense. =3
But, I take the point that more and more of these tasks will be automated more effectively in the coming decade.
It will make it easier for some humans to free of interaction with other humans.
But they still own a robotic vacuum, which they can deploy the other six days a week we aren’t there.
Initially the people who buy home robots can afford humans and robots.
Still so far away from being able to replace humans for all tasks, the difference between low hanging fruit (vacuum hardwood floors) and difficult tasks (dusting fragile art) is vast.
The home robot most likely will do much more than those things. It'll clean, but also be a guard dog, accept packages, garden, clean your car, reads stories to the baby, play catch with the dog, etc. Or at least in theory if the technology catches up.
How often do you hire people? And work with things like this? There's a real mental load and privacy and scheduling load here that robots solve. It can be very hard to find someone, then the time/investment of being home when they are available, etc. I'd rather have a substandard cleaning that's easy and convenient than getting these deep cleans and working with people, cleaning services, scheduling, the social and mental load of a stranger in your house, the issues about your own privacy, etc.
I think the success of the roomba shows that people will settle for less, and pay a lot for it. My robot vacuum is the worst vacuum and mop I've ever seen but it does it automatically and that means a lot to me. I just press a button and things are clean-ish. That has a lot of value. More complex robots will benefit from that kind of dynamic I imagine.
Right now, people who have flat floors, not too much pile on rugs and carpets, no pets or pets that don't shed much, no stairs, and don't have much in the way of mess are quite happy with their robot vacuum cleaners. Mostly. But vacuuming is pretty much the least annoying and tedious part of cleaning your house, and modern bagless upright convertible cleaners are cheap and lightweight.
People with medium sized flat boring lawns seem happy with their robot lawnmowers.
But its faster to get a service with the big mowers to do it, and the job gets done better by the humans, especially if you need to consider edges or have bushes to trim or leaves to move.
The first buyers are going to be the mid-wealthy. Live-in maid service is expensive. If the robot actually works, $50k for a live-in maid that you don't need to have space for an apartment in your mansion for them to live in is cheap.
That could be an interesting option, but realistically you’ll have to fold your laundry, do your own dishwasher, put away your/your kids’ toys, etc, unless you just want to have a clean house for one day per week.
This fact was driven home to me recently when dropping my mother off at the airport. For various reasons, my mother us to use wheelchair assistance when flying, and I usually get a "gate pass" to accompany her to the gate. An airline provided wheelchair is pushed by an airline employee whom I usually tip a decent amount every time. The last time she flew, the employee insisted that we had to make a detour, otherwise they would "write him up". Not wishing to make his life hard, we agreed and he brought us to an area where they were trialing robotic wheelchairs. They insisted my mother use the robotic wheelchair and since I was with her an a little curious, we agreed. In the process of tranferring her, I forgot to tip the wheelchair pusher.
The robotic wheelchair was an unconditional disaster. In a busy airport, it stopped every time it detected anyone within 5 feet of it and took 20 min to get where it would have taken less than 5 with the cherry on top being that it stopped and told my mother to get off 3 gates away. Had I not been with her, I'm not sure what she would have done, being too weak to lift her carry-on and walking to the gate.
But thinking about it a bit, I realized that sooner or later, the robotic wheelchair would be improved to the point that it did just as good a job as the human pusher at which point, all the income earned by the humans, all of whom are from the poorer sections of society, would be transferred to the robotic wheelchair company and its shareholders, all of whom are probably in the top 2% wealth-wise.
This transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich seems to be a recurrent theme in tech. Sure new wealth eventually is made, but it seems it's mostly for the top strata, with us techies being paid well enough to prevent us from feeling too many scruples.
I'm not going to go into the controversial world of assisted and some level of self driving, but its clear that's making a lot of progress and today is just seen as a boring feature on your car, like seatbelts or ABS.
I've been watching videos from Chinese robot manufacturers and we definitely are 'getting there.' What getting there means is the big question, but this isn't Omni magazine in 1985. You can see videos of these things doing a lot right now, even if its rudimentary. Unitree especially, considering how they aim for a 'low' price point. Of course a lot of these are carefully staged demos, but the fundamentals are here. Even non-staged stuff is starting to look relatively good.
The recent leak about Apple's robot is interesting too. Apple is very conservative, so if they're testing one, even if its a tabletop (with an arm?) that says a lot on what's practically possible and affordable right now. The same way when Apple was testing the PR waters for an electric car, it was a great time to move into electric cars.
Since we're already in the "submarine" sub-thread, make/model please :)
About two or three years ago my old robot vacuum was finally dying and I did a lot of on and off searching for what was out there. When I started looking almost every competitor was better quality and features than what iRobot had, for around the same price, and they were just starting to play catch-up.
I don't know how much they've improved in the past year, though.
The Ecovacs died twice, each just after a year (ie just out of warranty) needing to have main board/motor replaced. The bells and whistles didn't seem to be worth it. Self emptying station barely worked in an apartment with two people with long hair. Needed a lot of disposable replacement parts (main brush, side brushes, filters). Mopping feels like a bit of a gimmick.
The much cheaper Roborock so far has been solid but we've only had it for 4 months. Mapping is marginally better (it is FAR less likely to reset the map on you which is a real annoyance). Filter is washable, main brushes need to be replaced less often. Has a better mechanism for collecting long hair off the brushes. Mop attachment still feels like a gimmick.
I'll have a stronger belief in these things for consumers when we start seeing B2B adoption. Hotels have routine, highly structured cleaning tasks; hospitals have a need for extra strength, have highly structured cleaning tasks, and need to stock items; grocery stores have highly structured cleaning tasks and need to stock. Hospitals at least could tolerate the slowness of these things.
Without any B2B adoption it's hard to not see this as Roombas all over again. Cool for people who like it but low impact and still a toy 20 years later. I think generative AI makes these things better, though still perhaps struggles with long task adoption, but if you look at their movement they are still slow, weak, cognitively inflexible, and unstable. Maybe this tech is accelerating in some way I don't see and I'd love to be proven wrong here.
I think this is going to be fairly transformational, at least for care scenarios.
I'm not talking about the sci-fi pipe-dream of a Star Trek Data style robot, but more like a basic humanoid robot that can reliably do mundane & basic things on-command. Like pick things up off of the floor, go fetch items from another room, open the curtains, do some basic food preparation (e.g. heat things up in a microwave levels of sophistication, or even just getting a glass of water), do the dishwasher, take out the trash and so on.
Even if it can only do 1hr of chores at a time before heading back to recharge, thats huge. It will help people live more independent lives for much longer before needing expensive care from humans (something that we have a bit of a ticking time-bomb of, at least in the UK where the population is aging rapidly). It doesn't need to be a fully fledged "robot-nurse" to be helpful.
Bonus points if it can monitor it's user(s) and call for help if there appears to be anything wrong (e.g. fallen and can't get up type monitoring), or intervene in situations before they escalate (e.g. turn the gas off if it is left on, remind to take medicines etc)
As the capabilities of humanoid robots grow, the demand and so the supply will increase.
An example is olives. For centuries people picked or beat olives off of big trees but with machinery they have developed miniature olives that grow in neat hedgerows and can be easily harvested by machines.
I keep thinking about how much space people actually need to live. Bedrooms in particular. If all you need a bedroom for is sleep or romantic activities, why do bedrooms need to be 200+ square feet? Clothes ideally should be stored in another place where you dress and that place should be close to where clothes are laundered and where you shower and prep for the day. An annex to the bathroom, a dressing room seems ideal to me for clothes storage. In this case I'd be perfectly fine with a capsule bedroom big enough to hold a bed, a nightstand and nothing else.
I don't have any other concrete suggestions that would make automation easier but I'm sure this is possible.
Re: Your compensation, Levels can be eye opening: https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Facebook,Microsoft,Google,Am...
Regarding salary, Looking at my area, unless im in FAANG seems like im making around what the site says. I feel like that expense would be too much but maybe I just didnt get into stocks or crypto as much as others have done here.
If you and your spouse each make $150k (so $300k household income), paying 8% of your income ($24k/year) to have 6 extra hours a week to spend with your kids seems like a fair trade.
Two people working in tech could easily be making more like a $5-600k household income though, at which point $24k is only 4-5%.
In tech though, especially in the Bay Area, it feels like the norm.
... and you can expect the subscription costs to keep going up. None of those OTA updates are going to give you any new value unless you pay more.
(Sorry, couldn’t resist this Orville reference)