Comment by lallysingh 3 days ago
If a robot can do basic cleaning, laundry, and dishes, that's worth a lot to a lot of people. Dual-professional households have the money, and not having to do this housework could save some marriages.
There are a lot of maid services that imply (to me) otherwise.
Maid services are generally expected to handle "everything" for a pretty expansive definition of everything. They pick up scattered stuff and put in a sensible location, they arrange everything visible in an aesthetically pleasing way, they take out the trash, if there's some weird dirt that's hard to clean they creatively problem solve to find a way to get it off. I don't think there's a market for a service that can only handle basic cleaning.
(Will someone eventually invent a machine that can do all of that and more? Yes, probably, and they'll make billions when they do. But Tesla has offered no reason to believe this is on their horizon, and the focus on a humanoid form factor strongly suggests that they're optimizing for media appeal over practical capabilities.)
Maids are paid a VERY low wage in exchange for being able to take on an almost unlimited list of general tasks, from folding laundry to managing kids to mopping stairs. We are decades away from robots with that capability, and they are intended to replace people who are often not making even minimum wage? Please. Get real.
Robot vacuum with a mop, washing machine, tumble dryer and dishwasher reduce housework to like an hour per week, ie 30 min/person/week. This can be higher if you live in a big house, but if your marriage can’t tolerate 30 mins of house work a robot will not solve it.
> Dual-professional households have the money, and not having to do this housework could save some marriages.
Dual-professional households could hire a maid and pay for marriage counseling and still save money compared to a $20k robot plus whatever a subscription would run.
Maids are unaffordable in most rich countries that do not have access to ultracheap foreign labor or/and have stringent labor regs.
What do you consider affordable?
I can google "maid service seattle" and see dozens of entries. The first one in the yelp list is available to book and will clean a 1000 - 1500 sq ft, 2 bed, 2 bath house for well under $200. There's even a decent discount if you book is as a weekly or biweekly service.
That feels pretty affordable? I know it's a scale, but minimum wage here is $21/hr now.
I have enough time to take care of my own space, but for comparison Comcast internet is well over $120/month for crappy speeds. I think in comparison a little more than that for 1 deep cleaning a month is reasonable.
Nobody has yet demonstrated a stationary robot that can do these things.
They're all legs. The impressive demos are just show, not useful.
I don't think it actually is worth a lot to people. I know dual-professional households who don't even use their dishwasher consistently, and multiple companies have gone bankrupt trying to bring automated laundry folding (which does exist in industry) to the consumer market.