> But a household robot that could clean, wash and fold the laundry, do the dishes, maybe even be a chauffeur... that would be huge.
Except they can't. I get it, merging advanced AI with robotics has made huge leaps in the past few years, but building a truly autonomous laundry robot is an incredibly difficult problem that still feels many years away. And I've seen all the "folding robots" over the past few years, and they are still miles away from being useful in your average home (they only "fold" if pieces are handed to them one-by-one, or the more advanced ones that can pick out clothes from a pile look like they were folded by a 3 year old).
Also, consider that all-in-one washer/dryer combos have existed for a while, but they are still a teeny percentage of washer sales because they're expensive and require more maintenance. There is a surprisingly low threshold on what people are willing to pay for labor saving devices.
> There is a surprisingly low threshold on what people are willing to pay for labor saving devices.
A lot of people gladly pay humans to launder their clothes, so the market is there. But the current iteration of wash/dry combo machines doesn’t solve the main issue. I don’t mind transferring my clothes from the washer to the dryer, because that takes 60 seconds. It’s folding and putting away the clothes that makes laundry a chore.
Getting to a cheap household helper robot requires building the expensive one. I don’t think Boston dynamics believes any reasonable consumer would buy their atlas robot, but by building it and scaling its production in industrial use cases they will learn things that make building a cheaper one much easier. And they will have built some factories to mass produce them. It’s not something that will be in everyone’s home next year, but sooner or later the robot hardware and robot intelligence will both be cheap enough to be accessible by average people (at least in the developed world)