I don't see it happening anytime soon. Maybe at $5k (in today dollars) in ten years it will be something, but not today. Boston Dynamics is arguably the world leader, and they are focused on industrial simply because "Rosie the Robot" just isn't capable of doing enough for the price point.
This is not going to happen any time soon. The acquisition cost and ongoing maintenance issues alone limit the practical market of home robots to a tiny segment of the market.
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.
I strongly believe that except in edge cases, people spend so much time cleaning because they're not thinking about process and lack attention to detail. (or, potentially, they have people in their family who lack these things)
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.
It would be amazing to have robot-delivered butler service. However, I'm deeply concerned about privacy and, given OTA updates, physical safety. There are enough bad actors on the Internet as-is, I don't want my butler deciding to reenact Order 66 after a Wifi update.
I am fairly confident that while they're not ready "today", with the advances we're seeing in AI recently, we're going to have a viable in-home humanoid robot in the next decade or two, priced at "car" kinda prices
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)
For this to work efficiently maybe we will need to evaluate the form factor of homes in general (particularly in the US).
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.
I live in a large suburban home. I spend $1,000/mo on landscaping services and $1,000/mo on maid services. If I could buy a $10,000 robot that could do those things, as well as have apps for doing dinner dishes, laundry, making the bed, and feeding the pets, I would do it in a second.
Absolutely not happening. If robots get versatile enough to clean a random home, then they'll be good enough for higher-value work like being a robotic soldier or building more robots. And if they're taking lots of jobs like that, then there's going to be tons of spare man-hours for busywork like cleaning.
We, in the tech industry, go all starry-eyed when we imagine utopian
futures filled with robots that will do all your tedious chores. But a
dark side of this that goes unnoticed is that such automation is often
just a way for money to be transferred from the poorest sections of
society to the richest.
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.
The B2C case here seems off to me. The market of people who are going to pay the high price tag, have enough storage, and tolerate the extreme limitations and slowness of these machines seems to be: the rich, the elderly, and people with physical disabilities. The latter two categories come with a huge number of liability and regulatory costs that I think most of these companies are not willing to handle. That does not feel like a huge market.
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 don't get the naysayers, I absolutely see this happening. Take senior care, absurdly expensive even with low cost human labor, $100K a year. If we had $50k robots, it would be a game changer. People could live out their final years in their home with 24/7 personal care.
14 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 72.2 ms ] threadBut, I take the point that more and more of these tasks will be automated more effectively in the coming decade.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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'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.
(Sorry, couldn’t resist this Orville reference)