I'm bearish that they'll be economically viable in the house for a very long time.
For businesses the bar for adoption is very low: If the thing can work repetitive jobs for 24 hours a day and replace 3 shifts, the purchase bar is nominally anything less than 3 x human salary if your budgeting horizon is 1 year. That's a high number, and probably fairly easy to achieve.
For homes, it's a very different bar. You'd have a hard time convincing most American families to purchase anything with a >$1000 price tag. Currently that's pretty much impossible for a humanoid.
I think house cleaning/chores require at least a "part-time" job's work of work for the average household (especially with children). We may be atypical, but my partner and I don't want to hire out a cleaning service and deal with the whole human component. But, I think we'd gladly pay 15k+ if it allowed us to take on the additional gainful workload. Even at a 20k price tag, I suspect we would likely have made up the difference in under a year.
If you can even afford 20K you're in the top 10% of the US population. It's not a very big market, and even selling to that market is hard. Probably only 10% of that 10% will actually buy, and all of a sudden you're selling to 1%.
Selling to businesses is much easier, 99% of businesses can afford 200K if it replaces 3 x 70K humans.
Actually the high income households are becoming a greater and greater share of spending, referred to as the "K shaped" economy. For example, the top quintile of households accounts for about 40% of all consumer spending.
But they only need so many robot housekeepers. And their standards are going to be higher than the average consumer's. If you're targeting that demo, slumming it with a $20k robot won't do; with the performance, bespoke service and maintenance, and other considerations, might as well bump up to $100k or more. But, in the current zeitgeist, you're not making an aspirational product, you're just creating another icon of class warfare that turns off the consumers you were hoping to eventually reach.
Your napkin math only shows that the market is identical. There's about 35m businesses operating in the US. So by selling to 10% of those you sell the exact same number of robots...
The difference is that some of those businesses might buy a lot more than just one robot. As many as they currently have employees doing robot work for a human salary.
I don't think a cleaning robot and a vehicle are in the same category, as vehicles are more a necessity (at the very least to get to and from your jobs, to buy groceries, etc) and a cleaning robot is squarely a luxury.
A car saves you time walking/biking, a robot saves chore time. Depending on depreciation, it's feasible that you could go do minimum-wage level work on Doordash using the chore time you save from the robot and still come out ahead. E.g. 5 hours/week at $20/hour = $5200/yr
> A car saves you time walking/biking, a robot saves chore time
Mileage varies. My impression is that on net, many people borrow money for the vehicle and end up adjusting their lives to depend on it, so much so that in their head they think they're saving time, but if they'd put that money into their home budget and moved closer to where things are, they'd get more exercise, be more socially healthy, and also waste less time and money driving. In aggregate, this makes everything worse and perpetuates the cycle. I sure as hell wouldn't move somewhere I had to drive to and from if I didn't already have the car, and I sure as hell wouldn't buy a car to get to a job unless the nature of my work required it. Not again.
Only way I can see that happening is if you somehow get fired for not folding your laundry, in the same way people are fired when their car breaks and they can't make it to work.
At some point, household robots — once they become mainstream — can do things around the home that you depend on, and if/when they break down, prevent you from being able to work/get to work.
Or, if the stress of doing everything they do is too much, and interferes with your ability to work and do other things you once had the time to do.
> I don't want to hire out a cleaning service and deal with the whole human component.
I've used on in the past, but I found that I was routinely dissatisfied with how they were doing things and I felt I needed to maintain a certain level of tidiness to allow them to clean properly. I think there is an intrinsic cost to having hired staff in one's home that most consumers would be factoring in, consciously or not.
I pay $200 every 2 weeks to have a 3000 sq ft house cleaned.
That's about $5200 a year to fully clean a house. And it's a human, so they can also tidy up, clean out the refrigerator, do my laundry, water my plants, etc.
Where I live, you typically share house cleaners with your neighbors or family members.
My parents, aunt/uncle, grandparents, and one of my neighbors uses the same house cleaner.
If she stole from me, I’d immediately tell my family and she would lose basically all of her clients.
That makes it easier for me to trust her.
(It works similarly in NYC apartment buildings - a single cleaner often services many people in the same building, so they have a reputation to uphold)
I would never use random online cleaning services.
My understanding from parents and friends who have a cleaning service...it pretty much depends on a certain baseline level of cleanliness. Most cleaning services don't (and likely wouldn't be able to provide) basic "pick up around the house". They will come into a house that is mostly picked up and sweep, dust, mop, vacuum, etc. but they won't come into a toddler house and put everything away.
I'm sure that there are services that do this, but I very much doubt they are the $400 per month services you are talking about. Robots may not be able to do that level of task at all right now, but they will get there.
And of course, that's not even thinking about all the cleaning tasks that would be avoided in between the every-other-week visits.
Having my surfaces be somewhat cleaner every two weeks is worth ~nothing to me. It's by far the easiest and least unpleasant part of cleaning a house. Having a robot that will pick up the detritus of everyday life and put it away, pick up and clean dishes, etc. and do so every single day would be worth an enormous amount of money.
I have no idea how long it will take for robots to get to that point, but whichever company cracks that level first is going to make a lot of money.
Obviously the whole question is how a robot cleaner compares to a human.
As you point out, the potential for robots far outperforms humans in multiple categories (although clearly not all by any stretch).
I'd say pricing around that of a lower end new car - or nice used one - seems about right to me. In terms of justifying the price, another thing I haven't seen discussed much is the competitive advantage this can provide. If you're spending less time cleaning, that's more time for other things.
This is one of those "tell me you don't have kids without telling me" situations. The process of teaching a kid to be a responsible human is long and arduous. If you expect a 2 and a half year old to successfully be picking up their toys, well, I don't know what to tell you. Go spend some time in a daycare, I guess.
And of course, that's completely ignoring the fact that I also would like to not have to pick up my shit if I could buy a robot that would do it. Yes, I can. And in fact I currently do...mostly. But I'm not happy about it and if there was an even quasi reasonable amount of money I could pay that would mean I would never have to do it again, I 100% would do so.
And if you can honestly say that you wouldn't...well I hope you are enjoying your life in the monastery.
Teaching kids responsibility and autonomy cones in right after keeping them healthy.
2 year olds do a bad job. They are 2. Yet it is valuable for them to learn to manage themselves. They love helping put silverware away from the washing machine. Kids _need_ to help as part of their development.
Eh, I actually do have kids, and like other North American children they usually don't pick up their toys. When things get messy enough, the "toy sheriff" comes into town and sets things straight. He's got a hat and a badge and a thick mean southern accent. Toys that aren't put away get locked in "jail" for indefinite time.
I won't lie, I don't do this often, and I end up picking up plenty of toys, and would welcome robot assistance, but it still seems wasteful and privileged to use advanced tech in this way
The entire arc of human progress is taking things that used to be the domain of only the privileged and making them the domain of the masses. There was a time when if you were not actively contributing to the production of your own food (to the exclusion of almost any other activity), you were extremely privileged. Now, ~ no one (in the West) has to grow/raise/produce their own food and the proportion of most western's productive output that goes to purchasing food is a tiny fraction of overall work.
A new category of task starting to move along this trajectory is to be celebrated. Maybe some day people will clean some small portion of their house the same way that some people now have backyard gardens.
Totally agree with you on ‘putting stuff away’. Much of the mental effort is trying to organize stuff so it takes space efficiently, and be easy to find it when I need it. If a robot put it away, I don’t really care where. I can just ask it where it is.
The economy would be very dead if people only spend money on non-negotiable items. Why would one fly to Colorado if they could just go to the park near by?
Robots may not be very useful for now, but they will be at some point, and people will buy them, financing if they have to. Even if what the robots can do are not non-negotiable.
As far as household expenses go, we've never really budgeted for this type of purchase. But we DO budget for... utilities, groceries, internet, and vehicles. These are needs, to a degree - but most people (even on the border of poverty) have things like vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, washing machines, etc...
I could definitely see people baking in money for certain automations, if they have a comparable ROI.
Of course, the initial prices will be significantly higher than "end result" or commoditized prices, at which point maybe even people on the brink of poverty can afford some level of home automation. In the interim, yes - it will be largely for the wealthy and business applications.
To your point - in terms of domestic services - ownership isn't the only model. After all human cleaning services don't work like that either these days ( even in the American south.... ).
Some people might feel that a robot cleaner is less intrusive that a person.
The median working American earns something like 60k. Part time working adults are around 24k.
People might not have 20k in the bank, but if most are doing a part-time employment's worth of work which could be replaced by a machine, it would make sense on paper.
Granted, people aren't rational. Anecdotally, my partner and I probably could be hiring out some of this currently, but we choose not to as we don't want to have to work around a cleaning service's schedule. I think we'd be more apt to buy something which we own, have control over, always does things in the manner we'd like, doesn't have to work around our messy lives/schedules, etc.
Eh, I'm a pretty social and outgoing guy. I think its fair to have some reservations about people in one's own home. I'll admit I'm slightly neurotic in my own household in that I like things to be done a certain way. I'd also feel like I needed to maintain certain levels of tidiness to enable a traditional cleaning service to perform well.
I don't think it's about being social/outgoing or not. There's clearly an anxiety we have, we avoid confrontation, or awkward dynamics. For example, you like things done a certain way, that's irrelevant, its that you feel anxious working with a human and have them understand how you want it done sounds stressful, but would be comfortable doing so with a robot.
Robot lawnmowers are mostly over $1000 already and they only do one thing. Heck, a lot of lawnmowers are over $1000.
You can pay over $500 for an automatic cat litter box. Robot vacuums can be cheap but run to $600 or so. Household appliances is a robust sector where people have a proven track record of spending a lot of money.
Automatic litter box is a great example. We've had one for ~7 years and it's still going strong. High initial cost that pays back every day over the course of what will likely be a decade+ of usage. Absolutely worth every penny if you look to the horizon. I imagine the robot mowers and robot house maids will fall under the same type of payback but with even higher upfront costs - perhaps this will turn into yet another subscription scheme.
Not OP, but I have a litter robot 3 that is still going strong after 10 years, and a litter robot 4 that is around four years old. The only problem I've run into is occasionally the pinch sensor will get bits of litter stuck in it and I have to take the globe off and tap/push on the sensor housing, then it will allow cycling again.
Yeah, I've always had two or three cats using them, they like to use them as an opportunity to hide and pounce on one another as one exits the litter robot globe, inside the globe they have a pretty limited field of view.
It is all about the ROI. A lawn cut from a professional can cost anywhere from $25-$100 on an average (per cut). So with a $1000 lawn mower, you will get the return back in 10-40 cuts at most. That is less than 1-2 seasons. Sure, there will be some maintenance cost over the years but if you look at a 5-10 year period, it is totally worth doing your own. Even with the $1000 price tag. Of course, you cannot count the labor time.
Agreed. That's one thing I realized I cannot do myself. I bought an expensive Mower Rider and tried it myself only realizing how much work it is for do trimming, blow, cleanup, weeding etc other than just mowing. Granted, I have a large property. I hired back a landscaper and focus my time on other things :)
For all of these things, then what's the point of having a humanoid robot then? The last thing is a folding laundry bot that I would happily also pay $1000 for.
This is my dream for a house chore robot. If I could dump hampers of clothes into a receptacle and get stacks of folded clothes out, I’d happily pay $1k. Household of 5; my kids each produce 3-4 sets of clothes a day (sleep, school, sports, after school). I run wash in AM so dryer finishes before 3pm (pg&e ToU) and then I’m focused on other things for rest of day. More often than not, I get to bed to find a near full hamper of clothes dumped where I sleep and then have to sort/fold/deliver. Bonus points if robot can sort different items to different stacks/bundles.
I don’t need AI/robotics to save me time from having to think, research, or code… I need AI/robotics to save me time so I can think, research, or code.
I have personally never met someone with a personal robotic lawnmower, and I suspect that if you have you live in a bubble that is severely biasing your view of the average American.
> For homes, it's a very different bar. You'd have a hard time convincing most American families to purchase anything with a >$1000 price tag.
There are plenty of white collar employees in cities paying $500+/month for someone to come clean their home. As one of those people, I could easily see paying low five figures for something like this if it actually worked well and could replace most household labor.
Most consumers? Sure. Upper middle class consumers? They're the sort more likely to buy cars with cash if they're dissatisfied with the value of the financing offered.
As with most things, it'll cater to that demographic and then filter down.
Cars are an absolute necessity in the US unless you live in one of the small handful of cities that have viable public transit. Different thing altogether.
Robots aren't a necessity, and for a price tag in the tens of thousands, most people will just mop their own floors and do their own laundry.
> Robots aren't a necessity, and for a price tag in the tens of thousands, most people will just mop their own floors and do their own laundry.
And (regardless of the costs involved) if I were going to pay money to not do this stuff myself, I'd rather pay a human to do it because I know there are humans out there that could use the work and I value them much more than I value Google and other corporations making even more obscene amounts of money selling future e-waste.
That's really more of a financial literacy problem though. People don't see $45k car, they see $600/mo payment. And car dealers very much sell on the payment and not on the actual price.
nit: 45k is the average car loan for a new car, but average for a used car is $25k. Purchasing a car is a necessity but purchasing a new car is a luxury.
Leasing seems like it could make sense given rapid upgrades in the technology. Why spend $15k on a home robot that will be obsoleted in the next few years?
People are financing small consumer goods with 3 digit price tags because they can't afford their mediocre already leveraged life. They borrow high 4 to low 5 figures for a car because they can't get to work to earn money so they don't have to join the bums sleeping on the cardboard. They will not be borrowing high 5 figures to low 6 figures for Rosie the Robot.
If Rosie was the only output she would never happen. Rosie might happen as a side benefit of replacing American workers but only for the rich people.
The vast majority which may be replaced would probably be better off burning down the factory rather than celebrate their upcoming domestic helper.
it's not cheap at all and the privacy and logistical implications of letting a stranger inside your house is something not everyone wants to deal with. I would rather have a robot.
Why not? A recording from a robot can be potentially viewed by a real human, if the company is not reputable (happened with robotic vacuums). But by default, no humans will view it.
A human house cleaner by definition is a real human looking at your home every time.
One human, with a single set of human eyes and a limited network of associates with few immediate criminals looking to take advantage (although, yes, that does happen).
Versus a small army of roomba's and equivalents mapping out floor plans and tangentially exposing human occupation times with that large data set almost certainly exposed to criminal and surveillance networks that will almost certainly use some of that choicer data to their advantage.
Not to pull on the tinfoil hat, but I would assume most commercially available home cleaning robots will be covered with cameras, mics, and other sensors, and connected to their manufacturer's cloud... I don't pay for housecleaning, but I would vet humans quite differently.
I don't trust a robot with my privacy, but I know Linette isn't building a profile of my shopping habits and Wi-Fi traffic. She is also careful to not let my cats out.
Another huge blocker (that is essentially just cost too) is maintenance. These things are like 1000x more complex than a car, need to work in a diverse range of environments, handle water, household chemicals, different humidities, kids, etc… maybe eventually robots will service robots but that seems very hard!
And talking of kids, these will have to be exceedingly safe, a 6ft machine falling on a child is probably a worry most households could do without.
We'll probably get there in some shape or from but I agree, we're absolutely not there yet. I don't see humanoid robots normalized in households anytime soon but at the same time they'll probably be a thing outside the home.
> You'd have a hard time convincing most American families to purchase anything with a >$1000 price tag.
They all have cars. Turns out you can finance things, and turn them into forever debts. Paying $30K to never have to do chores again, or maybe even cook again, and live in a clean neat environment is not only an amazing proposition that opens up a lot of free time for people, but will also have a lot of social pressure behind it. We have social pressure that causes people to buy >$1000 phones to virtually no marginal benefit over $20 phones.
They will be paid off at $500/mo over 10 years, and most renters might just use the one that came with their apartment. If they're more like $80K or $100K I could see having a problem selling them. But if they basically turned apartment buildings into hotels, they would be a bargain for landlords; just give them the keys.
edit: of course, sci-fi has already rehearsed this. You can watch any number of movies and tv shows with families walking through a robot showroom guided by a guy in a cheap suit offering to give them the best deal. I'm sure you could find written examples from the 40s.
Unitree's R1 humanoid robot is only about $6000, and it's still a nascent, smallish scale technology. They will come down.
If the future home robots are any good, it saves you from buying a dishwasher and robot vacuum. It can replace a maid/cleaning service and gardener/lawn-mowing service. For anyone paying for those services, it pays for itself.
$1000 isn't that high. Probably about a third of American households have an appliance over $2000, which is still a massive market.
I doubt it'd save you from purchasing a dishwasher - those things are very efficient and not very expensive. Perhaps it'd save you from loading and unloading a dishwasher
I have a dishwasher and I still usually just hand wash. It takes about 10 seconds to wash a dish.
The side benefit is all your dishes are always available. With the dishwasher, up to one full dishwasher load are dirty at any time, which means you need more dishes and more cupboard space than someone without a dishwasher.
If the robot is going to clear your dishes and wash them for you right away, what's the dishwasher for? To save the robot 10 minutes?
Just use the shortest two cycle program while following the two stage powder suggestion by Technology Connections. Obviously, if you are American you have to make sure the water going into the dishwasher is hot.
Honestly I don't even bother with two cycles and just use a 45 minute program in a 45cm wide dishwasher while throwing the extra powder in there anyway because it is too cheap to care about the waste vs tabs.
That's a good reason to use a dishwasher, and you should keep doing it. But the overall waste is small and people aren't going to care.
I'm not saying people who already have a dishwasher will throw it away. But a robot makes installing a new dishwasher much less tempting.
At my utility prices, it costs about 5¢ to hand-wash one serving (plate, pan, glass, utensils, and a bowl) with running water. That's not nothing, but it's dwarfed by the energy use of using the oven and the supply-chain energy and water use of the food if it includes meat.
People will casually waste 10x that energy without a second thought when they don't need to just because it's convenient, or because they're used to doing things that way.
The dishwasher looks more unfavorable if you're considering installing one in a small apartment or condo. Apart from the cost of the dishwasher, you need space to install it, and more cupboard space to keep more dishes, glasses, etc. For an extra 4¢ per person-meal, having your robot do the dishes buys you the convenience of skipping all that and having all your dishes clean and ready all the time.
They could be shared, and work practically non-stop (minus nights, as that would wake people up). That'd bring the per-consumer cost down by a large fraction. The sharing would likely be organized by a commercial third-party, but still, it could be much cheaper than human cleaners.
Having said that, it could still be decades till the robot is ready to be released into human homes unsupervised. The variation in human homes, what people store in them etc. is not easy. However, it could be ready for hotels much sooner.
You never know the future but imagine the people who were bearish on personal computers when it wasn't a thing yet but was being discussed. Imagine Email, Internet etc etc. Now they are commodities. I am sure one day AI Robots will be a commodity that we could buy for $1000. May be 10 years from now. But it is coming.
Price point: they’ll be very low volume and very high price. There’s enough inequality and plenty of cash at the top to support such luxury robots. Everyone else will be doing their chores the old fashioned way, with their own hands.
I think domestic robots will make a lot of incremental progress and that few, if any, will be humanoid. We'll see a laundry folder and sock picker-upper and they'll be more like roombas or just big cubes. And tethered.
The more likely scenario is that the hucksters currently hyping the idea of humanoid robots will gradually move the goalposts so that, when we eventually get a big, soft, stationary cube with six inflatable robot arms they'll point to it and say "behold, a humanoid robot!" and declare their predictions vindicated.
Yeah if you can afford the probably 10x it will actually cost, you can also just afford a cleaner to come twice a week and be able to do a wider variety of tasks (anyone going to trust this with ironing?)
if you give me a robot that cleans the house and can do dishes and laundry I'll easily pay the cost of a compact car for that. I know a LOT of working families that would feel similarly.
I mean, a twice-monthly house-cleaning service is running you ballpark 5k/year and people treat that shit as non-negotiable. I tried to claw back that line item after our second baby was born (wife didn't want them in the house anyway when we had a newborn), and it was completely unsuccessful. She claimed misery and all our friends were on her side.
$70 a go? That’s got to be the cash only person to person handshake agreement. That would never buy you laundry too.
I think I remember maybe around $100 including laundry almost 20 years ago and that was a cash type arrangement, weekly including laundry (multi hour visit).
Ours was a 1300 3b1b. It was $35 an hour, they finished everything in under 2 hours. I'm guessing(hoping!) they have to be there for more than 2 hours for $200?
There is a lot of variance in the price of cleaning tied to location. Cost of living in the area for sure, but also presence or absence of economic migrants and new immigrants.
1. 80%+ of Americans can't afford house cleaning services. I'm a software engineer in silicon valley and even I clean my own house because I don't think I can afford it. My rents have gone up by more than 5K in the last year, my salary hasn't, so that's coming out of my house cleaning budget.
2. Even if you can afford 5K/year on it, the cleaning service is not an upfront commitment. You can bail anytime when you get laid off and clean your own house.
Well, to be honest, a cleaning service is a much more logical purchaser for a cleaning robot. Since you can truck it all over creation, work it 60 hours a week, and undercut all the human cleaning crews on price.
As opposed to a household which might not have enough work to fully utilize it, or just have trouble scheduling times where it can work without causing disruption.
if all it could do was operate a lawn mower and a shovel, the annual value to a homeowner in the north east is ~1-2k depending on lawn size assuming they value their free time at the same amount as their hourly wage.
what you have to keep in mind is homeowners salary is way above avg salary so anything you can do to effect them has a much larger impact than it would seem at first.
For businesses the bar for adoption is very low: If the thing can work repetitive jobs for 24 hours a day and replace 3 shifts, the purchase bar is nominally anything less than 3 x human salary if your budgeting horizon is 1 year. That's a high number, and probably fairly easy to achieve.
For homes, it's a very different bar. You'd have a hard time convincing most American families to purchase anything with a >$1000 price tag. Currently that's pretty much impossible for a humanoid.