Is this a humanoid robot that's controlled by someone in a call center remotely doing your laundry?
Putting aside ethical reservations about how much they are probably paying per task, that feels like wash and fold with extra steps.
Presumably, this is a way to collect diverse training data for the robot to be trained on. Wash and fold as a service is valuable (to some people), and presumable the “extra steps” are offset with the in-home aspect of this.
Meanwhile, the ethical considerations are huge. Laborers are literally training their replacement, and probably at questionable wages. They’re also explicitly inviting someone into your home remotely, and that person can see and interact with your house. Feels like a privacy and safety risk. Additionally, it seems likely that this would be a literal Trojan horse to allow international labor to work within the US without dealing with actual immigration. Oh and just for good measure, it’s taking the jobs traditionally held by some of society’s least privileged and most desperate workers.
Anyways, if it actually works, I want one.
Edit: I feel compelled to note that apparently they’re hiring in Palo Alto for these roles, today.
Companies found out that hiring indians and teleoperate the “robot” is far cheaper than having an autonomy or AI algorithms with sensors on-board. Speaking of, all these food delivery “robots” were/are teleoperated as well over the internet as well.
What they can do is, for everyone, have a base model, and then improve it over time. Then, with software updates they can improve the set of skills the robot can handle out of the box.
But this is the problem with current AI systems, without a continuous learning capability, you're always limited to the "default skills". As soon as you have something out of the box for the robot to do, you end up needing Indians to learn it.
All of AI is flawed in this way. LLMs for instance have almost no continuous learning capability, that is why we don't have AGI yet. They can't learn new skills. Therefore, they can't adapt to new jobs they have not seen during training. They can't even play pokemon properly or any complex game for that matter, because games involve learning new skills during gameplay.
It’s a training session. They’re not training the model on the robot in that moment, they’re collecting training data, don’t overthink the details.
That one doesn't have to do, hence the appeal.