Suspiciously absent: a rough idea of what percentage of tasks need the assistance.
Here is one for the contrary (just a book review. The citation is the book).
https://cleantechnica.com/2026/04/06/we-need-to-tax-billiona...
The target audience is the “regular-rich bourgeoisie”.
EDIT: Jeez, it looks like that's an 11 years old thread. Time does indeed fly.
EDIT 2: The source for the claim is paywalled, but this is how the Cultural impact chapter of the movie's Wikipedia page closes:
> In 2025, Rivera noted that a tech CEO claimed the film had been an inspiration for his company to employ a remote labour force in the Global South in order to operate robots in the Global North, and that the film has been used in pitch decks for various start-ups.
... once again bringing to mind the "At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from the classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus" meme.
Why an AI company cleaned my New York City apartment for free
This will almost certainly depend on the customer and residence. I don't think subscription pricing will be fair, but it can at least be budgeted for out of pensions and such for the people needing to pay for assistance.
This sort of menial task would likely be given to someone in a poorer part of the world, who ironically will be some of the first to master the first generation of remotely operated high tech robots.
The revolution against the rich will be led by poor precariats armed with robots.
If anything, robots will make rich people richer and their position more secure. Once again, you're hoping for a technological solution to non-technological problems
If you are telling me that one day I'll have a robot that cooks, cleans, is a personal assistant, a therapist. Eventually it'll be a chauffeur, babysitter, and obviously sex slave.
Why wouldn't i pay 50000 for that, besides the obvious "you are a creep" like why do I care when it's coming and market forces are going to make it an indistinguishable substitute human a la Joi from blade runner?
But abject exploitation? Sex slave, even? I should hope we can find a little decency within ourselves..
Could it become true ?
Well, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_fetishism we live in the future already
Used to be called "a wife", before emancipation.
Seriously though, the future is made of human beings more and more isolated from each other because technology will give us all that we used to get from other people, with none of the annoyances. Each the king or queen of their solipsistic kingdom.
Does that mean some random human looking at my dirty laundry in the middle of my home, the most intimate place in existence for me? No thank you.
Personally, I’d probably be willing to stomach a teleoperator but what I would not be comfortable with is the company retaining images, video, and other telemetry from my condo on their servers for who knows how long.
If I hire someone to come into my home I can meet them, decide whether I trust them, build familiarity over time, and develop some form of reciprocity. They know whose home they’re entering, and I know who they are.
That feels very different from an anonymous person on the other side of a teleoperated robot... who may be one of many interchangeable operators, switching in and out on some unknown schedule, with no meaningful relationship to me.
Maybe I’m just the wrong audience for this. Because no way am I comfortable with anonymous strangers looking around inside my home.
The article page on runtimewire is slop with a lot of distracting design elements and even a “WHY IT MATTERS” title, which is just cringe.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/x9TdqrvDHWY
Especially the arm clamp is the same shape, the actions are practically the same (take object and put in basket, teleoperation with live camera).
The type of thing you have lot of fun for 5 minutes.
Cheaper Unitree robots that starts at 4,900 USD are impressive in comparison.
Weave says the robot blends autonomy with teleoperation (remote assistance by a Weave specialist) to guarantee that we complete every fold
Lol. Folding engineer.
This will be life changing for the elderly and disabled if they can pull it off. If you have socialized care, the government would even probably pay since it will be cheaper than aged care facilities.
Must operate on a perfectly flat surface. My roomba could probably handle a larger carpet curb than that top-heavy thing.
Head and eyes appear to be at human crotch level for some reason... gross.
What a waste of engineering talent.
Especially because this thing is already $8k, I imagine they have already done some substantial price optimization.
It could fold my laundry while I'm busy working from home as a teleoperator for Weave Robots.
A much more valuable discussion would be centered around the company's own website, which contains the same information, and doesn't require an LLM mediator: https://www.weaverobotics.com/isaac-1
I also saw Tesla is ramping up to make millions of Optimus robots. And Amazon bought Fauna robotics which I predict we will start seeing "last 100 ft" deliveries soon. Amazon's Rivian packmobile will pull up to a block and 5 Fauna robots (they are short) will jump out and start delivering packages to the neighborhood.
The robots are coming...
https://www.reddit.com/r/robotics/comments/1ph3scw/tesla_opt...
https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-optimus-robots-bartend...
https://www.tesla.com/careers/search/?region=5&site=US&state...
* Not safe for feminists
I'm not trying to be facetious, I'm trying to tell you that your criteria are not meaningful, and you're pretending like they're obvious. It's why many US slaves moved directly from slavery into sharecropping for the same masters. The only thing that changed was the paperwork. Now they were renters, who could quit (with no assets and no means to feed themselves.)
We have lords of land. A monetary system based mostly on trickery hidden behind boring math that inexorably erodes the purchasing power of what we receive as compensation for our finite time alive.
So let's just jump to the interesting bit: how do we fix it? Got any ideas?
What doesn't make sense to me is the cost. Yes, $8000 is probably low for this robot but it's a reasonable price range for something like this. The AI credits though? I know vision LLMs are not cheap, they're not going to run something like Llama3.2vision on every frame. Very curious about the embodied AI architecture that this is going to use, and how it can get cheap enough that it's not going to use $500/month in electricity every month.
A service like that can be hundreds a month, so pay off period is on the order of years… which could be worth it.
For a bot that just automates an in-house laundry service that washes and folds? Not very interesting since it might save maybe 60% of the time, but practically zero percent of the mental overhead.
This seems like a step towards that I suppose. My house isn't configured to make it an option even if it was a fully-baked product, but if these ever get to the point of actually working without remote teleoperation I'd certainly be in the market.
Buying a machine to do difficult, complex, or strenuous work is one thing. Buying a machine to load and operate the other machine seems... different.
Get on the cross about... doing laundry, I guess? All you want but it's not crazy to want to maximize the amount of time you get to spend with novel, meaningful experience and minimize the amount of time you spend shuffling piles of clothing from one place to another over and over among the dozens of other mundane chores.
If you have the money, why not?
This goes for any recurring chore in my life. I love to garden, but watering plants is hell to me after the novelty wears off. I fixed this by installing an automated irrigation system. I get to do the fun bits mostly on my schedule to wind down when I feel like it (pruning, harvesting, staring at plants) and didn't sign myself up for yet another daily chore to do.
My wife is the opposite. She thrives on "chores" or routine simple items like this. She absolutely loves doing laundry to an absurd degree - kind of a zen moment in the middle of her day she can quickly spend 10 minutes here and there to get done. Same goes for cooking. I enjoy planning and creating elaborate meals I've dialed into "perfection" but take me an entire Saturday to accomplish a few times a year. She loves spending 30 minutes in the kitchen most nights to wind down after work - but really hates "big" projects of any type.
I imagine it has a lot to do with executive function. I enjoy large one-off projects (e.g. designing and installing an over the top totally overkill irrigation system) that are eventually "done" but fall apart on repetitive simple things that never end and just reset to be done X hours all over again. I like to have my "mental slate" clean when I wake up for the day, and I find I accomplish far more when I can configure my life in such a way.
As such, this robot as-is would be somewhat useless to me as I'd have to remember to hang up the clothes or walk them up the stairs to put away or whatever even with it. I'd get very little advantage for the spend.
Not sure how literal you were here or if it's more a feeling thing to you: My washing machine takes 1-2 hours per run. I don't believe you (or anyone else) can do all other attached work in 5 Minutes, or anywhere close to it.
Outsourcing can be difficult and expensive in many regions. The lack of an actual human might even be considered a benefit in some cases, such as nursing homes (although you have to weigh the benefits of human contact with the benefits of fewer humans spreading plagues).
The about page claims 1000+ lbs of laundry folded every week.
[1] https://sfstandard.com/2026/05/28/sf-startup-secretly-testin...
My laundry is upstairs and my washer is downstairs.
Also doesn’t seem to be able to start washer/dryer and transfer loads.
Your chinchilla had finished the wash cycle.
> Made to fit in every home, including yours.
Unless that home has stairs
I am happy this kind of thing is being worked on, I just don't think this is gonna be it - they really talk around what it does but "folding clothes" isn't enough. $8k to handle a complete laundry cycle (including ironing) might be interesting.
Robot operated laundry on a cruise ship or something.
Working with fabric is notoriously difficult. Doubly so when we're talking random unknown pieces of fabric already sewed together by some third party and not simple rolls of it that need to be transformed in known ways into clothing.
They need visual recording of tele-operated robots (or humans with headset cameras) doing normal household stuff like folding laundry in real environments so it can be fully automated. Which is what funds a lot of this stuff since that training data is a goldmine right now if a company can collect enough of it.
But why would you pay thousands and store a clunky machine in your home for that? Either you don't care about the bed being made or not -- in which case just don't, its not essential -- or you'd have it made already in 30-60 seconds when you got up before you could even get the thing turned on.
Folding laundry is the same thing. It says 30-90 minutes, I assume for one wash load? A human couldn't possibly take more than 30 minutes. And a human with a folding board could do it in 5-10. So unless you do not care about laundry at all, it would drive you crazy to watch that machine blocking your hallway for over an hour slowly folding a single load.
Alternatively, a wash/dry/fold service will deliver them to your door not just folded, but neatly packed in dustproof bags. (This is a major life hack when packing for a trip btw.)
- Marvin the household laundry bot
NOPE. Close tab. If this does not work without an internet connection then it's DOA. I should only have to connect it for software updates. Other than that, the bot is offline, period.
No? Think of a malicious actor hacking into one of these things and using your favorite kitchen knife against you while you sleep. I want a robot where the probability of that occurring is zero.
For 100 USD I can get a Roomba or Roborock for one floor and because that is so cheap I don’t mind this limitation. But for 8-10k USD I would expect this very common household feature to be solved.
Just prove to me it's deaf. I don't care who sees me naked that's their problem not mine.
Bikes (and e-scooters, one wheels) are a decent solution, but you can't take them in most metros or buses. 2nd/3rd world infrastructure is pothole ridden, not even ready for bikes. Walking can take you everywhere.
This seems cool, even if it's really just teleoperated.
This is hiring a human worker with extra steps, worse cost benefit and in a dehumanising manner.
I get what you are saying but unless we call it what it is (which is disgusting) we will just keep getting more of it, and will normalize this bullshit. (Intrusive products are already normalized but maybe we can slow the escalation of their intrusiveness).
Even finding a non cloud-video photo uploading robot vacuum is a challenge if not impossible. Because we accept this bullshit we ended with no alternative privacy oriented design and solutions in the market. Unfortunately people don’t pay enough of a premium for real privacy.
At $15/hr, $8000 is 533 hours. So you are only breaking even if you get more than 22 full days of human folding labor (not the actual, slower time it takes the robot) during the useful life of the machine (probably 2-3yr max since it relies on backend supervision like a waymo). ChatGPT estimates that a human could fold about 27,000 shirts over 533 work hours.
The aged, infirm and disabled are going to need real people for company and to deal with any crises the infirm might have. And since the real people will be there and paid for anyway, the state is unlikely to pay for robots as a quality of life improvement (they'd pay for them if they removed the caregiver but that complete removal will science fiction for a while).
As an example, I work taking care of a partly paralyzed man. He's tried an exoskeleton, believes it would help him a lot but can't afford the many thousands of dollars it would cost. The state pays for 18-hours/day care which is tens of thousands of dollars a month but they have to pay that.
Watching the videos, they have the cleanest kids in that house. The ability to move pillows 4 inches is just blowing my mind.
- The robot dragging one corner over itself into a sloppy mess. - Cut. - It’s perfectly folded.
Privacy nightmare. Bunch of random, low-paid operators looking around inside my home. No thanks!
Cut scene aaaand folded! It's like magic.
What does it mean "handles"? It doesn't say it puts on a wash, but that's what I'd want. I can only assume they're vague because it doesn't do anything useful.
> Makes beds
A robot the height of a child makes a double bed with sheet, duvet, and pillows? I highly doubt it could reach.
> Isaac 1 is autonomous for Laundry Flow and Daily Reset by default, with teleoperation assistance when needed to guarantee we complete tasks.
That's a lot of words to say "a person will drive it around your home". What sort of insurance do they have for that person breaking something in your home? What audit trail do they have for the operators?
Probably just make the user accept a license agreement saying they accept the risk? I suspect most people would accept the risk something might get broken if it means they no longer need to clean their house.