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Comment by kwhitefoot | Hacker News Reader

Why not employ a human being directly?

Then that human being has to actually travel to your house and do the entire job start to finish. The idea of a robot vac (or similar) that can do 80% of the job itself but ask for help from a trusted operator over the internet is really interesting.

So this solves the problem of rich people who don't want to live near poor people but do want their labor.

Finally?

And most “rich people” want to live in desirable neighborhoods and poor people cant afford to do so, the residents also want their houses clean

It is currently incredibly unproductive to get your house cleaned

It is simply going to be much more efficient to let Pakistanis on Fiverr control your automaton

Yuck, that is a good point. At the same time, is the need to house residential cleaning staff really what drives the creation/maintenance of integrated neighbourhoods?

For my part, I live in a pretty blended downtown neighbourhood (Kitchener, Ontario), and balancing the need for affordable housing with the constant pressure to "clean up" certain areas and turn brownfields into glitzy new condo towers seems to be something that's largely managed at the city council level.

Why yuck? I bet if you flipped it around and said "that opens the door for poor people to score lucrative contracts in richer markets which would be otherwise unavailable to them" then you'd think it was alright.

Maybe less now. It used to. Look at cities like London (UK, not Ontario), and you'll see lots of "mews" (1) that are rows of stables with associated housing for servants tacked onto the back of large housing and backing onto "service streets", so the rich could have their horses and servants housed where they were needed.

Today, of course, most mews have been converted into expensive standalone housing units, and most new integrated neighbourhoods are the result of council planning offices.

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mews

It solves the problem of not letting random strangers into your house.

And you think that a random stranger controlling that bot is less likely to cause damage on your property?

Even if the portal authenticates everyone... They'll still be one hack away from doing whatever they can to cause something to break for giggles

though you could probably blur/censor many details automatically before sending the images, which might be a decent enough solution to the problem

That's an interesting thought - optical character recognition and obfuscation to blur things like text on paper from a live feed.

Yes, I'm quite certain not having a person in my place will be less risky than having one.

You sometimes see the idea that if a security feature can potentially be defeated, that is equivalent to that feature not existing.

That's true for a small class of problems, but in general it just shows an inability to see nuance.

As the cafe job for disabled people, this also opens up the possibility of remote work for people with social anxiety, people in very rural areas with a lack of opportunity and so forth.

According to the article the waiters are paid about 9$ an hour. For a person in a destitute, remote small town jobs like this could be a really sweet side gig. It's not like they somehow would meet insular rich people anyway.

There's no reason to be cynical about this. Closing physical distance, which is one of the big contributors to lost opportunity is a good thing.

Expensive in most of the developed world, possibly higher risk and less reliable depending on the specifics of the employer and employee(s) in question.

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