When will we have humanoid robots in our homes? I had a great opportunity a few weeks ago to get interviewed by NBC’s Gadi Schwarz on his Stay Tuned Now show on exactly that topic. You can see the segment here:
It was a ton of fun, of course, and I’m personally excited to be able to have a humanoid — or near humanoid — in my home at some point in the future.
Here’s a transcript of our conversation:
Gadi Schwarz: More people are maybe warming up to the idea of a robot roommate. But just how close are we to introducing a new mechanical member of the family? Well, we sat down with some experts to break down what these robots could actually do and what tasks parents might hand off to free up some family time
Cartoon: Housework, nothing but housework
Gadi Schwarz: Back in the day, The Jetsons promised a future where robots handle the housework Rosie is the ideal maid But more than a maid, Rosie was a member of the family
Cartoon: And I love you people, too.
Gadi Schwarz: Fast-forward to today, and this is the closest we’ve got.
The tech is evolving and quickly. So how far are we from having humanoid robots that can do housework?
John Koetsier: I think we’re three to five years away from having our iPhone moment, our ChatGPT moment for humanoid robotics in homes, and I think that’s really soon. I don’t think we’re culturally prepared for that
Gadi Schwarz: John Koetsier from Forbes has been tracking the tech, and he says these robots will eventually be a major household purchase
John Koetsier: Twenty thousand dollars, forty thousand dollars, fifty thousand dollars, somewhere around there.
Price of a car, right? Maybe two hundred dollars a month if you go on a subscription plan, and you’ve got a humanoid that’s doing a lot of things in our homes.
Gadi Schwarz: Which raises a lot of other questions, like who gets there first and what about the competition?
John Koetsier: There’s about four hundred companies globally that I’m tracking that are working on humanoid robotics technology.
About half of them are in China. Don’t get too weirded out or too over-impressed with the videos of the dancing robots. It’s cool, it’s funny, it’s wow, it’s amazing. Nobody cares. Does it work? Will it work in the factory? Will it work in my home? Will it do things for us?
Gadi Schwarz: Can it do my dishes?
John Koetsier: Exactly, without breaking half of them
Gadi Schwarz: As for what a mechanical maid could mean for the family
Dr. Jen Hartstein: You still teach your kids to clean up after themselves, teach them how to do laundry ’cause they’ll need to do it when they go to college.
So I don’t think it becomes a replacement, but it could free up a lot of time for [00:02:00] parents to actually have more quality time with their kids
Gadi Schwarz: And when it comes to homemaking, one study found stay-at-home parents right now put in about two hundred hours of unpaid work a month. That’s worth between four thousand to five thousand dollars.
How they spend that newfound time could end up mattering just as much as the tech itself
Dr. Jen Hartstein: How are parents then using that time, right? Are they getting back on their phones and working, or are they taking that time to really spend with their children and kind of nurture that connection and that relationship?
I think that’ll depend on the family.
Gadi Schwarz: But until all that, sorry, kids, we’re still stuck folding and cleaning the old-fashioned way. Uh, and yeah, that’s, that’s my little daughter who got a, a Swiffer sweeper for her fifth birthday, uh, because robots are not in our house yet. And as we wait for robots to become human helpers, remember the promise of AR smart glasses?