A military bot is a lot simpler to make then a household bot, ironically. Soldiers can be trained to use a tool a specific way its intended (provided it's ultimately useful). And the range of things a military bot needs to do is actually somewhat more limited to mostly the things we've already seen.

I'm not really sure what a BD household robot would even do.

Are you kidding? For every soldier in the field, how many households would pay for having a robot to do their washing, cleaning, cooking, taking parcels, caring for the dog, etc. It's a huge market. And no export restrictions!

Sure, but it's also a competitive market, because cheap human labour is extremely proficient at washing, cleaning, cooking and dog walking.

c.f. military use where soldiers lives are very politically costly, and machines can be much more proficient killers.

That may be the case in certain part of the world (or even of the US) but if you think of London or New York, a typical household can certainly not afford to have someone full time taking care of these things. Western economies have been converging toward rather egalitarian societies where domesticity pretty much disappeared (and who would be the domestic to the domestics?).

Living in London I can hire cleaners and people to move stuff at very affordable hourly rates (the fact there's not an extremely popular Uber-type service for it says something about the demand...) and get food delivered whenever I want. And I'd expect sufficiently motivated humans to be considerably better at those tasks than a generalist robot.

I suspect that the purchase, maintenance and software licence costs of an extremely complex piece of machinery with incredible AI isn't going to compare that favourably with a minimum wage human anyway, even spread out over a few years.

Minimum Wage Human Capable of operating 24/7 in the $15/hr world is $131,400.

>McDonald's former CEO Ed Rensi: "It’s cheaper to buy a $35,000 robotic arm than it is to hire an employee who’s inefficient making $15 an hour bagging french fries."

Since we're talking about whether there's a mass market for domestic robots, that quote supports my point more than yours. A robotic arm consisting of non-novel technology capable of doing nothing more than bagging chips according to a set program costs $35k.

As a householder, I don't need someone to bag chips for me 24/7. Having someone spend an hour cleaning my flat once a week would be quite useful. Unfortunately, the robot arm doesn't have enough moving parts or AI to do that, and even if it could, I could hire someone on a $15 minimum wage to do that on a weekly basis for 44 years for the same price as the robotic arm.

For the cost, you could say the same with all the technology packed in a smartphone or a laptop. The fact is it has become very cheap once it is mass produced.

Cars, on the other hand, remain expensive. A robot with sufficient versatility to cook, clean and walk the dog is significantly more mechanically complex than a car and likely exposes manufacturers to similar liability issues.

And if the hardware costs mean it's not a mass market product, the software licences aren't going to be cheap either.

I doubt the price of cars is driven in big part by actual costs. Also, at least in my area, you can buy good enough used cars for as little as $400, which isn't very much money. A lot of people drive in cars that cost less than a decent PC.

Cars cost more than $400 to build. The used market does not pay for the existence of things.

Cellphones have no moving parts and do not exert large forces on things. High quality high power motors are expensive and will always be expensive compared to the consumer electronics we are used to.

Roomba etc can be cheap because the forces are small and required accuracy is low. An arm that can e.g. load a dishwasher or plug itself into an electrical socket is another beast. Consider that to lift 1kg payload the arm also has to lift itself, and arms typically weigh several kilograms.

Mass producing robots will help costs, but they will still be expensive like a car, not like a TV.

Probably. But you wouldn't buy one of these robots every year. You would replace them at the same rythm as any other mature technology (fridge, dish washer, etc). Obviously not the early models, but democratisation is not about the early models.

i think the entire military spending in the U.S. was >650B. It is probably insanely hard to train a robot to walk around an unknown environment, pick clothes up, launder & dry them, and then have the dexterity to fold them. What percentage of people would buy v1 of this in america. A standard shitty top down analysis tries to capture 1% of a market. Here, your absolute max is 1%, likelely 0.01%. So, capturing 1% of the world market of people who could possibly even afford this is 80k people. assume this analysis is terrible, but you get the idea. many countries spend on military/security. This would branch into police dept ect. Obviously, this woud be terrible for humans, but a robonanny is less marketable than a military robot because the tech is there for a military bot but not precise enough to do chores, which aren't super valuable relative to en masse robot manufacturing costs.

I'd assume the problems will be fairly similar. The terminator will have to evolve in an unknown environment, be careful of not hurting civilians (or the wrong army) and will face a deliberately deceptive enemy. Either way there will be a v1, and a v2, and a v3, and it will take a while before it becomes a cheap mainstream product. But the civil use I think has a multiple of the potential.

Now the reality is that it's probably not going to be one or the other, both will advance in parallel and share technologies.

i am totally in agreement that they will largely evolve in paralell. i just think the market op is much higher for mil tech now.

Most technologies are funded and developed in research stage for military applications, internet being one example. your example was (and i assume you mean far future) a super hard problem. terminator was a fully intelligent super being.

i am talking about the development of the class that boston dynamics is/has built. they can run around in open environments and could do recon, supply and very basic defensive or offensive maneuvering.

i think (and could be wrong) the granular dexterity to fold a shirt is super hard. also, training would be non trivial.

i think robots and augmentation will be mil -> commercial -> consumet. and this is happening. soon all 3 will evolve in parallel and converge on apecific applications

> I'm not really sure what a BD household robot would even do.

Start with basic tasks - carry grocery bags in from the car, walk the dog, carry heavy things from room to room. Vacuuming, mowing the lawn, etc could be next, then picking up clothes and toys from the floor. Maybe even chasing the kids through the woods, so you can keep an eye on them?

There are already robots for mowing the lawn and the results are great. Biggest time saver since i got my first dish washer.

Autonomous tools vs autonomous puppets to operate conventional tools. Roomba vs Ltd Cmdr Data.

We won't be seeing much of the latter any time soon. Even Star Wars assumes that the "roomba" type would be far more useful than his golden friend.

And some people do enjoy mowing their lawn themselves or cooking themselves. But I think most do not. And it would mow the lawn in the middle of the week when it is the least disrupting to neighbors. And it's one thing for Mum to enjoy cooking. But if the family has a choice between Mum's specialty (a bunch of potatoes floating in grease) and an electronic Gordon Ramsay with skills and recipes for every kind of cooking in the world, they might vote for the latter.

Boston dynamics worked on legged robots, signed contracts with DARPA, made cool videos showing how effective they were, people got spooked by the said videos, google PR decided image might damage company's face, so they decided to not associate Google name with the videos and robots. That and the fact that Google wants robots that work indoors while BD are making pretty much outdoor robots as of now.