The Coming Robot Home Invasion

https://www.andykessler.com/andy_kessler/2025/08/wsj-home-robots.html

by walterbell • 11 months ago

29 64 11 months ago

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alecco• 11 months ago

https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

smallmancontrov• 11 months ago

Just imagine how many suits people will buy for their robot butlers! Suits to the moon!

zoeysmithe3• 11 months ago

I think this is a little cynical. Robotics and AI are moving at a decent pace. I just bought a robot vacuum that is also a mop and has all manner of sensors and even mapped my house. It was like $250. That's a huge leap over the $500 one I bought years ago that just bounced around randomly and only vacuumed. "Hey why doesnt this have an app and complex sensors and be able to dynamically make a map," would be borderline-laughable not that long ago, but now its the bare minimum for a robot vacuum. I don't even see a lot that don't also mop too. When before the mop feature was seen as this high-end feature, often requiring buying a 2nd machine. Now its just something tacked on.

I'm not going to go into the controversial world of assisted and some level of self driving, but its clear that's making a lot of progress and today is just seen as a boring feature on your car, like seatbelts or ABS.

I've been watching videos from Chinese robot manufacturers and we definitely are 'getting there.' What getting there means is the big question, but this isn't Omni magazine in 1985. You can see videos of these things doing a lot right now, even if its rudimentary. Unitree especially, considering how they aim for a 'low' price point. Of course a lot of these are carefully staged demos, but the fundamentals are here. Even non-staged stuff is starting to look relatively good.

The recent leak about Apple's robot is interesting too. Apple is very conservative, so if they're testing one, even if its a tabletop (with an arm?) that says a lot on what's practically possible and affordable right now. The same way when Apple was testing the PR waters for an electric car, it was a great time to move into electric cars.

walterbell2• 11 months ago

robot vacuum that is also a mop and has all manner of sensors and even mapped my house. It was like $250

Since we're already in the "submarine" sub-thread, make/model please :)

vel0city2• 11 months ago

FWIW, the first commonly available robo vac that had sensors to make a map and optimally plan out cleaning a room came out 15 years ago, the Neato Botvac XV-11.

fragmede4• 11 months ago

https://youtu.be/HOoRnv3lA0k is staged to some degree, the question is how much. Even if I have to train it and do an annoying amount of setup work to train it so it works in my home, as opposed to their office, there's a price point where the company selling the robots just includes having a human technician come into your home to train the robot as part of the purchase process.

ikesau• 11 months ago

If I were to spend $10,000 on cleaning, I think I'd prefer to have 100 weeks of a human cleaner that can vacuum, scrub, climb stairs, etc.

But, I take the point that more and more of these tasks will be automated more effectively in the coming decade.

bluGill• 11 months ago

Putting away toys is the hard part. Though as I get older my back is starting to demand help with some of the rest.

simultsop2• 11 months ago

Isn't the plan of automation to let humans free at any cost? Like it happened with computers and relief from bureaucracy. First printers costed 20k, still there are 20k printers but way more powerful, the first series now are in homes under $100. It will take time to get cheap.

nightski• 11 months ago

I don't think a rational market would want anything at "any" cost. Either the robot has to be cheaper, or better enough to justify the increased cost.

newsclues2• 11 months ago

Automation won’t make all humans free.

It will make it easier for some humans to free of interaction with other humans.

newsclues2• 11 months ago

I have a job as a cleaner. We have clients who spend about that hiring us to do regular weekly cleaning.

But they still own a robotic vacuum, which they can deploy the other six days a week we aren’t there.

Initially the people who buy home robots can afford humans and robots.

Still so far away from being able to replace humans for all tasks, the difference between low hanging fruit (vacuum hardwood floors) and difficult tasks (dusting fragile art) is vast.

zoeysmithe3• 11 months ago

This is a bit like saying "Buy a commodore 64 to store recipes? I'd rather have a recipe book," in 1985.

The home robot most likely will do much more than those things. It'll clean, but also be a guard dog, accept packages, garden, clean your car, reads stories to the baby, play catch with the dog, etc. Or at least in theory if the technology catches up.

How often do you hire people? And work with things like this? There's a real mental load and privacy and scheduling load here that robots solve. It can be very hard to find someone, then the time/investment of being home when they are available, etc. I'd rather have a substandard cleaning that's easy and convenient than getting these deep cleans and working with people, cleaning services, scheduling, the social and mental load of a stranger in your house, the issues about your own privacy, etc.

I think the success of the roomba shows that people will settle for less, and pay a lot for it. My robot vacuum is the worst vacuum and mop I've ever seen but it does it automatically and that means a lot to me. I just press a button and things are clean-ish. That has a lot of value. More complex robots will benefit from that kind of dynamic I imagine.

dsr_• 11 months ago

The lesson of that is that you should wait at least 20 years before getting a device that purports to do the thing well, and maybe 40. And even then, people will still publish recipe books and cooking technique books.

Right now, people who have flat floors, not too much pile on rugs and carpets, no pets or pets that don't shed much, no stairs, and don't have much in the way of mess are quite happy with their robot vacuum cleaners. Mostly. But vacuuming is pretty much the least annoying and tedious part of cleaning your house, and modern bagless upright convertible cleaners are cheap and lightweight.

People with medium sized flat boring lawns seem happy with their robot lawnmowers.

But its faster to get a service with the big mowers to do it, and the job gets done better by the humans, especially if you need to consider edges or have bushes to trim or leaves to move.

fragmede4• 11 months ago

Do you spend that kind of money on it now using humans? Talk is cheap. I'm not saying I'd buy one given unknown capabilities and price, but $10k isn't that much for a robot, G1 is currently selling one for $16k and it doesn't do anything.

The first buyers are going to be the mid-wealthy. Live-in maid service is expensive. If the robot actually works, $50k for a live-in maid that you don't need to have space for an apartment in your mansion for them to live in is cheap.

bee_rider• 11 months ago

That’s 100 weeks at $100 per week. So, what, 5 hours per week, at most, for over-the-table and legit options, right?

That could be an interesting option, but realistically you’ll have to fold your laundry, do your own dishwasher, put away your/your kids’ toys, etc, unless you just want to have a clean house for one day per week.

1970-01-01• 11 months ago

I don't see it happening anytime soon. Maybe at $5k (in today dollars) in ten years it will be something, but not today. Boston Dynamics is arguably the world leader, and they are focused on industrial simply because "Rosie the Robot" just isn't capable of doing enough for the price point.

fragmede4• 11 months ago

With all the competition coming out of China, Boston Dynamics is arguably not. They came out with videos of a robot years ago, and are selling a $70k robot dog platform years, but Unitree is shipping a humanoid robot today.

brk2• 11 months ago

This is not going to happen any time soon. The acquisition cost and ongoing maintenance issues alone limit the practical market of home robots to a tiny segment of the market.

As neat as the idea sounds, the practicalities and edge cases keep this in the science fiction category right now and for the foreseeable future.

nebula88047• 11 months ago

People have more money than sense so at the very least, it will be another piece of junk that accumulates in peoples garages but at the very best it could serve some niche for some people.

Joel_Mckay2• 11 months ago

Bipedal humanoid robot platforms are a terrible design.

Even if the thing fell over it could inflict serious injury. =3

simultsop2• 11 months ago

It took less than 20 yrs for roomba's, things have to start somewhere.

brk2• 11 months ago

I agree they have to start somewhere, and they are definitely starting. But we are also nowhere near the prevalence of these robots that the linked article implies.

everdrive3• 11 months ago

I strongly believe that except in edge cases, people spend so much time cleaning because they're not thinking about process and lack attention to detail. (or, potentially, they have people in their family who lack these things)

There are a number of "cleaning challenges" which are really just conscientiousness or process problems.

"It's difficult to sweep the house"

- Often, this just means that the house is too cluttered. You own too many things, they're not put away, and so each time you need to sweep the floors, you need to spend time organizing first.

"The fridge is always getting dirty."

- Only clean things should be put in the fridge. If your shelves are dirty, it's because the bottom of the items you're placing on your shelves are also dirty. Do you let ketchup run down the side of the bottle? Is your counter dirty, and you've set a clean bottle of salad dressing on a dirty counter? In both cases, you have transferred dirt and/or oil into the fridge on the shelf. And then this compounds multiple times: do you always put the ketchup in a different place? Well now you've spread around the dirt. Do you clean the fridge but bot the bottom of the ketchup bottle? Well, now your clean fridge is immediately dirty again the moment you reload it.

- etc.

So many "messes" in the house are compounding problems; the worse you let it get, the bigger the problem you've made for yourself. Didn't put away the kid's toys? Well now you can't sweep that area. Can't sweep that area? Well now you can't mop that area. etc. One solution, which people might not think about with regard to cleaning would actually just be to make sure the kid has fewer toys, or at least fewer _available_ toys. If you nail this, the clutter --> sweeping --> mopping cascade starts improving without any additional work on your end.

AppleBananaPie• 11 months ago

This is 100% describes my situation and I'm saved by the luxury of people coming to clean my home and reset it.

Separately, I need to clean my fridge because then I can follow your great advice XD

hoss1474489• 11 months ago

Make sure to clean everything that was inside the fridge before restocking or you reset your progress

nebula88047• 11 months ago

- Only clean things should be put in the fridge. If your shelves are dirty, it's because the bottom of the items you're placing on your shelves are also dirty. Do you let ketchup run down the side of the bottle? Is your counter dirty, and you've set a clean bottle of salad dressing on a dirty counter? In both cases, you have transferred dirt and/or oil into the fridge on the shelf. And then this compounds multiple times: do you always put the ketchup in a different place? Well now you've spread around the dirt. Do you clean the fridge but bot the bottom of the ketchup bottle? Well, now your clean fridge is immediately dirty again the moment you reload it.

This sounds like some useful advice but misses the bigger picture. What about the dust from the day to day of just being alive? I just wiped down my face wash and other toiletries on my bathroom shelf. They were already clean, they didn't have latent "material" from the bottle dripping on its side, yet when I cleaned it with a soapy sponge, the bottle became shiny again like it was brand new. It accumulated dust that got trapped on there due to the hot/cold cycle of a bathroom with a shower in it. You can think of essentially any location on the planet...it will get dirty and is naturally cleaned by either the weather or by humans putting in the effort.

Thats not to say there isn't wisdom in this advice, Marie Kondo talks about how each item is an additional burden. In our consumerist culture the act of purchasing an item is the only value many items our lives end up having. Maybe an item only kinda serves a purpose and needs to be paired with another item to be complete (Example: a shaver that is a cheaper model that doesn't quite serve all shaving needs but does do many of them)

So many "messes" in the house are compounding problems; the worse you let it get, the bigger the problem you've made for yourself. Didn't put away the kid's toys? Well now you can't sweep that area. Can't sweep that area? Well now you can't mop that area. etc. One solution, which people might not think about with regard to cleaning would actually just be to make sure the kid has fewer toys, or at least fewer _available_ toys. If you nail this, the clutter --> sweeping --> mopping cascade starts improving without any additional work on your end.

Where does this end? Why not own anything? If you only own digital items then that itself gets cluttered and messy. Life is a series of maintenance tasks and then you die.

everdrive3• 11 months ago

Digital clutter has its own costs, (mostly attention) so I'd say at least go down one more turtle.

vel0city2• 11 months ago

If your shelves are dirty, it's because the bottom of the items you're placing on your shelves are also dirty.

I live in a humid climate. If I take something out of the fridge, set it on a clean counter for five minutes, and put it back in the fridge without wiping it down it'll leave smudges of water and dust on the trays. The trays will look dirty after a few months even if I only put clean things in there.

supportengineer• 11 months ago

"I'm 22, single, and live in a small apartment. Here's 10 things you are doing wrong as a homeowner with kids"

everdrive3• 11 months ago

I'm 40+, have two kids under two, and I'm the parent who is doing the most cleaning. The problems I outlined in the example were _always_ true in my household, but the added stress of two kids have made the flaws in our process that much more clear. ie, we could do a fine enough imperfect job before we had any kids. With one kid it was busy but do-able, and with two kids I'm trying to get the household to rethink how we tackle this.

I didn't use kids in my example to preach to parents. I used it because it's painfully top of mind for me currently.

bbkane• 11 months ago

Unfortunately (assuming you love with your partner), this takes relational work as much as actual cleaning work. If one of you lived in a larger house previously or maybe you have food insecurity or maybe you attach sentimental value to things you aren't actually using or maybe you see "getting your kid more things" as valuable to your self-esteem or maybe you're getting things because you plan to do something with it later (and repeat this multiple times), following this advice can be much harder than getting another shelf to put stuff or a robo-vacuum.

This work is still worth doing of course, but sometimes it requires a lot of mental work (dare I say healing) from one or both partners.

I guess my point is that switching to this mindset can be hard; and it might not be up to you.

I do really like this comment; I think it's really valuable when couples get on the same page about this.

cgriswald• 11 months ago

Can I just spend a minute to gripe about “cleaning” by stashing stuff away in the wrong place?

+ It becomes clutter in its temporary home making the things that belong there harder to see or access.

+ You’ll have to go looking for it when you need it which may take orders of magnitude more time than just putting it away properly. (And if you really need it and can’t find it you might buy another one, causing more clutter and costing money.)

+ Even if you remember where you put it you have to handle it twice to get it where it belongs, reducing efficiency over time.

I’m a huge believer in having things have a place they belong and making that process efficient. Every day frequent use things get priority.

My parents have dozens of (re-usable) plastic cups that just sit precariously balanced in a cupboard. They do use them for the occasional party but mostly they’re just a menace when you want a glass of water.

Solution 1: Keep 4 (or 6 or 8) cups in the cupboard. Store the rest in a box under the stairs until you need them for a party.

Solution 2: Re-home the extras completely and use Solo cups for parties. (Even ignoring the benefit of the extra space, this might be cheaper over time unless you really can’t leverage the space the plastic cups take by, say, buying consumables in bulk on discount.)

You shouldn’t be handling (or potentially handling) things you rarely use in order to access things you use every day.

Physical space has a use besides just storing more stuff…

jiehong• 11 months ago

Also, don’t live with a cat (or a dog I presume).

I own a robot vacuum mainly because the floor gets hair in just a few hours. It doesn’t alleviate me from cleaning, but it improves the baseline.

politician• 11 months ago

It would be amazing to have robot-delivered butler service. However, I'm deeply concerned about privacy and, given OTA updates, physical safety. There are enough bad actors on the Internet as-is, I don't want my butler deciding to reenact Order 66 after a Wifi update.

Hizonner• 11 months ago

It's worse than OTA updates. I'd expect most of these to use the cloud for a lot of their "thinking", and definitely to be controllable from the cloud on a minute-by-minute basis. Lose the WiFi and you can expect to lose a big chunk of the capability you paid for.

... and you can expect the subscription costs to keep going up. None of those OTA updates are going to give you any new value unless you pay more.

mattlondon2• 11 months ago

I am fairly confident that while they're not ready "today", with the advances we're seeing in AI recently, we're going to have a viable in-home humanoid robot in the next decade or two, priced at "car" kinda prices

I think this is going to be fairly transformational, at least for care scenarios.

I'm not talking about the sci-fi pipe-dream of a Star Trek Data style robot, but more like a basic humanoid robot that can reliably do mundane & basic things on-command. Like pick things up off of the floor, go fetch items from another room, open the curtains, do some basic food preparation (e.g. heat things up in a microwave levels of sophistication, or even just getting a glass of water), do the dishwasher, take out the trash and so on.

Even if it can only do 1hr of chores at a time before heading back to recharge, thats huge. It will help people live more independent lives for much longer before needing expensive care from humans (something that we have a bit of a ticking time-bomb of, at least in the UK where the population is aging rapidly). It doesn't need to be a fully fledged "robot-nurse" to be helpful.

Bonus points if it can monitor it's user(s) and call for help if there appears to be anything wrong (e.g. fallen and can't get up type monitoring), or intervene in situations before they escalate (e.g. turn the gas off if it is left on, remind to take medicines etc)

jppope• 11 months ago

pretty sure we've already had products in the market that can do the things you are thinking of, the problem with products like baxter (or boston dynamics products) wasn't/isn't the capabilities it was/is the price point. the unit economics for robotics have always been the problem. Sure you can buy a robot for $45K but you can have a hell of a whole lot of days of cleaning with a cleaning service for that same money... the downstream effect of this is that it is very hard to get economies of scale so they never drop to the point where these things are normalized.

mattlondon2• 11 months ago

You can already buy one from unitree for USD16k. Full time care for the elderly is epically expensive.

As the capabilities of humanoid robots grow, the demand and so the supply will increase.

mythrwy• 11 months ago

For this to work efficiently maybe we will need to evaluate the form factor of homes in general (particularly in the US).

An example is olives. For centuries people picked or beat olives off of big trees but with machinery they have developed miniature olives that grow in neat hedgerows and can be easily harvested by machines.

I keep thinking about how much space people actually need to live. Bedrooms in particular. If all you need a bedroom for is sleep or romantic activities, why do bedrooms need to be 200+ square feet? Clothes ideally should be stored in another place where you dress and that place should be close to where clothes are laundered and where you shower and prep for the day. An annex to the bathroom, a dressing room seems ideal to me for clothes storage. In this case I'd be perfectly fine with a capsule bedroom big enough to hold a bed, a nightstand and nothing else.

I don't have any other concrete suggestions that would make automation easier but I'm sure this is possible.

aetherson• 11 months ago

I agree that you could imagine that homes could be laid out more efficiently for automation. However, the vast majority of housing stock is not new and is not cheap to remodel. The result is going to be incredible pressure to make robots fit existing houses, otherwise your market share is going to be like 2% of the TAM.

joshuaheard• 11 months ago

I live in a large suburban home. I spend $1,000/mo on landscaping services and $1,000/mo on maid services. If I could buy a $10,000 robot that could do those things, as well as have apps for doing dinner dishes, laundry, making the bed, and feeding the pets, I would do it in a second.

nebula88047• 11 months ago

You really sound like the exception even for this forum. Either that or I am woefully underpaid.

simantel3• 11 months ago

At $250/visit, that's just weekly landscaping and housecleaning. More than I pay for myself (we have a housecleaner that comes monthly), but not unreasonable, especially for a well-paid dual-income household.

Re: Your compensation, Levels can be eye opening: https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Facebook,Microsoft,Google,Am...

j_timberlake• 11 months ago

Absolutely not happening. If robots get versatile enough to clean a random home, then they'll be good enough for higher-value work like being a robotic soldier or building more robots. And if they're taking lots of jobs like that, then there's going to be tons of spare man-hours for busywork like cleaning.

fragmede4• 11 months ago

That seems to say it'll eventually happen, the question is just on what timeframe. Three years? Five? Ten? Fifty?

groos• 11 months ago

We, in the tech industry, go all starry-eyed when we imagine utopian futures filled with robots that will do all your tedious chores. But a dark side of this that goes unnoticed is that such automation is often just a way for money to be transferred from the poorest sections of society to the richest.

This fact was driven home to me recently when dropping my mother off at the airport. For various reasons, my mother us to use wheelchair assistance when flying, and I usually get a "gate pass" to accompany her to the gate. An airline provided wheelchair is pushed by an airline employee whom I usually tip a decent amount every time. The last time she flew, the employee insisted that we had to make a detour, otherwise they would "write him up". Not wishing to make his life hard, we agreed and he brought us to an area where they were trialing robotic wheelchairs. They insisted my mother use the robotic wheelchair and since I was with her an a little curious, we agreed. In the process of tranferring her, I forgot to tip the wheelchair pusher.

The robotic wheelchair was an unconditional disaster. In a busy airport, it stopped every time it detected anyone within 5 feet of it and took 20 min to get where it would have taken less than 5 with the cherry on top being that it stopped and told my mother to get off 3 gates away. Had I not been with her, I'm not sure what she would have done, being too weak to lift her carry-on and walking to the gate.

But thinking about it a bit, I realized that sooner or later, the robotic wheelchair would be improved to the point that it did just as good a job as the human pusher at which point, all the income earned by the humans, all of whom are from the poorer sections of society, would be transferred to the robotic wheelchair company and its shareholders, all of whom are probably in the top 2% wealth-wise.

This transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich seems to be a recurrent theme in tech. Sure new wealth eventually is made, but it seems it's mostly for the top strata, with us techies being paid well enough to prevent us from feeling too many scruples.

cdcox• 11 months ago

The B2C case here seems off to me. The market of people who are going to pay the high price tag, have enough storage, and tolerate the extreme limitations and slowness of these machines seems to be: the rich, the elderly, and people with physical disabilities. The latter two categories come with a huge number of liability and regulatory costs that I think most of these companies are not willing to handle. That does not feel like a huge market.

I'll have a stronger belief in these things for consumers when we start seeing B2B adoption. Hotels have routine, highly structured cleaning tasks; hospitals have a need for extra strength, have highly structured cleaning tasks, and need to stock items; grocery stores have highly structured cleaning tasks and need to stock. Hospitals at least could tolerate the slowness of these things.

Without any B2B adoption it's hard to not see this as Roombas all over again. Cool for people who like it but low impact and still a toy 20 years later. I think generative AI makes these things better, though still perhaps struggles with long task adoption, but if you look at their movement they are still slow, weak, cognitively inflexible, and unstable. Maybe this tech is accelerating in some way I don't see and I'd love to be proven wrong here.

charlie90• 11 months ago

I don't get the naysayers, I absolutely see this happening. Take senior care, absurdly expensive even with low cost human labor, $100K a year. If we had $50k robots, it would be a game changer. People could live out their final years in their home with 24/7 personal care.

teekert• 11 months ago

But will Isaac have pain receptors?

(Sorry, couldn’t resist this Orville reference)

The Coming Robot Home Invasion

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