AI lab offers free plumbing and HVAC repairs across three cities to train robots
tomshardware.com
tomshardware.com
You don't pay the plumber to replace the widget. You pay the plumber to look at the problem and know what widget to replace and the correct set of moves to do so without flooding the house. Good luck!
Cue the "Obviously, with a master plumber guiding them, they could do this!" non-counterpoint counterpoint because you've just destroyed the cost savings of not sending that master plumber to the site and if you try to make the master plumber multi-task, there goes the cognitive load burnout event horizon just like... Stay with me... REPLACING JUNIOR ENGINEERS WITH CODING AGENTS!
Kill me now. The Robot Apocalypse has already segued from tragedy to farce and the AI intelligentsia need to read more Adrian Tchaikovsky and less Eliezer Yudkowsky. I eagerly anticipate the downvotes once again for loving the science and technology of AI yet despising the breathless ridiculous hype on both sides of the AI wars. This is an alien mindset, I get it, but do try to convince me the error of my ways by the only way you know how to do.
Everybody thrives best when luck is on their side :)
Even the pros flood a house now & then. You have to figure they have insurance just in case.
Once the dust settles (or the water drains) an interesting indicator might be whether there is any difference in insurance rates between human and robot plumbers.
Every discussion I see here is working under “when they are another order or two of magnitude better than today.”
No one is saying masters are getting replaced today. But “you pay the x to look at the problem and know the y and know z” is literally just intelligence over complicated tasks. It gets replaced if these things get smarter. And there is not really a good reason to think they won’t besides “I don’t want them to” or “my identity is tied to them not getting smarter”.
But I welcome the attempt to build a domestic home repair robot as it's a valid attempt at getting AI better at something it's godawful at currently.
Instead of someone with knowledge fixing a leak under your sink, it'll be some kid who has never turned a wrench before, following some LLM instructions.
We're slowly turning our whole workforce into the worst call center you've ever called -- a bunch of idiots reading from a script with no agency or skills of their own.
You jest, but if you think about it, it's not too hard to see Idiocracy as a movie about AI [1]. What do you think humanity is going to be like after thousands of years of no selective pressure on intelligence and no practical value to knowledge and education?
Idiocracy is the coming AI Utopia: your great-great-great grandchildren spending their days yukking it up "Ow, My Balls!" and having even dumber kids.
[1] IIRC, the backstory of the movie has the automation developed after humanity started getting stupid, to keep things from falling apart, but it seems more realistic for it to happen the other way around.
Your floor is now clean.
Imagine if our benevolent AGI made Earth an utopia where everyone can achieve their full potential if they wish, then having first contact with another AGI. The alien AGI would ask if our AGI keeps these dumb humans as mementos, not realizing those humans as smart as they can possibly be.
When I was a kid, a landlord in my community decided to "fix" a broken heating unit at one of his properties himself to save money, and wound up killing all of his tenants due to CO poisoning. Those are the kinds of situations that we are risking by enabling DIY contract work.
But of course, with enough VC money you can take the Uber route and 'creatively interpret' the law
One is that an Uber rider is never put on a list of "can't ever ride on other services again", whereas if you try to sell a house that has unlicensed plumbing or electrical work done, it will show up on inspection and any smart buyer will walk (or run) away. Tons of real estate deals fall through because the seller did shoddy work like this and it will demonstrably reduce the value of your property because it's only worth what people are willing to pay.
This is also true for when you want an actual contractor to come work on your house. If a licensed contractor sees that you're trying to fix unlicensed work, they too will run away because they don't want to inherit the liability. I think the very red-tape nature of contracting work will be one of the things that protects it from this idiocy.
First, there's quite a lot of unlicensed work that is entirely legal in many places, and a lot of it is fairly common work -- replacing or repairing fixtures, for instance.
Second, there's no "list of unlicensed work" either -- sellers are required to disclose unpermitted work that they're aware of, but as you can imagine, compliance here is sometimes hard to enforce, as sellers often either don't know and minor work might not even be visible for a buyer to question. Yes, if you add on an addition or finish a basement without pulling permits, this is something that is more obvious. If a seller replaced a pipe in a wall, who is going to know?
Third, it depends on the property. You wouldn't want unpermitted work on a premium home in a premium neighborhood. But if you go shopping for a deal on a starter home in a rural area? Much of the inventory will have unpermitted work, there may be zero local enforcement, and the buyer will likely be planning on doing their own unpermitted work :)
Home improvement stores really wouldn't exist in the way that we know them if everything needed a permit.
> If a licensed contractor sees that you're trying to fix unlicensed work, they too will run away because they don't want to inherit the liability.
Many will be hesitant to fix shoddy work, but most will be fine with replacing it.
I have personally experienced several warranty calls for major appliances under warranty. The "tech" who shows up knows less about the appliance than I do, and the first thing they do is get on the phone with their own support call, who attempts to figure out what the issue is.
It's maddening for the consumer (me) because it (again, in my few experiences) doesn't produce a quality resolution quickly.
An actual appliance tech who still does service calls is like a unicorn for me - once I find one the are getting all my calls. My current guy for washers/driers tells me he is the remote tech for a few major brands, and spends a lot of his time each day on the phone with the onsite meat puppets.
I prefer the Chernobyl name for them - biorobots
Expert system? What's this, the 80s? :)
But yes, I agree with the main sentiment. That's basically what Amazon already is (and Uber).
"So, what do you think it is?"
"i don't know dude, I just have to do as the machine tells me, what's a pipe wrench?"
Is anyone willing to pay for a person without knowledge asking an AI or a robot to mess with their AC or pipes? At that point I'd rather do it myself with AI, at least I will care and be responsible about the results.
I have proper professional plumber now doing repairs for a month in our apartment. He is part of 3 member team, the other is electrician with 40 years of experience and another tylist? but each can do each other's trade on cca comparable level, just due to personal connection I have with them).
For repair work, its always discovery, always more complex than anticipated, mostly non-standard, and the guy is creative, he has to be. And thats 20 year old apartment in heavily regulated Switzerland, nothing old or abscure.
I know enough building sciences to do most repairs or renovations myself. I still pay for a professional when I don’t want the liability risk (plumbing or electrical in a large multifamily property, for example). A few hundred dollars is always cheaper than my property insurance deductible, or the entire loss of coverage is denied (and property insurers are denying roughly half of annual claims).
AI Runs Into Its Next Big Obstacle: Insurance - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50154288 - October 2026
Yep. My brother used ChatGPT to guide his repair of a rusted hole in the driver's side door of his pickup truck.
He never would have tried that repair on his own. Looks good, too.
I ended up figuring out how to do the work myself.
What I gather is happening is that the K shaped economy is having wealthier people who benefit from the current tech boom buying and renovating houses at such a rate that skilled trades people are not bothering to chase smaller jobs.
That said, I am going to need some pretty good evidence a robot can be trusted to do the work. Working on houses in any form results in finding weird and unpredictable work from DIYers and prior generations doing things in radically different ways. My sink for example did not fit exactly the space the old cast iron sink sat in. What is the right decision: knock the spacers off the new stainless steel sink, or cut pieces of the countertop to make it fit? The next problem I had was the even once it fit, the faucet did not have clearance for the bolt which held it in place - requiring a trip to Home Depot to consult with their experts on how to handle it (turns out: a PVC pipe spacer cut to fit).
That is a lot of improvisation and dexterity for a simple sink replacement. It is going to be a while I think.
"Home-service technicians perform millions of highly technical tasks every day. We are creating a way for homeowners and service companies to benefit financially from the value of that expertise.
"We want to build the infrastructure that connects that knowledge with the companies building the next generation of intelligent machines while making sure the people creating the value participate in the economics."
While these technicians may be getting a bonus on top of what they usually charge, it's not like they're getting royalties or stock options for training their replacements. If you're a technician working or contracting for a service company that agrees to this, you might not even see any of that extra money.
It seems kind of silly with the current state of robotics, but in a way it's a kind of prisoner's dilemma: short-term gain of being paid to train the robots vs. long-term loss of being automated out of a job. Licensing is a barrier, but we let them drive cars in some cities.
What do you mean by automated? No humans in the loop, or that the human doing the work is using some kind of AI tool to aid them?
How quickly text based LLMs gained “intelligence” was shocking to all of us. What you need to understand about LLMs is they don’t care whether it’s text or a language or binary data. All they need to have is sufficient training data in order to be able to replicate human behavior. There are a lot of companies collecting training data for exactly these sort of real world activities now. When we get to a point where there’s enough training data where you can input a camera feed and the output is signal controls for the actuators on the robots, they’re going to start looking and acting like humans all of a sudden.
Even if this robotic technology existed today (which it does not), it would take more than five years even to get it out there in the real world. If you think people in general are negative to AI, wait until they're told "AI will look after your elderly mother".
As for what exists today, there is a ton of content online including very long live streams. Take a look at what figure robotics is doing with figure 3 (autonomous mail sorting, dishwashing, clothes folding, house cleaning streams), what unitree is doing with its speech to action LLM, as well as what Gemini robotics is doing. These are all on device autonomous physical LLMs that are in the very early stages and the stuff they can do is already incredible. You can look up Sunday robotics that essentially can fold 99% of clothes as shown on a 3 hour stream. There are a host of other very big players in the space, including Tesla robotics, Boston dynamics, and dozens of other US and Chinese robotic companies that are making a lot of progress very quickly.
> If you think people in general are negative to AI, wait until they're told "AI will look after your elderly mother".
People might be initially skeptical but if you tell them, it’ll happen for 1/10th of the price and people see this working for a few months they’ll quickly hop on the bandwagon. I don’t think you understand how expensive elder care is currently, people pay thousands of dollars per month for it.
Nothing is inevitable. If this was inevitable, it's only under our current anti-human from of capitalism (it was always that way, AI just took the mask off).
> Who want's to pay an extra bundle for a plumber to come in and destroy a bunch of walls to fix a clogged pipe? No job is safe.
If the clog is so bad they can't snake it out or something, I don't think a robot is going to do a better job. Plumbers have to destroy walls because plumbing is often installed in inaccessible places.
If you really want cheap plumbing, you could always move your pipes outside the walls (sort of like the ductwork in Brazil, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9gO01pyv24).
I don't think people would choose to fix toilets to survive if they didn't have to
If I hadn't gone into tech, I might have been a plumber. Plumbing is a deeply interesting topic, and it involves a lot of physics and fluid dynamics. Acting like a plumber is a desperate idiot with a wrench is not an accurate take, and is really rude. Also, Master Plumbers who operate their own businesses generally make >$150k/yr.
1) The dramatic drop in demand for my services when most of the knowledge workers lose their jobs and thus incomes.
2) The dramatic increase in supply of people doing my job when all those knowledge workers attempt to flee to 'safe' jobs.
Crushing forces coming from both sides are likely to harm even the jobs that seem to have the lease AI exposure.
Home repairs are too expensive
Cool! VC capital at work for the common people.
> to train AI robots
LOL total bullshit.