Comment by johnfn 4 days ago
I mean, forget the manufacturing industry. I'd happily pay a lot of money just to have one help me with menial tasks around the house. I mean, I'd probably pay thousands for a bot that could just do the laundry. Are you saying that such a market doesn't exist?
Well you go ahead and tell me how many hours a week you're going to spend working to afford a robot that saves you an hour a week of labor, then get back to me. If you think you won't be paying monthly subscriptions and doing maintenance on these machines to save you a couple hours of folding clothes, you're the one contorting yourself.
And yet such a HUGE amount of time is spent by families around the world (mine included) just moving laundry around in various states:
Dirty -> Sort It Yourself -> Plan Washing Chunks -> Load into Washing machine -> Yay It "Washed it For You" -> wet pile of clothes -> Unload it -> dryer -> Dryer "Dries" it For You -> Fold It Yourself -> Storage.
Now do this for a family with 2 kids that go to school. Washing is literally an hour or two of collective human time every day.
I'd pay money to rather spend that time with my kids instead of yet another useless daily chore that can be automated.
Now also apply the same logic to dishes, clearing up around the house, sorting cupboards, Driving!!, and a host of other things. The market is absolutely huge, and people are sticking their heads in the sand because they know that once this drops, humanity will reach an inflection point and all pointless manual labor will disappear, which means saying goodbye to cheap third world labor and only capital + raw resources + energy will be the only things holding back all scaling.
Also, despite what people think, children are capable of doing their own laundry and clean up after themselves. Maybe they can spend an hour less on their screens. Imagine what a spoiled-ass shit kid would grow up in a house where they have no responsibilities.
If you make a $10,000 robot that can do all of the dishes every damned household with kids in any semi-rich country will get one. A very good portion of our night is spent cleaning up after supper with just two kids, and that's time we can't spend with them. I'd even pay a subscription on top of that $10,000.
If it does laundry too? We'd easily pay $20,000, and we don't have FAANG type salaries.
Yeah, great. Except we need to unload the dishwasher every day, which takes a lot longer when you have all sorts of kid's cups and bottles. We also need to bring the dishes over, rinse them, put them in, wash the pots & pans by hand along with the high chair's detachable eating area, wash the table, wash the cooking area & counters, and then wash the sink.
A dishwasher saves a lot of time but it certainly doesn't save all of the time.
A robot vacuum costs thousands of dollars (will about a thousand) and they don't work very. There is no way that you are going to get a machine that is orders of magnitude more complex down to that price point any time soon.
A business case is not just a matter of a willing buyer. It is a buyer and a vendor who can agree on a price that works for both. You may have agreed but the physics of the matter mean that there is nobody to take the other side.
Humanoid robots are a lot of sizzle-- they promise all sorts of flexibility, at the cost of hugely higher cost/complexity/unreliability.
If you can scope your problem to some degree, you can probably make some purpose-built automation that won't look like a human, but will do the job competently and cheaply.
I see the demos with the robots carrying boxes and think "okay, why not just use a conveyer belt?"
Because, again, for home use we don't want a laundry robot, a dish washing robot, a cleaning robot, etc. We kind of have those (laundry machine, dishwasher, Roomba-types) but they all have big limitations. What people want is something that can do everything a human can do, so it can put away those dishes, wash a pan, clean the table, counters, etc. We've already scoped the problem and a humanoid-ish robot is probably the best option to do those things.
Well for home use you probably also want a robot that won’t accidentally murder your pet, injure your children, break itself and/or your prized possessions by doing the wrong thing, etc etc etc.
These are unsolved problems for robotics. There is a reason that most industrial robots work behind guards or in very constrained areas with use cases that are 100% on rails and stringently tested.
The idea that if you just make a robot in a human shape all these cease to be problems is magical thinking. We are fare from knowing that a humanoid-ish robot is the best option to do any of these things because we have no idea what it would take for it to do these things safely other than to say it would take technology that we currently don’t have.
The market for that exist but the execution to get that product is beyond hard. Compare full self driving after all these years where are we? It’s still not a real thing. It’s still just a limited experiment. The cars have only speed and steering angle to manage. What do you think about “full self driving robots”? There is a business case for them but in the near term you cannot make one good enough for the tasks you want. Safety is a big issue on top of making the robot useful. You don’t want it hurt anyone.
I responded to someone saying "Ain’t nobody made the business case for that. It is pure vibes." When I point one out, all the responses shift the goal posts, as you are doing, to say execution is incredibly hard or Tesla is far behind or whatever. But that's not what I was saying, nor what I was responding to.
You already have machines that do the laundry. Put clothes in, they come out clean. Have you ever tried manually washing clothes? All you have to do is take them out and fold them.