People in the US buy cars.
Can a household robot provide as much utility as a car? If "yes", the market gets pretty big.
Can a household robot provide as much utility as a car? If "yes", the market gets pretty big.
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.
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.
Costs me 160 / month for 4hrs / week.
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.
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.