You wouldn’t buy, say, a car that only got half the mileage or whatever just because there’s a human story behind it. There’s a human story behind almost everything.

Easily the most intriguing aspect of the show is discovering the often inordinate amount of time, energy and money that the candidates have invested in what, to the disinterested outsider, appears to be a completely mad and unworkable idea: the potentially destructive power of human determination.

I agree with your second paragraph completely. I also totally undrestand it, having cofounded startups myself in the past. You get tunnel vision.

Don't let a robot do something a human can do better.

A good example is robot vacuum cleaners: I have had one for a few years now and it's easily the best purchase I've ever made: it doesn't vacuum as well as we do but it does it everyday which is something I'm absolutely unwilling to do. Having it in my home greatly reduced the amount of time we had to dedicate to cleaning the floor and dusting non-floor surfaces (it turns out that daily vacuuming the floor has a huge impact in the amount of dust collected everywhere else).

(But I suspect you don’t need a fancy machine for simple shapes - a simple folding wooden rig would do and be almost as quick. Hell, I’ve got a cheap plastic thing that’ll do shirts in seconds.)

Large hotels and commercial laundry operations already have expensive specialized machines for folding. This does not seem to be targeting that market.

There are already such machines in industry (in garment-making, hotels etc). The challenge is that they are typically specialised towards specific types of garment. Nobody in industry really needs a generic machine; but that's the only configuration that the home market will consider. The only sub-niche big enough that could maybe sustain a specialised machine in the home is "shirts and trousers" - but there the real annoyance is ironing, not folding.

Fairly expensive machines though, and typically can only fold 1 type of article (eg: need a machine for each towel size or spend time setting it up)

There's a human story behind every product.

It's called Washbox, and it's a locker in the atrium of my apartment building. I drop my clothes off, text the locker number to the company, and my clothes will be returned clean the next day. It is, in fact, both super useful and cheap.

I'm sure they would love to automate their washing & folding process further, but those implementation details are already well abstracted from me as the end user. If I were interested in automating laundry, it seems smarter to start by targeting industrial use by existing laundry services who will be willing to pay more per unit and put up with more quirks than a home user would.

They'd be charging me almost as much just to do wash & fold than I pay for someone to clean my whole house....

I can see it being worth it for people who make a decent income and spend that time doing something else. It’s pretty much the same as any service for things that need to be done regularly. As your time becomes more valuable, it makes sense to delegate those tasks off.

A robot that puts my kids' clothes in a bag for pickup by a laundry service might be a winner.

Or one that sorts out intimates and drycleaning from towels and shirts, so that the latter can be sent out. My wife's primary objection to laundry service is that it's too personal to send out. Thus, the dream of a robot that can do it all in-house.