Posted by denysvitali 10/28/2025
We've seen that people behave worse when you introduce indirection. People act worse on the internet. Soldiers have an easier time killing with drones than in person. The ethical issue is in both directions: its inhumane to the operator, but I also don't want to feel like a fake person on a video screen to them.
This is then exacerbated when you realize that the people operating this machine are almost certainly not being paid well, creating obvious and legitimate negative incentives. Then you plop them into the households of people with the insane wealth required to afford this. You might think that I have just described the situation with maids (and to some extent, I agree! I have never really felt comfortable that dynamic either), but this is actually different, because you are adding in the indirection and making actions and interactions feel less "real" to both parties: the clients are likely to treat the robots worse than they would a human helper, and the operators may feel these rude clients they see on their monitors aren't as real as the people around them.
Besides having someone strange in your house, you also have the company probably recording stuff. Privacy wise... It's worse. But that makes me not as concerned with safety since it any misbehavior would quickly be detected.
I can think of at least one very prominent company that is currently recording, at scale, its users in its quest for full autonomy. As best I can tell, that company simply deletes videos when they are inconvenient.
teleoperated robots don’t have that incentive and can pay “international low” levels of compensation
Even needing a clearer feels living unsustainably - its living in a house too big to maintain.
And if the answer is that works takes up too much time, yes we work too many hours.
The cleaning lady is not some rocket scientist, she is someone that has very low skills and therefore does low skilled labor: cleaning houses.
This is false, having a clean house, clean dishes, cooked food is extremely valuable, but this is mot captured by money, because half of the population were basically indentured servants that were culturally expected to provide this work for free.
Of course, the indentured servants payed rent in kind, with their bodies, whether they like it or not.
Say whaat? The woman's father literally paid good money to have her taken away. Everyone but the woman saw cash changing hands, but she was legally barred from owning property.
Freedom was for men.
If the present “owner” paid “good money” to take her away, doesn’t that mean she was a liability instead of an asset?
I'll be curious if they move those positions to a lower cost-of-living area as they scale up.
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...
[0] https://mosh.org
Thinking about it now, if one would deliberately add much more latency (a few seconds), it might be possible to use real-world simulation as aid. At least for operations which can be decomposed into sequences of transitions between stable/safe states. Say moving dishes from dishwasher to cupboard. Picking up is critical, but holding in hand is (presumably) safe, placing in cupboard critical, once placed it is safe. Then one could let teleoperator do the entire critical move virtually, act it out in simulator only. See what the outcome is. If high risk of failure, deny operation. If good chance of success (per simulation) can allow to execute in the real world. More autonomous operation will need ability to simulate actions, project alternative approaches into the future, and a world model strong enough that can also plan and execute based on it. So there are potential synergies in a full-teleop, to hybrid teleop to autonomy transition. Note, this approach would also assume the relevant environment to be static. So it would not help handle the pet or toddler...
By the way, we've had robotic surgery [1] for years. These machines are very expensive, and it takes months, if not years, to learn to operate them flawlessly.
That really depends on how demanding you are. For example, I prefer to thoroughly wipe the dishes after taking them out of the dishwasher (if necessary). This is a fairly demanding task in terms of motor skills. I suppose we all have similar discrepancies from what is considered normal or good enough.
A human-knitted marvel that does it all. From telling cayenne apart from paprika to cleaning your toilet.... well, maybe. From what I can tell, it can flush but not wipe, so you'll still want to budget for a bidet.
Technically, it makes Level-5 autonomy look straightforward. At least roads have rules and standards; household bathrooms, not so much. But let's gloss over that, because I want to know more about the legal agreement you'll have to sign. IANAL, but I expect something akin to a carpet-bombing of blanket disclaimers: no liability for direct, indirect, incidental, consequential, punitive, or other damages—including injuries or loss of life—or really anything else that could go wrong, such as losing your mail, opening your door to assist in a robbery, setting your house on fire, flooding it, or sending your banking information to a Nigerian prince. Too bad iRobot never got around to explaining the legal side of things, but there's always hope for iRobot 2.
Is this a humanoid robot that's controlled by someone in a call center remotely doing your laundry?
Putting aside ethical reservations about how much they are probably paying per task, that feels like wash and fold with extra steps.
Presumably, this is a way to collect diverse training data for the robot to be trained on. Wash and fold as a service is valuable (to some people), and presumable the “extra steps” are offset with the in-home aspect of this.
Meanwhile, the ethical considerations are huge. Laborers are literally training their replacement, and probably at questionable wages. They’re also explicitly inviting someone into your home remotely, and that person can see and interact with your house. Feels like a privacy and safety risk. Additionally, it seems likely that this would be a literal Trojan horse to allow international labor to work within the US without dealing with actual immigration. Oh and just for good measure, it’s taking the jobs traditionally held by some of society’s least privileged and most desperate workers.
Anyways, if it actually works, I want one.
Edit: I feel compelled to note that apparently they’re hiring in Palo Alto for these roles, today.
Companies found out that hiring indians and teleoperate the “robot” is far cheaper than having an autonomy or AI algorithms with sensors on-board. Speaking of, all these food delivery “robots” were/are teleoperated as well over the internet as well.
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.
It’s a training session. They’re not training the model on the robot in that moment, they’re collecting training data, don’t overthink the details.
That one doesn't have to do, hence the appeal.
Truly it does look like that.
> Use NEO as a mobile bluetooth speaker anywhere in your home.
I expect my robot vacuum to vacuum the floor, because it's a little wheeled disc on the floor. It's not going to be able to cook for me. But this thing? Yea, it should cook for me.
Humanoid only seems useful if it can do stairs - something many form factors fail at. Though I'd expect a centaur form factor could do stairs better and probably is cheaper.
But it did remind me of my friend Ben Skora and his robot AROK. Fabricated in his garage using sheet metal (Ben rebuilt cars), power window motors, dryer vent pipe for arms, a Richard Nixon halloween mask inside a motorcycle helmet, two car batteries and wheels as shoes, bicycle brake clamps covered with rubber gloves as hands, a front panel of lights that blinked, and miles of wiring that never worked 100%.
The whole system was analog. Tones from two princess phone keypads controlled the motors and he could talk and listen remotely (20 ft away) using a hacked set of walkie-talkies. Don't ask me how.
AROK was built in ~1971-1973 and now resides inside a glass case at the Moraine Valley Community College Technology Building. [1]
He built AROK to help around the house, do chores, walk the dog, etc.
[0] https://cyberneticzoo.com/robots/1975-arok-ben-skora-america...
[1] https://www.morainevalley.edu/news-story/arok-the-robot-roll...
It would seem like the ideal target for this would be say a hotel operator. A team of these could clean a large number of rooms on an unoccupied floor of a hotel at once. Even if this was tele-operated remotely, this seems like it could be particularly beneficial for hotels in remote locations where its harder to hire people locally.
"For 20k$, you can pre-order one now"
The pre-order is only $200
But yes, it gives a good perspective about what's the state of the robot right now