Hotels have a variety of tasks they would love to replace a host of low cost labor with robots with.
Someone in a higher income bracket wouldn’t think twice about that cost if it did significant work. On the other hand, the bar is high (cleaning, folding, picking up -- all are still fairly challenging AI problems, to say nothing of the "business" logic that would go into it).
Then you've got that quality servos are expensive. Some of that can resolved with volume, but not all of it.
In fact, France would probably be a very attractive country for this technology because of this.
Lamplighters are especially useful to consider here.
How many lives has electricity saved? How many ICUs can operate continual machines because of it? How many people at risk of heat stroke can run AC in summer because of it? How many transplants and temperature controlled medicines got delivered because of it? What about its role in food safety? What about timely communications of life saving information, like those lost at sea asking for help, or severe weather alerts advising others to shelter? That's just the beginning, it seems incalculable really.
That lamplighter should have had a society willing to catch them during the transition. But imagine if it solved this problem by holding that one person's job sacred at the cost of millions of other lives instead.
It's absolutely good and relevant to worry about individual cases, but it seems like society is better off if we allow jobs to adjust to the actual current needs of humanity, rather than holding them fixed. Then we just also try to do our best to take care of as many of those who fall through the cracks as we can.
The amount of time we used to spend making a single yard of cloth, or creating 10 pounds of flour is almost unfathomable today.
The prevailing economic theory was that we would automate away so much work that leisure time would prevail. Instead our massive increases in output have just driven greater consumption.
But the difference made by housecleaning robots isn’t the straw the breaks the camels back.
It would take a massive breakthrough in AI to eliminate the majority of knowledge workers at the scale that agriculture and textiles have already been transformed.
Trying to stay as ethics neutral here.
We will probably see something like "Human assisted AI" with a sliding scale from mostly human to mostly AI for various tasks at various stages of development. The operators will be sourced where work is cheap, like Amazon Mechanical Turk.
Once VC gets it they'll fund the first few generations of bots on optimism alone.
Honestly who cares if it cant do everything. Nor can robotic vacuum cleaners and I have three.
@spykie So what if it cant go up stairs, have robots on each level. If it cant pick its self up, have multiple, let them help. Most things it cleans are light, so no problem there either. Cant interact buttons? Give it a rotating toolhead.
@bArray it doesn't need to operate autonomously, see the Human assisted AI argument. With good UX one remote operator will control five or six bots at once, tagging objects, issuing instructions. Give the User a good AR app, let them issue location based instruction around the house that the "AI" (remote operator) will slowly handle during the day.
Honestly, this space will be a primary design driver soon. I cant totally see IKEA making robot compatible cupboards.
If this space isn't huge I will be incredibly surprised.
Mmm...I guess it's fair to assume that the IQ of a human cleaner is superior to anything resembling a Roomba. Would you hire a human cleaner and grant them access to your living area? And if so would you be monitoring their every move while they go about the job?
Bezos & company aren't exactly considering the plights of their employees/independent contractors for their quarterly financial report.
Is it bad that I rank how successful a venture might be based on how many jobs it might destroy?
The bigger issue, IMO, is avoiding distasters like Roombas trying to vacuum dog poop.
I agree, although I saw it as implied!
Robots are like AI: once they become widely used, they are no longer called robots. :)
To me, dish washers, mixers, vacuum cleaners are all robots that can be part of the household fleet.
Mixers and food processors are robots in French:
https://www.robot-patissier.org/robot-menager-robot-patissie...
https://translate.google.com/#view=home&op=translate&sl=en&t...
The thing about examples like the washing machine is, I haven't looked but I would be surprised if there isn't already a networked washing machine, less the powered door, that is meant for smart homes.
I'm happy with our Roomba. We don't have any dogs but is it really that bad!? :-)
Two months ago, my partner vacuumed up fox poop. No idea why he thought it was a good idea. We realised it wasn't when the soft, sticky debris coated the inside of the vacuum cleaner's flexible hose. :(
The smell only improved after I cleaned every internal crevice. Including submerging the crinkly part of the hose in a half-full bath and pulling through a sponge three or four times.
We still have to put deodorant beads inside the vacuum cleaner bag.
Robonix Philosophy at play here, inspired from Unix philosophy [1]
- Make each robot do one thing well
- Expect the output of every robot to become the input to another
- Design and build robots to be tried early, ideally within weeks
- Use robots in preference to unskilled help to lighten a chore task
It's a totally different use case to have a labor-saving device available 24/7. For example, I did not stop using my dishwasher when I hired a cleaner, and my cleaner does not do my dishes or put them away.
https://www.reviewed.com/dishwashers/best-right-now/the-best...
The knowledge workers automate jobs away, leading pundits to say the future for low-skilled workers is to provide boutique services for the upper class. The end being that the upper class is too ashamed to actually consume those services if it means looking at a person...well, that's sort of a delicious irony, isn't it?
I have also heard about people getting cleaners who initially do a good job, but whose work quality degrades over time. You wouldn't have that problem with a robot.
For high risk people, this might be a good alternative for normally-simple tasks they can't do by themselves.
A safe assumtion is that all IoT devices spy on you. I wonder how much longer there actually are robot vacuum cleaners that are safely offline for sale with full functionality.
- 4-year robot lifetime is overly pessimistic. If upgrade is not the reason (which has nothing to do with lifetime, it's your choice to upgrade), a robot could last way more than 4-years (especially with right-to-repair laws in place).
- That said, such a robot will most likely be available for less than $21k and very soon in the near future.
I find interesting to address the middle one statistically.
A given machine has a number of random events that can kill it. Each possible event type i can be modeled as a Poisson process Xᵢ with, in a given year, probability λᵢ. The machine survives in a given year if no occurrence of event i happens, with probability Pr(Xᵢ = 0) = exp(-λᵢ).
For instance, a device with an average lifetime of 8 years and a single possible cause of death, has λ = -ln(½^⅛) = 0.087.
Given N independent event types (say, if you have on the order of N components), the yearly survival of the overall machine has probability Πᷡᵢ exp(-λᵢ).
Thus the lifetime of the overall machine is ln(½)÷ln(½^(Σᷡᵢ 1÷Lᵢ)) = 1 ÷ Σᷡᵢ (1÷Lᵢ) if each component has lifetime Lᵢ.
For instance, two components with an average lifetime of 8 years yield a single machine with an average lifetime of 4 years.
The more death-causing event types there are, the smaller the lifetime; and a general-purpose robot inherently has more.
I believe this result is counter-intuitive, and is the reason you might be led to think I am overly pessimistic.
> ... N independent event types ...
So if the robot blows a $0.03 (i.e., 3 cents) electrolytic cap [0], that's an independent event type that "killed" the machine? Just trying to get a sense of how you define "machine kill" (and as I said I mentioned a big caveat of right-to-repair laws).
That's what I think the value is for this robot. A quick clean, reorg of the room / house.
This reminds me of the little swarm of robots that come out of the walls to clean up spills in The Fifth Element.
This is where raising the minimum wage can spur innovation. If we gradually increase the cost of human labour (with higher wages, and other conditions), then the market will be motivated to fund & find technological solutions.
The main equation for general-use household robots is: can it beat human fares?
A good weekly cleaner (4 hours) is about €22/h in Paris, or €4.5k/year.
Let’s say your robot lives 4 years, similar to your computer (which seems fair, since it is one, and an abused one at that). Since you amortize its price over 4 years, its initial cost must be below €18.3k ($21k) with human-quality-parity.
Personally, though, I would bet on dedicated, single-purpose robots, working together through wireless communication. Simpler to build, less costly, easier to replace. One small wheeled quadcopter for cleaning surfaces, one wheeled laundry box to carry it to the washing machine, one arm attached to the washing machine to put it in, etc.