SF startup is testing robots in Airbnbs, and trashing them, lawsuit claims
sfstandard.com
sfstandard.com
>A refrigerator shelf was cracked, and a broken glass or dish had been left in the garbage disposal. A wooden nightstand drawer was chipped. Cups and plates were in the wrong places. It looked like the furniture had been moved around.
Not sure which one is worse, the fact that the bot can't actually do household chore or the fact that the humans can't clean it up.
I am someone who came of age during an incredibly hopeful time about how technology could be a force for good. The silicon valley ethos at present is totally morally bankrupt and rotten to the core.
Now I’m getting even angrier imagining the email that went around internally on how to spin this and why it was a short term loss but will be for the long term good. Of trying to kill off the idea of cleaning people and then jacking up rates.
It's... both.
So far we were implementing only the first two ones, with AI, it looks like we decided to accelerate Idiocracy implementation too.
I'd planned on feeding the spam to the trolls but it seemed a like unethical and prone to obesity. Plus cross breeding could be a problem.
Can I install it in an AirBnB or do they come pre-fitted?
I wonder why that was on the same level of complaints about broken things.
If you break a production server you don't just leave it broken...
I'm assuming these companies have VC cash, so not just paying for repairs and risking negative publicity seems extremely foolish.
Do things right is where we should be heading.
And the more "software eats the world", the less this paradigm is gonna be a feasible market strategy. I've harbored these thoughts from way back and hence I was (and continue to be) skeptical of unregulated start-ups/new tech ideas who interface with the real world: Hyperloop, Tesla self-driving, and Theranos come to mind. An interesting case study in my view is _Github_ who in theory, having software engineers for customers, should be pretty well-insulated from the expensive repair costs of the real world. And yet we'd all agree they need a GINORMOUS dose of that sweet sweet "stable infra".
Well, no wonder people don't have faith in the people selling AI.
Also, if this is the best they can do and left such a mess, don’t let them operate robots or any machines! Teach them to use a mop and then maybe upgrade them to a vacuum, and if they pass, let them use a sink garbage disposal under adult supervision.
And yet they weren't able to build a model house or even just some model rooms for a controlled environment and practice there full time first. They could have done round the clock testing, with full flexibility of the arrangement, no need to waste time moving hardware around and risk damage, no liability, and more. A fake house costs next to nothing. A (fake) model kitchen is cheaper than an Airbnb stay.
Have you seen how many public demos from manufacturers of advanced robots like Boston Dynamics are using "artificial" obstacles and layouts? It's obvious they did a lot of development in those conditions. You don't need someone's home to find out if your robot can grab a plate without destroying it, or climb a flight of stairs.
I don't want any of my personal life observed by my professional life and vice versa. It is bad enough that /I/ have to observe both and try not to pass judgement on myself.
It reaches for people without morals, and instructs them to pursue profit without regard for morality.
I'm very, very, very glad to hear that these people are getting sued.
They should expect to feel a hostile world if they put their every effort into creating a hostile world
So the host wasn't able to add the additional risk and hassle to the price, which in this instance would have been a quite legitimate ask as the robot damaged their revenue generating property.
It's very ironic that Airbnb itself has done similar practices in the past where it ignored hospitality regulations to establish their business model, i.e. not asking for permission but for forgiveness.
The Airbnb style response would be to gig-ify this model where you ask an independent contractor to buy the test robot, rent the Airbnb, and test it out instead of you doing it yourself. Then the contractor bears the risk of damages to the property.
I might be okay forgiving skirting the disclosure rules BUT only if they tried to be model tenants and, if there was any damage, took steps to proactively make things right. If you're breaking the rules, even if there was no damage, you should definitely be cleaning up and putting things back in place.
What I find inexcusable is not owning up to the damage and paying to fix it when your prototype goes on a rampage of destruction.
Moving fast and breaking things is fine, as long as you fix the stuff you break...
What? No its not. Breaking things can cause harm that is not always "fixable", particularly if its not your thing to break.
And what is going to be impossible to fix or replace in a budget !hotel room?
"Moving fast and breaking things" could be acceptable in cases where there is an ulterior objective whose potential value could be >> these costs, but in general it should be evaluated more carefully.
are too broke to pay for scratched furniture?
I personally think the problem here is that they were delusional enough to think this was the way to 'test' their prototype clean-o-bots. But as you point out (and...sigh...you're spot on on all points), we live in a world where doing things like beta-testing robo-cars in real live traffic is perfectly cromulent as long as you capture market share and outlast the lawsuits and 'disrupt' something.
Stop outsourcing the cost of your vision to the rest of society. Especially when it’s peanuts to you and meaningful to, in this case, the host of what they call an apartment and you seem to think is a test course.
But hundreds of millions sounds like enough money to get some industrial or dead commercial space (even in/around SF) and outfit it to be like an apartment. Or six different ones, and six others two weeks from now, and two weeks after that. The cost of the space and the carpenters/painters/drywallers/handymen/managers/whatevers would seem to be something of such relative insignificance that it doesn't even show up on the budgetary radar.
And that is very much on brand for these groups.
Then they should have a lab with real furniture and movable walls so they can do controlled real world tests. Once the above tests are done you add confidence with random real world tests.
The types of problems seen here are things that your lab tests should fail and keep you out of real world tests. Particularly when the test subjects don't have some sort of test agreement
The cheaper the handymen come, the better the randomness is.
One doesn't even have to tell them to be random; that part happens all on its own in the ways that real apartments ebb and flow.
And the handymen themselves can be rotated out every couple of weeks, as well. The cost of rotation is low. The handymen are plentiful, and they are happy to get hired for a day here or there for literal odd jobs.
(If anyone wants even more practical solutions for robot testing facilities that don't make headlines by pissing people off, please put your contact information in the space provided by pushing the "Reply" button. Thanks!)
I've got mine, you can all go f*ck yourselves.
We need to get back to a place where other people matter, where the implicit social contract is honoured by everyone, and there are consequences for breaking it.
> people have been given to understand "I have a problem, it is the Government's job to cope with it!" or "I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!" "I am homeless, the Government must house me!" and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing!
In subsequent years she often invoked society in phrases like "civil society", "free society", and "responsible society". The quote means that government won't help you very much, and indeed that you should be self-reliant. But it would be a distortion to extrapolate that into "be bad and inconsiderate and uncooperative". Individualism doesn't require the individuals to be unpleasant to one another. It just means they aren't an organized collective or hive.
They won't because that's a fundamental principle of the model they believe in.
Learned from the best of them, I see.
Modern tech culture is a blight on society.
Scamming homeowners out of relative peanuts is super cringe. Everyone looks bad:
- Employees - Management - Investors - Previous companies listed
& “move fast & be antisocial” Bot Co. too. Photograph/video walkthrough the rental beforehand, safeguard antiques/uniques, professionally restore to 100%, nobody ever has to know. Or call host, drop cash.
Make people whole - this is so much easier than your robots, guys.
That tracks.
If we want to put a stop to this sort of behavior from businesses we can't be punishing employees for this behavior, we have to run it up the chain.
You might want to ask most contractors, or contract lawyers, about that.
"I was just following orders" for basic property damage typically doesn't hold up in court for them either.
We should. I don’t see an easy way to do that.
I do think there is a straightforward case to be brought against the bookers. So I’m saying start there and then idk have them co-operate against the company.
It's also not a dichotomy. It can be both criminal and civil. Victims always have the right to seek compensation in parallel with criminal punishment.
Aside from the obvious joke, I feel like a lot of people miss that you can pursue BOTH civil and criminal cases for a given crime. If a billionaire murders your spouse you absolutely can sue them for wrongful death. That doesn't preclude them to also going to jail for 20+ years.
It took over a decade for Waymo to get from "able to drive around SF for demos" to "3x safer than humans, with thousands of vehicles on the roads".
A lot of these things may end up in closets, next to the VR headset and the 3D TV.
We're probably going to end up with the situation where the burden "it is considered criminal child endangerment to leave your child alone with the robot" falls on the parents, not on the robot manufacturers.
The first time a child gets harmed by a robot, the company making that robot will go spectacularly bankrupt. If a child gets killed by a robot, it would likely end the consumer robotics industry for a decade or more.
Robots and AI have too much money to be held liable.
I don't think AI in general has that benefit despite people occasionally trying to criticise AI companies who restrict the output of LLMs by reference to the 1st amendment; robotics in particular definitely doesn't have that benefit.
Nobody really cares. Robot vacuums are still a single digit % of the vacuum market.
It turns out that saving a few minutes on housework isn't something people are willing to spend thousands, or even hundreds, of dollars on when the cheaper options are more versatile and more robust.
I absolutely hate doing these chores to the point I rarely do them and go through cycles of two weeks of gradually disorganized living space until I finally crack and spend two hours gritting my teeth to poorly execute the chores.
I should hire a cleaner to come every two weeks, but that’s a chore too. I’d rather order a robot from Amazon, take it out of the box and have my problems solved.
That tech bros glibly assume that a freakishly expensive appliance is everybody's must-buy is part of why most people now have extremely strong negative feelings toward tech.
Of course, the're will be a few robot dogs patrolling the fences and hidden behind closets on the rare occasions the servants decide to rebel.
[1] https://aeronauticsmagazine.com/news/no-robots-allowed-south...
How many startups work is they simply break the law. The gamble is that you can get big enough fast enough that you can then lobby for a change in the law before governments catch up. Uber and Airbnb are like the posterchildren for this. Taxi services are regulated. You can't run an illegal hotel in a residential area. Simple.
So what we have here is another company who doesn't want to make a test kitchen or house. No, that's too expensive. So they'll instead use another startup to effectively steal a lab. It's layers upon layers of illegality, basically.
So if this succeeds and this company creates waves of domestic robots, we can then start to imagine what the next layer is. Will somebody rent an Airbnb with domestic robots so it can then sublet those robots to somebody else or use them for tasks they weren't designed for?
If the company ends up having no commercial success and the lawsuits for damages rack up, can they just close the company file for bankruptcy and face no consequences? Or is there some civil or criminal risk to this behaviour?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piercing_the_corporate_veil
If this were happening in the real world, they would have to personally back some of the corporate debts before banks would lend them money. But this is Silicon Valley, where banks and VCs just give away money to their buddies.
If the company's owners had unlimited liability for problems the company caused, that wouldn't be much of an LLC, would it? The primary purpose of an LLC is to make it so that the owners (often the founders) cannot personally be held responsible for debts the company incurs, even debts incurred through their instructions.
This also includes debts caused by punishment for the company breaking civil contracts, but doesn't make individuals who use the company to break the law immune to criminal charges. But the standard of evidence for prosecuting that type of malfeasance is pretty high...
It’s more so investors who aren’t involved in day-to-day decision making can invest without worrying that the founders will create liability for them.
You can "in certain circumstances" (negligence, overt criminality...) go after the managers. You probably can't go after the managers for things like producing a business plan they could have plausibly believed was legal and causing the company to incur civil liability.
In the situation described in this article, probably both the owners and the managers (likely the same people!) get away without being held accountable, and the victims have no recompense because the company folds.
Insufficient capitalization is the #1 reason for piercing the veil (and also works well against corporations). This involves not putting enough investment into a company to pay the foreseeable debts it would incur from its activities. This means: if your LLC incurs debts knowing it lacks the ability to pay them off, the courts can pierce the LLC and go after you.
But anyone that personally causes damage through negligence or intentional acts can be sued personally as well. If the employer is bankrupt the employees involved would be the only ones pursued. And these damages are relatively small individually, bankruptcy is not an issue.
Also there are some exceptions to the limited liability for company owners or directors like for illegal activity and fraud.
Since the Airbnb bookings were ostensibly made by individuals, most attorneys would also name those individuals (in addition to the company if the company was named).
Having your founders/management/employees rent houses via Airbnb is a really bad strategy for limiting your liability using a company.
At some point does morality ever enter the equation, or does YC deliberately go out of its way to select people with utter disregard for the laws or rights of other people?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7sd_yhc8IY
Yeah.
This sounds a lot like criminal invasion of privacy.
Edit: What are you downvoting? You can’t secretly watch Airbnb guests through a window you rented to them for the same reason you can’t put spy cameras in their bathroom.
Systematically? No. Casually? Of course you can. Why wouldn’t you be allowed to?
These aren’t corporate landlords, after all.
I'm a little surprised he didn't knock and ask to go in.
Keep it real, Kyle. It doesn't seem like you learned anything from the failure of your last company.
[1] https://weartv.com/news/local/report-pensacola-woman-charged...
Which is below the CA 12,500$ limit for small claims court.
Haven't checked whether the case was brought to small claims, but that'd be my guess.