I hope you do!

I'm skeptical of v1 of this technology, but I could imagine a mature version of this technology could be great.

And $500/mo for essentially an always-available housekeeper seems very reasonable.

Where I live, having a housekeeper come for a few hours once a week costs about $100 a week, or $400/mo. Having a robot that could potentially always be there to:

* Tidy up.

* Clean

* Do laundry

* Help with other stuff

Seems well worth $500/mo. I don't expect that V1 of this technology will be able to effectively do all that stuff, but I'm hopeful that v2 or v5 might be able to.

On a related note, "folding laundry" seems to be a really hard challenge for machine learning to solve. Solutions like "Foldimate" kind of work if you individually hand it every piece in the right way - but nothing seems to be cable of having a human dump a bin of washed clothes in and spitting out nicely folded laundry. And everything so far that's promised to do that seems to be vaporware.

Personally it's the part where some rich dude in SV tells me he's building what sci fi says will save us time to focus on real things

The irony and complete disconnection from the reality of 99% of people is quite mind blowing indeed

The fact that it feels like we're really getting there. The product is not perfect, and most importantly not shipped yet, but it's one of first humanoid robots I saw with a price tag and customer focus.

Point being, we might be at an iPhone-like pivotal moment for home robots.

You just know it's going to creep up on you slowly, then every time you turn around it's slightly closer to you - yet completely still.

Can it wash its own bodysuit?

Will it wash itself? Would be totally ironic if we had to strip the robot of its clothes and wash it :)

I just think about how things are when they are brand new versus their in-use appearance.

Think about a MacBook that’s a couple of years old. Glossy letters on the keycaps, a couple of sneeze splatters on the screen, some cosmetic scratches.

In this case, if you needed this for whatever reason, I suspect the lease makes sense to not get stuck with a Gen1 product after the same cost point of 40 months.

IDK, this is not a problem I need to concern myself with. I’m clearly not the target demographic.

Huge risk having it operate in a kitchen: open flame, hot liquids, spills, sharps, etc.

It's most likely just a remote piloted session that's fed into the bucket for the robot to train on unfamiliar tasks/edge cases for known tasks. Falls in line with the true meaning of AI being Actually Indians.

I don't think its a training session. Current AI models are pre-trained before deployment for inference. After the model is trained, they load it into the robots computer, and it runs inference with that model. You can't train the model again because you don't have enough memory on the robot, but also even if you did its slow and consumes energy. You could have it train in some server but then every new skill would require you to pay the equivalent price for renting a bunch of GPUs for many hours.

What they can do is, for everyone, have a base model, and then improve it over time. Then, with software updates they can improve the set of skills the robot can handle out of the box.

But this is the problem with current AI systems, without a continuous learning capability, you're always limited to the "default skills". As soon as you have something out of the box for the robot to do, you end up needing Indians to learn it.

All of AI is flawed in this way. LLMs for instance have almost no continuous learning capability, that is why we don't have AGI yet. They can't learn new skills. Therefore, they can't adapt to new jobs they have not seen during training. They can't even play pokemon properly or any complex game for that matter, because games involve learning new skills during gameplay.

Like, this thing is nightmare fuel. They're making up nightmare stories because this uncanny valley horror practically invites the brain to do so.

You’re right, it’s so unrealistic to imagine that maybe a hominid telepresence platform in your home with a human operator might get operated by its operator to do some type of weird privacy-violating stuff. Only a crazy person would dream of such a thing.

Oh, this was the plot of the Mexican sci-fi movie The Sleep Dealer: [0]

From Wikipedia: "A fortified wall has ended unauthorized Mexico-US immigration, but migrant workers are replaced by robots, remotely controlled by the same class of would-be emigrants."

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbJGQl-dJ6c&pp=ygUUc2xlZXAgZ...