Earlier this month, a San Francisco start-up posted a strange job opportunity. It was hiring people to walk robot dogs. No experience necessary. Obviously.
Walking a robot dog paid around the same hourly rate as that for the flesh-and-blood variety, but the robot dog required more time wandering the city’s sidewalks to do its business. Four to six hours of perambulation were required, said the ad.
So much for robots making our lives easier.
On the positive side, there was no need to clean up after the robot, or to pretend you did not see the deposit it left behind on someone’s yard.
On the negative side, the robots could prove as stubborn as their living counterparts. Just as a normal dog might suddenly plop down and refuse to budge in the middle of a busy street, the robot dogs, too, might give up mid-walk — because their equipment overheated. Robot dog walkers would then need to carry the mechanical quadrupeds back to the start-up’s office. Applicants, the ad warned, must be comfortable “safely handling equipment weighing about 33 pounds.”
The ad, which has since been deleted, offered $20 an hour and was posted to the Facebook group “Bay Area Jobs” by the start-up, called Dimensional, which is based, appropriately, in a San Francisco neighborhood called Dogpatch. It spurred only a couple of comments, none of which acknowledged its strangeness. “My son is interested,” one mother wrote. “Can start right away.” (Her son did not ultimately follow through, she told me.)
Dimensional is building an open-source operating system for robots, said its founder, Stash Pomichter. Mr. Pomichter, who is 26, wants to embed A.I. agents in robots so that consumers can command them to do work in the real world, the same way people are giving commands to services like Meta’s Muse to do tasks for them online.
People, Mr. Pomichter fervently believes, should be able to command robots to pick up heavy boxes and lug things around. “It’s honestly barbaric that humans are still doing these physical tasks,” he said in an interview.
But before we can have robodog save us the trouble and indignity of carrying the groceries, Dimensional needs to improve the robots’ ability to autonomously navigate an urban environment. Thus the need for robot dog walkers, who are creating what Mr. Pomichter called “ground truth” by controlling and steering RoboFido, while its cameras and sensors record the walk.
One resident who spotted a human walking a four-legged mechanical ward — and provided a video to The New York Times — declared San Francisco a weird city that is only getting weirder.
Dimensional is not a hardware company. It purchased more than 100 robot dogs and 50 humanoid robots from manufacturers in the United States, China and Germany, Mr. Pomichter said, and is developing operating systems that can integrate with A.I. agents so the machines can act more independently. The $2,000 “dogs” it sent out with human walkers this month are from a Chinese company called Unitree and come ready to be controlled with a hand-held remote or mobile app.
Dimensional compared how the robot dogs performed when walking around under human control with how they did when controlled by an A.I. agent, and found the latter lacking.
“What we determined from our dog-walking experiment was that agents are still very bad at controlling hardware,” Mr. Pomichter said. “And humans are still needed in the loop.”
The aim is to enable robots to work in factories, in data centers, on construction sites and as security guards. One version of this is happening, with a robot dog patrolling an apartment complex in Atlanta, with a human-in-the-loop based in the Philippines. The robot is essentially a mobile security camera for a remote human observer.
Mr. Pomichter said he had programmed a robot dog to patrol Dimensional’s warehouselike office at night. He said he had given it the prompt “You are the world’s best security dog” and told it to follow anyone who entered the building after midnight. If it sees someone, it sends Mr. Pomichter a text so he can check the security cameras to see if it’s a zealous employee or an intruder.
Not everyone was amused by the robots roaming Dogpatch this month. Dimensional wants to give A.I. agents real-world bodies at the same time that concern is spreading that more sophisticated A.I. might try to kill us.
The Terminator vibes set off one man who went to the company’s office and then sent alarming text messages to a Dimensional employee saying the robot dogs would be used as weapons. “Have fun helping slaughter random people you scum,” the man wrote in a message viewed by The Times. Dimensional reported the man to the police.
“We may have to deal with more of that,” Mr. Pomichter said, “in which case, we may need more patrol dogs.”
The post Wanted: Robot-Dog Walkers. $20/Hour. appeared first on New York Times.
