Warehouse automation is a completely different ballgame to consumer, though.

If an Amazon warehouse can replace a $20,000/year human with a Kiva robot, they're happy to pay $10,000 for it. Consumers, on the other hand, would find $500 on the steep side for a robot vacuum, considering they'll also need a regular vacuum to cover the stairs and so on.

Consumers' price sensitivity is why Roomba spent years with a plastic product navigating at random by bumping into things and relying more on a brush than a vacuum.

I think your numbers are a bit off. The base Amazon warehouse worker is closer to 35-40k all in cost. And the $700-$900 roombas sell very well.

I'd expect they'd pay even 2-3x that easily since a robot can work 24/7. The squishy humans need to pee, or worse go home.

I once attended a Foxconn seminar presented by Jay Lee where the topic was "dark warehouses"; certainly wouldn't be surprised if Amazon has a strong desire to reach that level of machine autonomy in their own warehouses.

At this point a company is going to need to produce a "deceased cubicle human detection" robot for the few holdouts 40 years from now.

there's a loose correlation of concerns there, but "definitely"? More like "likely."

> Amazon definitely cares about automated appliances (as demonstrated by their warehouse automation)

This is almost equivalent to saying that Boeing cares about paper planes because they make airliners.