For house keeping tasks the robotics companies love showing off... it honestly doesn't matter if it takes a robot longer than a human to clean your house. As long as it gets done before you get home from work, no big deal.
For businesses the bar for adoption is very low: If the thing can work repetitive jobs for 24 hours a day and replace 3 shifts, the purchase bar is nominally anything less than 3 x human salary if your budgeting horizon is 1 year. That's a high number, and probably fairly easy to achieve.
For homes, it's a very different bar. You'd have a hard time convincing most American families to purchase anything with a >$1000 price tag. Currently that's pretty much impossible for a humanoid.
Like cars, they'll likely purchase them through finance deals, with a monthly payment. Or perhaps even rent/lease them.
Robots aren't a necessity, and for a price tag in the tens of thousands, most people will just mop their own floors and do their own laundry.
And (regardless of the costs involved) if I were going to pay money to not do this stuff myself, I'd rather pay a human to do it because I know there are humans out there that could use the work and I value them much more than I value Google and other corporations making even more obscene amounts of money selling future e-waste.
increasing your spend by 25% is a smaller change then increasing your spend by infinity%
If Rosie was the only output she would never happen. Rosie might happen as a side benefit of replacing American workers but only for the rich people.
The vast majority which may be replaced would probably be better off burning down the factory rather than celebrate their upcoming domestic helper.
A human house cleaner by definition is a real human looking at your home every time.
Versus a small army of roomba's and equivalents mapping out floor plans and tangentially exposing human occupation times with that large data set almost certainly exposed to criminal and surveillance networks that will almost certainly use some of that choicer data to their advantage.
It's literally trade offs in both cases.
But that means speed does matter after all. The renting company will need to clean as many flats as possible with a single robot in a single day.
So the lifestyle stayed inflated.
1. 80%+ of Americans can't afford house cleaning services. I'm a software engineer in silicon valley and even I clean my own house because I don't think I can afford it. My rents have gone up by more than 5K in the last year, my salary hasn't, so that's coming out of my house cleaning budget.
2. Even if you can afford 5K/year on it, the cleaning service is not an upfront commitment. You can bail anytime when you get laid off and clean your own house.
3. Consumers don't budget rationally. Businesses do.
As opposed to a household which might not have enough work to fully utilize it, or just have trouble scheduling times where it can work without causing disruption.
How big is your house? When we had a cleaning lady it was $70 a go. Under $2000 for every second week.
Wondering if you're closer to the southern border or something.
I think I remember maybe around $100 including laundry almost 20 years ago and that was a cash type arrangement, weekly including laundry (multi hour visit).
You can pay over $500 for an automatic cat litter box. Robot vacuums can be cheap but run to $600 or so. Household appliances is a robust sector where people have a proven track record of spending a lot of money.
This is my dream for a house chore robot. If I could dump hampers of clothes into a receptacle and get stacks of folded clothes out, I’d happily pay $1k. Household of 5; my kids each produce 3-4 sets of clothes a day (sleep, school, sports, after school). I run wash in AM so dryer finishes before 3pm (pg&e ToU) and then I’m focused on other things for rest of day. More often than not, I get to bed to find a near full hamper of clothes dumped where I sleep and then have to sort/fold/deliver. Bonus points if robot can sort different items to different stacks/bundles.
I don’t need AI/robotics to save me time from having to think, research, or code… I need AI/robotics to save me time so I can think, research, or code.
Interested. Which one?
Great machines!
If I can get a robot replace a gardener who I pay $170/mo for 2 visits per month, i probably would. But I suspect that would kill lawn
Apparently prices on them have gone way up. The one he has now would cost something like $6K today.
> You'd have a hard time convincing most American families to purchase anything with a >$1000 price tag...
Which I am skeptical of.
I think house cleaning/chores require at least a "part-time" job's work of work for the average household (especially with children). We may be atypical, but my partner and I don't want to hire out a cleaning service and deal with the whole human component. But, I think we'd gladly pay 15k+ if it allowed us to take on the additional gainful workload. Even at a 20k price tag, I suspect we would likely have made up the difference in under a year.
Selling to businesses is much easier, 99% of businesses can afford 200K if it replaces 3 x 70K humans.
I'd gladly pay or finance a robot that could have dishes clean, laundry folded, and carpets vacuumed by the time our family got home.
Mileage varies. My impression is that on net, many people borrow money for the vehicle and end up adjusting their lives to depend on it, so much so that in their head they think they're saving time, but if they'd put that money into their home budget and moved closer to where things are, they'd get more exercise, be more socially healthy, and also waste less time and money driving. In aggregate, this makes everything worse and perpetuates the cycle. I sure as hell wouldn't move somewhere I had to drive to and from if I didn't already have the car, and I sure as hell wouldn't buy a car to get to a job unless the nature of my work required it. Not again.
They only became a “necessity” once they went mainstream and the world started evolving with vehicles becoming a part of everyday life.
I can certainly see the same thing happening with residential robotics.
Or, if the stress of doing everything they do is too much, and interferes with your ability to work and do other things you once had the time to do.
I've used on in the past, but I found that I was routinely dissatisfied with how they were doing things and I felt I needed to maintain a certain level of tidiness to allow them to clean properly. I think there is an intrinsic cost to having hired staff in one's home that most consumers would be factoring in, consciously or not.
Probably $80/day for someone to do everything I want done. 20 days a month.
$1,600/month.
It'd take two years, and the robot has paid for itself.
Can a household robot provide as much utility as a car? If "yes", the market gets pretty big.
Robots may not be very useful for now, but they will be at some point, and people will buy them, financing if they have to. Even if what the robots can do are not non-negotiable.
I pay $200 every 2 weeks to have a 3000 sq ft house cleaned.
That's about $5200 a year to fully clean a house. And it's a human, so they can also tidy up, clean out the refrigerator, do my laundry, water my plants, etc.
My parents, aunt/uncle, grandparents, and one of my neighbors uses the same house cleaner.
If she stole from me, I’d immediately tell my family and she would lose basically all of her clients.
That makes it easier for me to trust her.
(It works similarly in NYC apartment buildings - a single cleaner often services many people in the same building, so they have a reputation to uphold)
I would never use random online cleaning services.
I'm sure that there are services that do this, but I very much doubt they are the $400 per month services you are talking about. Robots may not be able to do that level of task at all right now, but they will get there.
And of course, that's not even thinking about all the cleaning tasks that would be avoided in between the every-other-week visits.
Having my surfaces be somewhat cleaner every two weeks is worth ~nothing to me. It's by far the easiest and least unpleasant part of cleaning a house. Having a robot that will pick up the detritus of everyday life and put it away, pick up and clean dishes, etc. and do so every single day would be worth an enormous amount of money.
I have no idea how long it will take for robots to get to that point, but whichever company cracks that level first is going to make a lot of money.
And of course, that's completely ignoring the fact that I also would like to not have to pick up my shit if I could buy a robot that would do it. Yes, I can. And in fact I currently do...mostly. But I'm not happy about it and if there was an even quasi reasonable amount of money I could pay that would mean I would never have to do it again, I 100% would do so.
And if you can honestly say that you wouldn't...well I hope you are enjoying your life in the monastery.
2 year olds do a bad job. They are 2. Yet it is valuable for them to learn to manage themselves. They love helping put silverware away from the washing machine. Kids _need_ to help as part of their development.
I won't lie, I don't do this often, and I end up picking up plenty of toys, and would welcome robot assistance, but it still seems wasteful and privileged to use advanced tech in this way
A new category of task starting to move along this trajectory is to be celebrated. Maybe some day people will clean some small portion of their house the same way that some people now have backyard gardens.
May be they will. But do you think this because of the LLMs? I don't think LLMs will help. Because it can only generate text.
Costs me 160 / month for 4hrs / week.
Obviously the whole question is how a robot cleaner compares to a human.
As you point out, the potential for robots far outperforms humans in multiple categories (although clearly not all by any stretch).
I'd say pricing around that of a lower end new car - or nice used one - seems about right to me. In terms of justifying the price, another thing I haven't seen discussed much is the competitive advantage this can provide. If you're spending less time cleaning, that's more time for other things.
Some people might feel that a robot cleaner is less intrusive that a person.
People might not have 20k in the bank, but if most are doing a part-time employment's worth of work which could be replaced by a machine, it would make sense on paper.
Granted, people aren't rational. Anecdotally, my partner and I probably could be hiring out some of this currently, but we choose not to as we don't want to have to work around a cleaning service's schedule. I think we'd be more apt to buy something which we own, have control over, always does things in the manner we'd like, doesn't have to work around our messy lives/schedules, etc.
I could definitely see people baking in money for certain automations, if they have a comparable ROI.
Of course, the initial prices will be significantly higher than "end result" or commoditized prices, at which point maybe even people on the brink of poverty can afford some level of home automation. In the interim, yes - it will be largely for the wealthy and business applications.
I kind of understand where the feeling comes from, but this also saddens me. What happened to our generation? We're scared of people.
I share those feelings too, it's self-reflective.
If the future home robots are any good, it saves you from buying a dishwasher and robot vacuum. It can replace a maid/cleaning service and gardener/lawn-mowing service. For anyone paying for those services, it pays for itself.
$1000 isn't that high. Probably about a third of American households have an appliance over $2000, which is still a massive market.
The side benefit is all your dishes are always available. With the dishwasher, up to one full dishwasher load are dirty at any time, which means you need more dishes and more cupboard space than someone without a dishwasher.
If the robot is going to clear your dishes and wash them for you right away, what's the dishwasher for? To save the robot 10 minutes?
I'm not saying people who already have a dishwasher will throw it away. But a robot makes installing a new dishwasher much less tempting.
At my utility prices, it costs about 5¢ to hand-wash one serving (plate, pan, glass, utensils, and a bowl) with running water. That's not nothing, but it's dwarfed by the energy use of using the oven and the supply-chain energy and water use of the food if it includes meat.
People will casually waste 10x that energy without a second thought when they don't need to just because it's convenient, or because they're used to doing things that way.
The dishwasher looks more unfavorable if you're considering installing one in a small apartment or condo. Apart from the cost of the dishwasher, you need space to install it, and more cupboard space to keep more dishes, glasses, etc. For an extra 4¢ per person-meal, having your robot do the dishes buys you the convenience of skipping all that and having all your dishes clean and ready all the time.
Honestly I don't even bother with two cycles and just use a 45 minute program in a 45cm wide dishwasher while throwing the extra powder in there anyway because it is too cheap to care about the waste vs tabs.
And talking of kids, these will have to be exceedingly safe, a 6ft machine falling on a child is probably a worry most households could do without.
They all have cars. Turns out you can finance things, and turn them into forever debts. Paying $30K to never have to do chores again, or maybe even cook again, and live in a clean neat environment is not only an amazing proposition that opens up a lot of free time for people, but will also have a lot of social pressure behind it. We have social pressure that causes people to buy >$1000 phones to virtually no marginal benefit over $20 phones.
They will be paid off at $500/mo over 10 years, and most renters might just use the one that came with their apartment. If they're more like $80K or $100K I could see having a problem selling them. But if they basically turned apartment buildings into hotels, they would be a bargain for landlords; just give them the keys.
edit: of course, sci-fi has already rehearsed this. You can watch any number of movies and tv shows with families walking through a robot showroom guided by a guy in a cheap suit offering to give them the best deal. I'm sure you could find written examples from the 40s.
There are plenty of white collar employees in cities paying $500+/month for someone to come clean their home. As one of those people, I could easily see paying low five figures for something like this if it actually worked well and could replace most household labor.
Part of the reason is upfront commitment is scary and risky for personal money, but not scary for a business.
As with most things, it'll cater to that demographic and then filter down.
what you have to keep in mind is homeowners salary is way above avg salary so anything you can do to effect them has a much larger impact than it would seem at first.
Having said that, it could still be decades till the robot is ready to be released into human homes unsupervised. The variation in human homes, what people store in them etc. is not easy. However, it could be ready for hotels much sooner.
I don't think we'll get household robots anytime soon. Hell, the only ones that can afford them will be the same that would hire human household help.
But maybe they'd rather deal with a robot than a human?
I do want a robot serviant. But running AI that I control. Here it google says it can "And this profound intelligence can also run locally on-device", that makes it interesting for me.
I don't want a person I barely know regularly going all over my apartment. What if they discover... nevermind.
A robot, on the other hand? Hell yeah!
My issue is different: I feel bad with someone working around me while I am lazy. A robot would not pose that problem.
That aside: if I'm lucky enough to find a person who's good and reliable, they might move away, switch jobs etc.
It has all the headaches that come with hiring and managing someone, because, well, it is exactly that... If I don't want to be a manager at work (been there done that, happy to let others do it and get the raise that comes along with it), I sure as heck don't want to do it at home.
Those controlled by LLM's maybe ain't.
Here with google the LLM is even local, but will be fun with the cloud controlled robots, where the company got overwhelmed and silently uses a weaker model at certain times. With fun results.
In the humanoid robot scenario, you'll get a surveillance device with a built-in microphone and camera beaming every intimate detail of your space to the highest bidder. Instead of getting one person you don't know very well in your space, you'll get thousands.
Just imagine, there’s a woman Alice who cleans your home once a month. On this particular day, she had a fight with her husband this morning on (something completely unrelated to you).
Do you expect her to check her emotions at the door when she enters your space? Or is she going to give really bad vibes while she is moving around your house?
This is the same reason people prefer buying Tesla cars direct instead of having to make a deal at a dealership. If they all had high EQ maybe they'd prefer the dealership model after all.
Tech does also attract grumpy people.
The reason this idea stuck in my memory when I read it - is that it resonated with me. To some extent I feel this way.
You have cause and effect wrong; it just makes people that have to deal with the people in and around the tech industry grumpy.
More seriously:
- I wouldn't feel obligated to 'pre-clean' anything. Who wants to come across as a thoughtless/careless slob whose personal habits amount to borderline-abusive demands on the cleaning staff? Not me... and where does that line get drawn, anyway?
- I wouldn't worry about stuff being picked up and misplaced
- I have never had problems with maids stealing stuff, but I know others have
- Cleaning can be initiated or postponed as needed, with no dependencies on someone else's schedule
Well, as long as you don't mind the workers in the robot company's telemetrics department whacking it to your robot's video feed.
(I'm being facetious here: nothing that transmits data out of the house is going to be deployed to run household robots, at least not in my house. Even if I didn't care, I can't make that call on behalf of family members or guests. Then there's the obvious concern that the robotics company would sell the data to my homeowners' insurance company, health insurance company, and who knows who else.)
That being said, by the time the kinematic hardware needed to build a robotic housekeeper is available for home use, I don't think the brainpower is going to be a problem. There's nothing in Ex Machina that couldn't run on a couple of RTX 6000s.
(real-time mess handling)
For example, you could store far more things out of easy human reach.
There is going to be so much pain from VLA malicious compliance. If the current gen of LLMs are anything to go by I can already see it being an hilariously massive problem. People are careless.
it depends. in order for my slow ass Roomba to clean my floors, I have to move a bunch of things out of the way and not use the room.
on the flip side, i think this "the robot cannot automate the whole task" thing is reductive too. suffice it to say, EVERYTHING matters, there honestly nothing that "honestly doesn't matter."