Home robots can return time lost to chores

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 10:09

   always think is a really brave endeavor, because anybody who's been through multiple startups knows how painful and terrible it is. Could you tell us a little bit more about the impetus behind the bot company and what you were doing there? Yeah, well, we talked about this a little bit when I was making that decision, what to do next. And I did some soul searching and determined that I'm just a builder.

2. 10:26

   I like building things. And sitting on the sidelines or helping other entrepreneurs or doing something else, I think would be fun, but not quite scratching that same itch. I'm 39. I feel like I got at least one more startup in the tank. So the question became of like, what to do? And I look back on my career. This is my, I guess, depending on how you count, like third major startup. And the first one was, you know, Twitch and Justin TV.

3. 10:48

   And that was straight out of college. And that was just doing anything, doing a startup and trying to make it work was the priority. And that ended up being video games and entertainment. The second time around for Cruise, after doing entertainment, I decided I want to focus on impact. So like, what's something where we can use technology to meaningfully improve people's lives? Self-driving cars, they save lives, they give you tons of time back.

4. 11:07

   That was like squarely in the, you know, impact category. Third time around, I definitely care about impact, but also fun. So it's like working with people I like on problems I like, really challenging technical problems and building amazing products. And so we're building home robots. And the impact side of that is one of those things that's hidden in plain sight. There's only 24 hours in a day. And if you're sleeping for eight hours, working for eight to 10, there's precious few hours left that are actually your time.

5. 11:35

   And people spend a surprising amount of that remaining time doing essentially unskilled labor, acting like robots every day, making the bed, doing the dishes, folding the laundry, picking up toys after your kids. These are not things that make us human. These are actually things that detract from our humanity and they're the perfect criteria for that reason to be automated by machines. And I think, you know, when you describe that to people like, oh, you don't have to do all those things anymore.

6. 12:00

   There's a machine that could do this for you. It clicks instantly. People are like, that is so obvious to the point where I think, you know, in five years, maybe 10 years, it will seem as insane to have like a house without multiple home robots as it would be to have a house without a sink or like a laundry machine or like a toilet. But these are going to be critical things that, if you can afford them and we want to make them really affordable, are just going to seem extremely common sense.

7. 12:25

   Why wouldn't I want to have the time in my home be my time, not consumed by these chores? I just thought that analogy was really interesting because we never really think about plumbing as a technology, and it is. And to your point, up until reasonably recently, you know, most of human history, we had no running water. You'd like walk down a hill with a bucket and you'd bring it into the house. And I actually think that's a fascinating analogy because nobody really talks about some of these things that actually our technology is technology and the degree to which we now just take it all for granted.

8. 12:51

   Yeah. So plumbing and electricity were sort of turn of the century things. And then I'd say in the 1950s and 60s, there was a resurgence about around like home appliances. There's some great advertisements from the 50s and 60s. If you look back, it's like this is 1950s time, but it's like, you know, the housewives standing in the kitchen and there's the microwave and the dishwasher and all these like new appliances that like make it so they have more time and they can do more and be more productive.

9. 13:14

   The last time we had like a surge of excitement and progress, like in our own homes, you know, in like 50, 70 years. So I think it's time to revisit that. And going back to the robotics side, like actually pulling this off, it's basically been the dream for people working on robots since the dawn of robotics to build a robot that can like go to the fridge and get you a beer or something like that.

10. 13:35

    You know, you sit on the couch. It's like the dream for nerds working on robots. And that's like obviously a tiny subset of what you'd want a household robot to do. But that's really hard. And like, why is it so hard to just have a robot like open a fridge, get a drink and bring it to you? And the reality is it's similar to self-driving cars in some regard, where it's a very unstructured environment. Like every home is different. Everybody has, organizes their home in a different way. The layout is different. The objects in the home, the different, how they live in their home is different. And so having a robot that sort of lives in this unstructured environment, it's like the polar opposite of a factory assembly line where everything is rigid and repetitive and precise.

11. 14:13

    In a home, it's like sloppy and changes every day. And so using classical approaches where you have computer vision and you're trying to like reconstruct 3D objects or fit to a map would make this like a really, really challenging and computationally intensive problem. Moving to more modern techniques like end-to-end learning or imitation learning, even reinforcement learning. Now, if you can teleoperate a robot and demonstrate how to do something or collect data from humans in some way or from internet videos, you can kind of imbue a robot with a sense of common sense and ability to make make sense of these unstructured environments and on top of that you can talk to the robot in natural language using your voice uh rather than typing into an app or on a keyboard so i think you know you asked

12. 14:55

    when the time is to start a robotics or a self-driving company maybe that was 2020 i think for home robots, it feels a little bit early. So like now is definitely the time in my view. How much of what you did it or that people have learned at places like Cruise or Waymo or others is also useful in the context of home robots. In other words, what sorts of things overlap