Comment by johnfn

"My layman's opinion is that I would happily pay a lot of money to have a robot help me around the house: fold my clothes, do the dishes, whatever dumb menial labor. That seems like a business case to me, unless someone is going to tell me I'm the only one in the world who could want that (but I doubt it)."

How much is "a lot of money"? Not picking on you, happy to let you want what you want, but people often seem to mention laundry, which mystifies me.

I am an adult male in the US. I do not need to dress for work in any way I would not dress anyway. Basically, I do two loads of laundry a week, one for clothes, one for towels and bedding.

This requires about one hour of actual work per week. More if we counted "waiting for the washing machine" and "waiting for the dryer" as work, but I don't.

How much would I pay to remove this hour a week of (really easy) work from my life? Almost nothing. I would not, for example, pay someone $50 to come to my house and do it for me. It's not a problem and doesn't need a solution.

So how much would you really pay for a robot that did your laundry, washed your dishes, and did other "dumb menial labor"?

> My layman's opinion is that I would happily pay a lot of money to have a robot help me around the house: fold my clothes, do the dishes, whatever dumb menial labor. That seems like a business case to me, unless someone is going to tell me I'm the only one in the world who could want that (but I doubt it).

The day that:

- displaced workforce issue is solved

- they cost less than 20k everything included, base model

- do all the processing locally in their HW

- are smaller and lighter than a human being (but can reach higher places)

- last 10 years at least

I will definitely buy one. I don't think I'm going to see this in my lifetime though (I'm in my 40's).

> Are you really telling me you wouldn't pay any amount of money to do menial housework? If not, why not?

Do you own a Roomba? I don't. It's a huge liability and doesn't do the cleaning I want out of it, even at a sub-$1000 price point. The humanoid robot is clunkier, more of a liability, and will still refuse to do certain tasks.

> Are you really telling me you wouldn't pay any amount of money to do menial housework? If not, why not?

This is called having a live-in maid or a cleaning service. Even in the first-world, where there isn't a disfranchised rural population to provide cheap labor to the middle class (e.g. Philippines, most of LATAM 20 years ago) the service will be cheaper than the price of a vaporware bot [0]. Now, you might say the droid is cheaper if you want a live-in maid in HCOL area, but have in mind that this thing barely can fold clothes and fill a dishwasher (an actual domestic bot). Also it sometimes is actually a dude controlling it remotely.

We would need bots of the level of that awful I Robot movie with Will Smith.

[0] https://www.1x.tech/order

And another thought: if the robot can do housework, can it do factory work? Fieldwork? Lawn care? What else can it do with zero modifications?

That expands the market greatly.

You couldn't pay me any amount of money to have a robot in my home if it's controlled from Elon Musk's data center.

And I'm a former Tesla FSD customer, so I should be the ideal early adopter for this product.

No, I wouldn’t.

For one, I don’t spend a lot of time doing housework. Just organize your life better.

Beyond that, the cost would not be small. Based on current designs, operating costs would be thousands of dollars per month. I would not pay that.

It would require a cloud controlled robot with cameras in my home. Why in the world would I want that.

Finally, I already have dishwashers and laundry machines.

> My layman's opinion is that I would happily pay a lot of money to have a robot help me around the house: fold my clothes, do the dishes, whatever dumb menial labor.

Then why don't you hire a helper for that? You just said you'd pay a lot of money, so money doesn't seem to be an issue. What is then?

Do you already pay a human to do this work?

You would pay "a lot of money"?

Like, more than the cost of your house? For something that can't do those things right and has to be supervised? To a company that can't deliver product on time?