I have no particular idea whether there's a business case for humanoid robots or not. I would love to have the argument set out well. Perhaps you'd indulge my curiosity.

I don't understand why my question was so controversial. Oftentimes on this website I feel like everyone is tapped into some polarizing news source that I am not, and so when I ask some (to my mind) benign question it's actually a secret tripwire that everyone is super polarized on and so rather than engaging in my question they all just tell me I am a moron. But I am seriously just asking a question here.

My layman's opinion is that I would happily pay a lot of money to have a robot help me around the house: fold my clothes, do the dishes, whatever dumb menial labor. That seems like a business case to me, unless someone is going to tell me I'm the only one in the world who could want that (but I doubt it).

OP said:

> Humanoid robots? Ain’t nobody made the business case for that. It is pure vibes.

I can't make sense of this. Are you really telling me you wouldn't pay any amount of money to do menial housework? If not, why not?

> My layman's opinion is that I would happily pay a lot of money to have a robot help me around the house: fold my clothes, do the dishes, whatever dumb menial labor. That seems like a business case to me, unless someone is going to tell me I'm the only one in the world who could want that (but I doubt it).

The day that:

- displaced workforce issue is solved

- they cost less than 20k everything included, base model

- do all the processing locally in their HW

- are smaller and lighter than a human being (but can reach higher places)

- last 10 years at least

I will definitely buy one. I don't think I'm going to see this in my lifetime though (I'm in my 40's).

"My layman's opinion is that I would happily pay a lot of money to have a robot help me around the house: fold my clothes, do the dishes, whatever dumb menial labor. That seems like a business case to me, unless someone is going to tell me I'm the only one in the world who could want that (but I doubt it)."

How much is "a lot of money"? Not picking on you, happy to let you want what you want, but people often seem to mention laundry, which mystifies me.

I am an adult male in the US. I do not need to dress for work in any way I would not dress anyway. Basically, I do two loads of laundry a week, one for clothes, one for towels and bedding.

This requires about one hour of actual work per week. More if we counted "waiting for the washing machine" and "waiting for the dryer" as work, but I don't.

How much would I pay to remove this hour a week of (really easy) work from my life? Almost nothing. I would not, for example, pay someone $50 to come to my house and do it for me. It's not a problem and doesn't need a solution.

So how much would you really pay for a robot that did your laundry, washed your dishes, and did other "dumb menial labor"?

Reliably? $25k. Having kids means I have less time to do more chores, if I could convert those chore-hours to family quality time, it would be invaluable.

I recognize that having kids too young to do their own laundry could change the calculus.

Maybe there will be a $25K robot that can do laundry before your kids grow up enough, but can't recommend holding your breath.

> Are you really telling me you wouldn't pay any amount of money to do menial housework? If not, why not?

Do you own a Roomba? I don't. It's a huge liability and doesn't do the cleaning I want out of it, even at a sub-$1000 price point. The humanoid robot is clunkier, more of a liability, and will still refuse to do certain tasks.

What makes the roomba a liability?

And another thought: if the robot can do housework, can it do factory work? Fieldwork? Lawn care? What else can it do with zero modifications?

That expands the market greatly.

You couldn't pay me any amount of money to have a robot in my home if it's controlled from Elon Musk's data center.

And I'm a former Tesla FSD customer, so I should be the ideal early adopter for this product.

Why thousands per month?

Why would cloud connectivity be required? (I'm almost certain you're right, the big makers will require cloud--but that's not a requirement of the tech, is it?)

There is insufficient compute to operate these things locally in dynamic environments. The models for doing that kind of robotics inference are running on racks of H200’s.

> Just organize your life better.

Do you really think this is a viable solution to families with kids?

I can't speak for the other guy, but as a person who manages humans at work: I'd rather have a robot at home.

1) I live way, way out in the middle of nowhere.

2) Humans are fickle, late, emotional. They have requirements in their own life that conflict with the jobs I want them to do.

3) Taxes. I don't want to deal with this headache. 1099 my cleaner or whatever?

4) In my version, the costs of owning the robot are less than the costs of hiring humans. If that wasn't true, then I'd reconsider. I probably wouldn't buy one until the cost switched like that, unless maybe it was open-source or something.

Here's another way to think about it: Amazon is willing to pay workers to do the job, but they'd obviously rather have the robots do it. The robots work close to free, don't complain, and probably do a better job (at the jobs they're capable of). Why wouldn't they hire a human for that? A lot of the same reasons.

FWIW, I emailed auntanns.com to ask what a combination personal assistant and housekeeper would cost:

> Thank you for inquiring about our services. I'd love to discuss with you further regarding the person you are seeking. Personal assistants do not do housekeeping and housekeepers do not have the P.A skillset to pay bills and make appts etc unless they are an executive level housekeeper. Rates for executive housekeepers range between $60-$65/hr and a minimum of 20+ hours per week, plus PTO, paid sick days and many also seek a health stipend.

It costs approximately $200 for our house to be cleaned once (by humans). We do it about once a month because we don't feel like spending $200 weekly). It would be great to have it ~continuously cleaned but we the cost/benefit isn't there for having a full-time person.

Do you already pay a human to do this work?

I absolutely pay to have a maid come over and clean, yes.

You would pay "a lot of money"?

Like, more than the cost of your house? For something that can't do those things right and has to be supervised? To a company that can't deliver product on time?

Aren't the humanoid robots looking to ship around 20k?

You can hardly even buy a reliable new car for that amount.

The average new car in the US is now ~$50K.

The business case for humanoid robots is simple... for lack of a better term, they're robot slaves. Companies or governments can buy them once, pay relatively minimal maintenance fees, and have an army of workers that don't need a salary, never take breaks, never complain, never unionize, and do things faster and more accurately than most humans ever will. Any company that can move to robots, will move to robots.

Imagine the profits companies will have when they can eliminate, or drastically reduce, their single largest expense... payroll. Not only the base pay, but 401K match, insurance, payroll taxes, etc. Poof... gone.

I agree with everything you've said. To me the next question is: If nobody has a job, who will buy all the robot-produced goods?

Some people will have jobs, even in the most robot-heavy vision.

I don't know if it's enough people to buy the goods, but robot-produced goods should bottom out on price, closing in on the actual cost of materials/energy.

"robot-produced goods should bottom out on price, closing in on the actual cost of materials/energy."

I don't think that's really true, or rather it's variably true along a continuum for different kinds of things. Some things sell for close to the marginal cost of production, others close to what the market will bear.

For two examples, flat-screen TVs seem to be on one end of the continuum, iPhones on the other. Lots of other things are at different points in between. Robots won't eliminate demand for luxury goods, which are not usually near the marginal cost of production end of the scale.

I don't know what it costs Apple to make an iPhone, but if they could cut it in half while people were still willing to pay $1,000, there's no reason to think they'd lower the price.

But why are they in humanoid form? Wheels are more efficient than legs, they have no need for a face. It sure does sound like vibes

Because the world has already been built for the "human" interface

It has? I don't think every little thing has. Do I want a robot that has to lift the couch to clean under it, or do I want a robot that can get under the couch?

How does a wheeled robot navigate stairs?

The same way someone in a wheelchair does. You get rid of the stairs.

The part that often gets left unsaid or glossed over is what the transition period looks like. At most we get some Underpants Gnomes claim about unlimited abundance without actually engaging with the substance of what happens if this technology gets built and deployed. What do you imagine the political and economic impact will be if a huge portion of the population is left without jobs and the political reality hasn't caught up to the speed with which the technology gets deployed?

Oh no, but Elon Musk tells us that out of the kindness of his heart we're going to have unlimited abundance. The same man responsible for taking away aid from thousands of the poorest people in the world through DOGE's interruption of PEPFAR and USAID.

With a single sentence from him, he could start saving thousands of lives without impacting his wealth in the slightest. He could do that right now.

That there can be differing viewpoints on this matter is demonstrative that sex as well as gender is a social construct: the categorization and distinguishing characteristics of sex are normative. It's deeply ironic that the people complaining about "gender ideology" are in fact its purveyors.

The only problem is that knitting wasn't invented until hundreds of years later.

But chainmail was a thing, so how did they manufacture it without knitting? Maybe “knitting” is just a way of describing this, while the knitting you're thinking of is specifically knitting involving textiles.

Chainmail is made from individual rings. Romans made it from punched out metal rings alternating with rings made of wire and then ends of those rings made out of wire together. Not really too much riveting you can do with textiles. Well maybe plastics, but they did not have plastics.

Use the `method` method to get a reference to the one you are concerned with, then call `source_location` on it.

That's only during runtime. Simply reading code can be annoyingly difficult without hard references. Especially when the code is coming from a gem.

Many times LSP's can't figure out where the code is coming from if it's a few layers deep. Then you're stuck with the time consuming method of running the code and doing something like what you're describing above just to read it.

As someone who has no idea how Ruby works, how does Emacs show where any function is defined, right down to line number? Emacs has a big mudball of single namespace too

And even good type checkers can't infer every symbol statically where Python/JS has no issue with it.

> Even worse, there are programmers who have only had a high-school education and just seem to ''be good at it''. These scenarios and how they really do play out in real life have detailed at length.

This is classist at best and personally offensive.

I appreciate the source, but a website that advertises Michio Kaku is deeply disappointing.

I feel like the missing option is event handlers.

Maybe they are not better at the problem than anything else.

Which tug?

Heidi Brusco

Neat. I visited Valdez, Alaska lately and a friend was pointing out the tugs there. They seemed somewhat larger than other tugs I've seen. A data sheet says they have about 4x the horsepower of Heidi Brusco, coming from a pair of CAT C280-16 engines. I'm not clever enough to figure out how those are started. Cool boats are cool

It's a reference to a song ("867-5309 / Jenny") by Tommy Tutone. It's pretty dated by now.

It was fun to read about this in the North American Numbering Plan documentation.

Dated?!

DATED?!

BLASPHEMY!

;-)

It's as old now as the first Jazz concert at Carnegie hall was to it. Fred Astaire's "Nice Work if You Can Get It" was #24 on the charts that year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1938_in_music

Dated, just like putting noses to smileys!

iOS speech-to-text spells "smiley face" with a nose.

FWIW! :)

I feel older every day.

Better than not getting any older!

[Citation Needed]

Crap. I used to think being alive was better than being dead. But come to think of it, the only ones complaining are the ones who are still alive. I’m conflicted now.

David McBride and Richard Boyle. Both tried the official channels then whistleblower channels. Both made some mistakes but all in the public interest. Aussie gov treated them shamefully.

Witness K and Bernard Collaery came to mind when I was writing it. They blew the whistle on illegal espionage used to pillage the resources of our tiny neighbour, and the government threw the book at them. Absolutely shameful.

I understand that Wikileaks is controversial but I don't think there is any dispute that he has acted in the role of whistleblower to some extent. But that's not really the point I'm trying to make, so I've removed the reference.

I think I'd argue for a sui generis classification, which does partake somewhat of the whistleblower, but it seems like calling Napoleon a general. He was certainly that, at times. Apologies for the nit-picking in any case.

Another example would be David McBride who was in the Australian military and blew the whistle on war crimes. He recently got sentenced to jail while actual exposed war criminals are free.