At 50k/year that's 2-3x minimum wage depending on where you live. That's 3 employees for a year. And in that wage bracket there are no repair costs associated with the humans. Nor maintenance.

Also who gets the robot to the house? And what cleaning company or what ever has the Capitol for a $50k purchase. The competition has their own Transit and start up costs are cleaning supplies.

Even if it were 50k a year, that's under $6 an hour, which beats minimum wage in the U.S.

Good observation!

Even if we assume 90% uptime, it’s going to needs some maintenance, it comes out to a levelised cost of $6.34 an hour, plus parts and labour for the maintenance.

This still blows human labour out of the water because robots don’t complain about conditions, and they don’t intentionally run off with trade secrets.

Yet.

They don't get tired, they don't have days off sick, they are repeatable

Automation is good. Assuming the hypothetical robot that can do the required task actually exists, it's probably worth nearer to $100k a year

Not sure if you've worked with machenery before but it takes plenty of time off.

You only get that if you're working round the clock, which none of the examples would do for companies as the robot would need to move around thus having downtime.

Your also assuming 0 maintenance and no charging time

The parent and grandparent comments to mine appear to be talking about $50,000 as the original purchase price. That’s the way I read it.

If it were $50,000 per year then I agree with you.

Further to this, Australia, where I live, has a high minimum wage at a little over $20/hr casual, and a little under as a fall tint employee with 20 days paid leave and 10 days sick leave per year.

There’s no way I can afford a full time, 8hrs / day, personal assistant.

But you don't. Cleaning dishes, floor and and clothes is not a full time job: I(ve have done it for decades, but now have people to clean my house, cook and wash my clotheres.

So your robot will sit idle most of the day, unless you have a much bigger house or a big family.

And remember that for the next 20 years, the robots won't be able to do many things due to motor skills/autonomy/analysis capabilities. So they may, by as for now can't replace a full time human.

Android are still scifi.

> So your robot will sit idle most of the day

I think you have a "neurotic" cleaner robot working full time to make sure your house, dishes, and clothes are perfectly finished. Part of the package is a cheap third-world worker for an hour to remotely waldo the robot for the difficult parts, and do the final checks.

The robot is bought using finance, like a car. Or bought on a service plan that gives you "free" upgrades every few years.

It then becomes a social norm to have a robot "My, how unclean your home is, whyever don't you get an Apple Dysony like I have".

(I'm unsure what the marketing would be in countries where you don't visit friend's houses...)

VOIP still doesn't work properly in the Valley one time out of two, and you want somebody from the other side of the world remotly handling breakable things in the house ?

The first robot killing the cat by dropping a knife because of a lag is going to be fun.

Jeepers - as though the Valley is the centre of the universe?

If latency turns out to be a serious issue, then remote control robots would be installed where latency is reliable, or where home owners can get low latency connections.

Most likely latency will improve for the valley over the next few years.

Certainly VoiP is reliable in many other countries. We use a cheap provider at work (virtually no issues), and I used it at home in 2011 and it was rock solid. And NZ is definitely on the edge of the main networks!

Edits:

PS: second anecdote: I'm on an island in the Mediterranean at the moment, and VoiP seems very usable.

PPS: what do the gamers in your neighborhood do to resolve ping times? They usually are extremely interested in diagnosing the underlying causes of latency and finding solutions (although you obviously need to find a more engineer type gamer than a script kiddie soothsayer type)

We just switched to all VoIP desk phones at work, over our NBN connections. Same at home. Works flawlessly.

Both providers, Telstra at work, and Internode at home, give VoIP traffic the highest priority QoS, as far as I’m aware. It’s been a while since I worked Internode.

Sure, but then...

You know, there hasn’t been a technological advancement we’ve managed to refrain from using. So it’s either it’s just a matter of time, or it’s not possible due to some limitation(a).

Let’s assuming for a minute that this does eventuate, and some robot does manage to kill the cat: we’ll get over it. We haven’t regulated the car out of existence yet, and they have a tendency to kill quite the many cats.*

*all analogies breakdown under scrutiny.

Of course. I'm not saying it can't happen. I'm saying it's still scify. We have nowhere close the technology to make it happen yet.

I'm convinced AI and androids will come around. I just don't think it will happen in this decade.

I’m still not completely sold on the certainty of either. Time will tell.

Yep, this is what I’m talking about. Well said too :)

I understand that but your assuming you never replace the robot, no downtime, no amortization, no maintenance costs. Which is not reasonable either.

At 3 years you are likely break even with humans with no maintenance costs. At 5 you're likely actually b/e, and may need to do major matinence or an upgrade .

24/7/5 is a lot of wear and tear.