Comment by duskwuff 3 days ago
A teleoperated robot is little more than a human worker with extra steps. (And an expensive, clumsy human worker at that.) I can't imagine many situations where that would make sense instead of having a human do the work in person.
Maybe you can scale to have one operator operate ten or a hundred household robots at a time.
An autonomous robot that has 99% reliability, getting stuck once an hour, is useless to me. A semi-autonomous robot that gets stuck once an hour but can be rescued by the remote operator is tempting.
Expect security and privacy in the marketing for these things, too, but I don't think that's a real differentiator. Rich and middle class people alike are currently OK with letting barely-vetted strangers in their houses for cleaning the world over.
There could be some compelling reasons for one.
- Services like maids or cleaners are usually scheduled, maybe you have to wait and open the door etc. Maybe they can't make it that day because of snow storm etc.
- Services are normally limited to certain hours. With a remote operator, the robot could do laundry all night ran by someone in a different time zone.
- If needed could be operated in shifts.
- Other new use cases could arise, e.g. wellness check on elderly, help if fallen or locked out etc.
The only places it does is where humans can't easily go: space, underwater, hazardous industrial sites, etc.
It can occasionally make sense for high skill stuff where the shortage is people who can even do it, like remote surgery.
In your house? That's silly. It'd be 100X more expensive and complicated than just hiring a housekeeper so you could... hire a remote housekeeper?
The person in a third world country is not a slave, they're doing the job for a few bucks a day because it's still better than other options available to them.
What is the difference between being a teleoperator in India for a californian family robot, and being a software dev for a company selling SaaS products to the US market?
This is the reality now. It is the entire point of globalized labor.
Global trade right now is literally about exploiting labor at a distance.
Our shit didn't get made in China because they were inherently better at making shit!
Yeah but with a teleoperated worker you can have them work remote from a place with poor labor regulations and extremely low pay.
The future with this as a reality is a really dark place, where the uber wealthy live entirely disconnected from the working class except through telepresent machines half a planet away. That way the wealthy don't have to be inconvenienced by the humanity of the poors.
Suddenly I think Musk is trying to turn Earth into Solaria.
I could see teleoperated help catching on. Americans are weird about staff. When I visit my old-world family, it's seen as perfectly normal to have someone living in an attached apartment, handling the cooking the cleaning, etc. There are well-established etiquette rules, understood both by the staff and the family, which help navigate the rather complicated, radically unequal relationship between the two.
Americans by and large don't do that. We software developers have not that different of an income gap between us and minimum wage workers compared to my family overseas and their staff. Yet, it would be considered weird, extravagant even, for a $300-500k/yr developer to have dedicated help. We're far more comfortable with people we don't need to interact with directly, like housecleaners, landscapers, etc.
Teleoperated robots sidestep that discomfort, somewhat, by obscuring the the humanity of the staff. It's probably not a particularly ethical basis for a product, but when has that ever stopped us.