>Donovan alleges that employees of the Bot Company(opens in new tab) rented his home “under false pretenses” to conduct prototype testing on robots they’re training to do household chores.
>A refrigerator shelf was cracked, and a broken glass or dish had been left in the garbage disposal. A wooden nightstand drawer was chipped. Cups and plates were in the wrong places. It looked like the furniture had been moved around.
Not sure which one is worse, the fact that the bot can't actually do household chore or the fact that the humans can't clean it up.
It's exactly this ethos, the "move fast and break things", and oh, we don't give a fuck about who/what we damage in the process - careless people indeed.
I am someone who came of age during an incredibly hopeful time about how technology could be a force for good. The silicon valley ethos at present is totally morally bankrupt and rotten to the core.
Same. Growing up Gen X, I always thought robots being used for evil would be cool dystopian dictatorships that would try to grind me under its boot but I would resist. Instead it’s just twerps who are so terminally online they can’t fathom other people seem to have feelings.
Now I’m getting even angrier imagining the email that went around internally on how to spin this and why it was a short term loss but will be for the long term good. Of trying to kill off the idea of cleaning people and then jacking up rates.
> I always thought robots being used for evil would be cool dystopian dictatorships that would try to grind me under its boot but I would resist. Instead it’s just
One thing that I've been noticing more and more, is that it looks like every dystopic work of art, be it 1984, brave new world or idiocracy, ends up being used as an instruction manual.
So far we were implementing only the first two ones, with AI, it looks like we decided to accelerate Idiocracy implementation too.
Same. The one that cemented it for me is The Matrix is only a quarter-century old, yet some people watched it and thought, "Oooh, good idea!" You can't even complain the context was gone.
Well let's get right on that then. If you'd kindly share your address and those of your favorite friends and family, we'll go distribute a couple hundred in damages to each of them.
No, this isn't a generational thing, if you don't see the problem with trashing someone's house (let alone doing so to the tune of $12k) that is a comment on your values alone.
But why don't they take the same money and get a cheap industrial unit and build some mock rooms up. Surely it costs the same as hiring and subsequently fixing peoples houses.
If I'm supposed to buy a robot to clean my house, I personally don't want to have to go looking for where the stupid thing has put my cups and plates or whatever whenever it straightens up. I expect there to be a place for all the things and all the things to be put back in place. That's not "er mah gerd the world is ending because millennials am I right!"; that's "your idiot robot can't do the one job I bought it for".
Move fast and break things is an ethos borne out of the assumption that fixing things is relatively cheap. Hence it made sense in software where experimentation is dirt cheap. But even then, the idea is quite a stretch: ask anyone who worked in a startup who had to sell to even just SMEs, not to mention big conglomerates. The idea hits a hard wall and starts to crack when the business hits a customer who can't fix things for cheap. Even Zuck, father and posterboy of the idea, had to eventually pivot messaging to "Move fast with stable infra".
And the more "software eats the world", the less this paradigm is gonna be a feasible market strategy. I've harbored these thoughts from way back and hence I was (and continue to be) skeptical of unregulated start-ups/new tech ideas who interface with the real world: Hyperloop, Tesla self-driving, and Theranos come to mind. An interesting case study in my view is _Github_ who in theory, having software engineers for customers, should be pretty well-insulated from the expensive repair costs of the real world. And yet we'd all agree they need a GINORMOUS dose of that sweet sweet "stable infra".
Love that part. It really illustrates how incompetent these people are. That’s why the need for robots, they are projecting their incompetence on other people!
Also, if this is the best they can do and left such a mess, don’t let them operate robots or any machines! Teach them to use a mop and then maybe upgrade them to a vacuum, and if they pass, let them use a sink garbage disposal under adult supervision.
The were incompetent enough to go to real world testing when these issues would have been obvious from a basic model kitchen test. Obviously their bot is in the very early development stages where it can't do any of the basic things right, they're nowhere near the phase where they needed real world testing. You don't need a real house to tell that your bot keeps damaging furniture, floors, and other items. You iron that out in the lab, then go in a real setup.
And yet they weren't able to build a model house or even just some model rooms for a controlled environment and practice there full time first. They could have done round the clock testing, with full flexibility of the arrangement, no need to waste time moving hardware around and risk damage, no liability, and more. A fake house costs next to nothing. A (fake) model kitchen is cheaper than an Airbnb stay.
Have you seen how many public demos from manufacturers of advanced robots like Boston Dynamics are using "artificial" obstacles and layouts? It's obvious they did a lot of development in those conditions. You don't need someone's home to find out if your robot can grab a plate without destroying it, or climb a flight of stairs.
The company could also test the bots in their employees’ homes for no cost. If employees aren’t comfortable with the bots in their own homes, then they shouldn’t let them loose in others’.
I personally would not want my employer putting anything with an AI or camera inside my home. That would be a non-starter. And I work for a company that uses cameras and compvis.
I don't want any of my personal life observed by my professional life and vice versa. It is bad enough that /I/ have to observe both and try not to pass judgement on myself.
I think you're right and hope this stunt damages their valuation. As an investor I would have serious doubts about a company which at this stage doesn't have the brain or the money to have a proper development plan and resorts to desperately throwing anything out there, hijacking an Airbnb rental as their lab. That reeks of incompetence, maliciousness, and desperation rolled into one.
The irony is the company is trying to make robots to help clean airbnbs for renter turnovers. Instead they are messing up airbnbs and making them harder to clean before turnovers.
It's fine to make mistakes, that's how you learn. The problem here was that they didn't announce to the host that they are doing a test of their in-development equipment.
So the host wasn't able to add the additional risk and hassle to the price, which in this instance would have been a quite legitimate ask as the robot damaged their revenue generating property.
It's very ironic that Airbnb itself has done similar practices in the past where it ignored hospitality regulations to establish their business model, i.e. not asking for permission but for forgiveness.
The Airbnb style response would be to gig-ify this model where you ask an independent contractor to buy the test robot, rent the Airbnb, and test it out instead of you doing it yourself. Then the contractor bears the risk of damages to the property.
> The problem here was that they didn't announce to the host that they are doing a test of their in-development equipment.
I might be okay forgiving skirting the disclosure rules BUT only if they tried to be model tenants and, if there was any damage, took steps to proactively make things right. If you're breaking the rules, even if there was no damage, you should definitely be cleaning up and putting things back in place.
This was my thought. I can understand not wanting to go to the hassle of trying to explain that you're testing an experimental prototype robot to a confused Airbnb owner.
What I find inexcusable is not owning up to the damage and paying to fix it when your prototype goes on a rampage of destruction.
Moving fast and breaking things is fine, as long as you fix the stuff you break...
Even if it is fixable, there are costs involved for the fixing. A broken hotel lamp will sit in a landfill for all eternity.
"Moving fast and breaking things" could be acceptable in cases where there is an ulterior objective whose potential value could be >> these costs, but in general it should be evaluated more carefully.
In a rental unit you should not have things that can’t be replaced. People who rent it will break things, either by accident or purpose (there are always idiots around).
The problem here was that they didn't announce to the host that they are doing a test of their in-development equipment.
I personally think the problem here is that they were delusional enough to think this was the way to 'test' their prototype clean-o-bots. But as you point out (and...sigh...you're spot on on all points), we live in a world where doing things like beta-testing robo-cars in real live traffic is perfectly cromulent as long as you capture market share and outlast the lawsuits and 'disrupt' something.
> Founded by alums of Tesla and the autonomous vehicle company Cruise, the San Francisco startup has received hundreds of millions in venture capital funding and is valued at $2 billion
Stop outsourcing the cost of your vision to the rest of society. Especially when it’s peanuts to you and meaningful to, in this case, the host of what they call an apartment and you seem to think is a test course.
I mean, it's good that they're testing things in different places. Environments vary.
But hundreds of millions sounds like enough money to get some industrial or dead commercial space (even in/around SF) and outfit it to be like an apartment. Or six different ones, and six others two weeks from now, and two weeks after that. The cost of the space and the carpenters/painters/drywallers/handymen/managers/whatevers would seem to be something of such relative insignificance that it doesn't even show up on the budgetary radar.
They want realistic randomness in the apartment layouts. This is a quick, effective way to get that. If they were honest with the hosts, it wouldn’t even be a bad idea.
You don't need that until the very end. They should be modeling many houses first, and they can get that by having employees measure their own house. They should also know something about the edge cases and have a lot of very unrealistic houses modeled.
Then they should have a lab with real furniture and movable walls so they can do controlled real world tests. Once the above tests are done you add confidence with random real world tests.
The types of problems seen here are things that your lab tests should fail and keep you out of real world tests. Particularly when the test subjects don't have some sort of test agreement
Or, just throwing this out there, secretly list their own places and have robots clean up after the guests to evaluate -real places- that have -actually been used-. The key here though is that the places need to be theirs (or at least be a clear contract with the actual owner with full consent and understanding).
A robotics startup at this phase is unlikely to successfully clean an apartment. Usually it’s a lot more about data collection and training. Cleaning an apartment is very hard. The humanoid startup Figure showed their robot moving a few dishes from a nearly empty dishwasher to empty cabinets, and they’re an established company. Actually cleaning is very very hard and the systems are just not very capable yet.
Nobody in this startup landscape gives a shit about anybody or anything that isn’t, at that very moment, contributing to their product development, market share, or raising capital. Even then, they only give a shit if they can’t avoid it and still get what they want. The second they are no longer useful, they’re thrown out like a bag of moldy tangerines. Morally bankrupt “leaders” employing people too inexperienced to know better or too disempowered to change anything.
This is the product of "rugged individualism" so prized of Reagan/Thatcher politics. Thatcher meant exactly this when she said "there's no such thing as society".
I've got mine, you can all go f*ck yourselves.
We need to get back to a place where other people matter, where the implicit social contract is honoured by everyone, and there are consequences for breaking it.
I was watching some midcentury American Prelinger (sp?) archive video where some dapper and devastatingly square professor extolled the virtues of capitalism. Nearly point-for-point, his rationale for capitalism being fair and egalitarian was dismantled starting in the 80s.
No, that wasn't the meaning. In context, the lead-up to the quote was:
> people have been given to understand "I have a problem, it is the Government's job to cope with it!" or "I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!" "I am homeless, the Government must house me!" and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing!
In subsequent years she often invoked society in phrases like "civil society", "free society", and "responsible society". The quote means that government won't help you very much, and indeed that you should be self-reliant. But it would be a distortion to extrapolate that into "be bad and inconsiderate and uncooperative". Individualism doesn't require the individuals to be unpleasant to one another. It just means they aren't an organized collective or hive.
To be frank, nowadays nobody even cares about product fit, if it really works. What matters is creating a narrative compelling enough first to raise capital, then use this capital to create a narrative for a profitable exit. The product itself is secondary.
& “move fast & be antisocial” Bot Co. too. Photograph/video walkthrough the rental beforehand, safeguard antiques/uniques, professionally restore to 100%, nobody ever has to know. Or call host, drop cash.
Make people whole - this is so much easier than your robots, guys.
I don't understand the alternative, that it would be legal to break the law as long as it were a petty crime and you were being paid to do it? It's a principle, it applies broadly. We tend to think about it in terms of the most dramatic and memorable example but that's neither here nor there.
> we should prioritize the people giving the orders
We should. I don’t see an easy way to do that.
I do think there is a straightforward case to be brought against the bookers. So I’m saying start there and then idk have them co-operate against the company.
Nah fuck them both. They went in an left apartments in disarray and didn't give a fuck. That's just basic human decency, regardless of whether or not your boss is a prick too.
They intended to defraud this home owner engaged under contract for their own profit. This wasn't unforeseeable or accidental damage nor due to a misunderstanding on their part.
It's also not a dichotomy. It can be both criminal and civil. Victims always have the right to seek compensation in parallel with criminal punishment.
Another excellent legal statement from The Mafia /s
Aside from the obvious joke, I feel like a lot of people miss that you can pursue BOTH civil and criminal cases for a given crime. If a billionaire murders your spouse you absolutely can sue them for wrongful death. That doesn't preclude them to also going to jail for 20+ years.
It's probably easier to handle as civil negligence. Criminal damage has an intent component. Of course it would hinge on discovery - as soon as you find an email to the effect of "we know this will cause damage, let's test it on someone else's house", that counts as intent.
These bots are going to arrive suddenly and in huge volume. I’m not sure when it will happen, but when it does, it will be extremely fast. The software is basically ready, and the hardware isn’t too far off. The processing latency will be problematic but with local inference improving quickly, this will all come together into the perfect storm for the arrival of the bot army. I don’t think any of us are prepared for it.
No, neither the hardware nor software is anywhere even remotely ready, where by "ready" we mean "safe to share living spaces with unsupervised children and pets without EVER accidentally reducing your toddler to a fine paste, literally a 0% chance". That's the minimum that people will accept, and that's more than ten years away, if it ever happens.
Good news, the current apocalyptic memory prices will mean that only apocalyptically rich people will be able to afford them at the toddler-pasting stage if they come out any time soon!
Both of the preceding comments are true. These things are about to arrive in vast volume, because the factories to build them are already starting to run. And they're nowhere near ready for that.
It took over a decade for Waymo to get from "able to drive around SF for demos" to "3x safer than humans, with thousands of vehicles on the roads".
A lot of these things may end up in closets, next to the VR headset and the 3D TV.
You'd be surprised. I think Waymo have already proven this; not perfectly safe, but below the care threshold. And the demand for childcare is huge. Of course, what then happens is how the ensuing child neglect case falls out.
We're probably going to end up with the situation where the burden "it is considered criminal child endangerment to leave your child alone with the robot" falls on the parents, not on the robot manufacturers.
That's not how product liability laws work in the U.S. or in the E.U.
The first time a child gets harmed by a robot, the company making that robot will go spectacularly bankrupt. If a child gets killed by a robot, it would likely end the consumer robotics industry for a decade or more.
Robot vacuums have been around for a decade now. Some are apparently decent.
Nobody really cares. Robot vacuums are still a single digit % of the vacuum market.
It turns out that saving a few minutes on housework isn't something people are willing to spend thousands, or even hundreds, of dollars on when the cheaper options are more versatile and more robust.
Doubtful these clowns even have commercial insurance for these rentals. What a deceitful and dangerous way to build a business - to save (what?) a few thousand per rental?
It's an interesting approach to the fact that navigation in human spaces is very difficult to generalize, which is probably the main reason that robotics has lagged, say drones.
Pretty disgusting behavior. Total lack of respect for others property. The individuals should be named and shamed for participating rather than putting it under the umbrella of the Bot Company.
If the company ends up having no commercial success and the lawsuits for damages rack up, can they just close the company file for bankruptcy and face no consequences? Or is there some civil or criminal risk to this behaviour?
Officers of the company can be at risk under certain very poorly defined circumstances. Basically, you have to prove that they personally were at fault and were just using the company as a legal cover for their misdeeds.
If this were happening in the real world, they would have to personally back some of the corporate debts before banks would lend them money. But this is Silicon Valley, where banks and VCs just give away money to their buddies.
As a slight hint, one of the more common types of corporation is an "LLC". LLC stands for Limited Liability Company.
If the company's owners had unlimited liability for problems the company caused, that wouldn't be much of an LLC, would it? The primary purpose of an LLC is to make it so that the owners (often the founders) cannot personally be held responsible for debts the company incurs, even debts incurred through their instructions.
This also includes debts caused by punishment for the company breaking civil contracts, but doesn't make individuals who use the company to break the law immune to criminal charges. But the standard of evidence for prosecuting that type of malfeasance is pretty high...
I said the owners can't be held liable, I meant the owners can't be held liable.
You can "in certain circumstances" (negligence, overt criminality...) go after the managers. You probably can't go after the managers for things like producing a business plan they could have plausibly believed was legal and causing the company to incur civil liability.
In the situation described in this article, probably both the owners and the managers (likely the same people!) get away without being held accountable, and the victims have no recompense because the company folds.
LLCs are the limited liability form also most easily subject to veil-piercing (meaning, the courts ignore the limited liability shield to go after the assets of the owners) as most LLCs fail to properly maintain all the technical minutae necessary to actually keep the liability shield in place.
Insufficient capitalization is the #1 reason for piercing the veil (and also works well against corporations). This involves not putting enough investment into a company to pay the foreseeable debts it would incur from its activities. This means: if your LLC incurs debts knowing it lacks the ability to pay them off, the courts can pierce the LLC and go after you.
Usually you just hear about people suing the company, they are easier to collect from. Often they have insurance that will pay out a claim that is faster to pursue than a lawsuit. And if the damages are really large a single employee could go bankrupt. Also because the company is vicariously liable for the actions of their employees in the scope of their duties.
But anyone that personally causes damage through negligence or intentional acts can be sued personally as well. If the employer is bankrupt the employees involved would be the only ones pursued. And these damages are relatively small individually, bankruptcy is not an issue.
Also there are some exceptions to the limited liability for company owners or directors like for illegal activity and fraud.
In a case like this, it would be typical for all possible defendants to be named.
Since the Airbnb bookings were ostensibly made by individuals, most attorneys would also name those individuals (in addition to the company if the company was named).
Having your founders/management/employees rent houses via Airbnb is a really bad strategy for limiting your liability using a company.
Lawsuit results get priority in bankruptcy court and so are still likely to pay out. The exact order varies by country, type of bankruptcy, and I'm not a lawyer. in general when you are bankrupt there is money just not enough and the courts decide who gets it. That money often exists after selling everything (desks, computers, chairs...) even if there is none now. The courts then decide who gets it, court fees, bankruptcy lawyer fees (if reasonable), banks, then the owners. Often the banks will take the company as a whole and put in new management if the business is otherwise good (think plumbers where the business is likely good but they can fail for bad management, tech companies like this they may give up on)
For the record, this is another YCombinator startup...
At some point does morality ever enter the equation, or does YC deliberately go out of its way to select people with utter disregard for the laws or rights of other people?
The fact that this made it to the news cycle is indicative enough of the airbnb owner smelling money once they found out a robotics company is involved, regardless of the extent of damage/wear
Knowing the cost of home ownership, it’s not unlikely to imagine the reported damages are well within what he’s asking. Given that repair work, filing paper with the courts, etc is a major PITA, if this guy was just looking for a payout you’d think he’d ask for a lot more.
This is just the most perfect Silicon Valley microcosm.
How many startups work is they simply break the law. The gamble is that you can get big enough fast enough that you can then lobby for a change in the law before governments catch up. Uber and Airbnb are like the posterchildren for this. Taxi services are regulated. You can't run an illegal hotel in a residential area. Simple.
So what we have here is another company who doesn't want to make a test kitchen or house. No, that's too expensive. So they'll instead use another startup to effectively steal a lab. It's layers upon layers of illegality, basically.
So if this succeeds and this company creates waves of domestic robots, we can then start to imagine what the next layer is. Will somebody rent an Airbnb with domestic robots so it can then sublet those robots to somebody else or use them for tasks they weren't designed for?
This is not Donovan's "home", as the article states. It's his house and rental business. And he was snooping on his guests when he was taking the rubbish bins out and happened to notice cables and people typing on laptops inside the house - which I'm sure is an explicit violation of Airbnb policies.
> Hosts are allowed to have exterior security cameras and recording devices, and are required to make sure their location is disclosed in the listing’s description (ex: “I have a camera in my front yard,” “I have a camera over my patio,” “I have a camera over my pool” or “I have a doorbell camera monitoring my front door and the hallway of my apartment building.”)
> He looked through a window and saw black cables taped to the walls. A man was typing on a laptop sitting next to what appeared to be a robot.
This sounds a lot like criminal invasion of privacy.
Edit: What are you downvoting? You can’t secretly watch Airbnb guests through a window you rented to them for the same reason you can’t put spy cameras in their bathroom.
> The “Peeping Tom” Laws Penal Code 647(j) explicitly states it is not a defense to this charge that the defendant is a cohabitant, landlord, tenant, cotenant, employer, employee, or business partner or associate of the victim.
Here the "reasonable expectation of privacy" is not because they were in the nude, but because they were secretly using your home to test clumsy robots and wouldn't like to be caught.
>Donovan alleges that employees of the Bot Company(opens in new tab) rented his home “under false pretenses” to conduct prototype testing on robots they’re training to do household chores.
>A refrigerator shelf was cracked, and a broken glass or dish had been left in the garbage disposal. A wooden nightstand drawer was chipped. Cups and plates were in the wrong places. It looked like the furniture had been moved around.
Not sure which one is worse, the fact that the bot can't actually do household chore or the fact that the humans can't clean it up.
It's exactly this ethos, the "move fast and break things", and oh, we don't give a fuck about who/what we damage in the process - careless people indeed.
I am someone who came of age during an incredibly hopeful time about how technology could be a force for good. The silicon valley ethos at present is totally morally bankrupt and rotten to the core.
Same. Growing up Gen X, I always thought robots being used for evil would be cool dystopian dictatorships that would try to grind me under its boot but I would resist. Instead it’s just twerps who are so terminally online they can’t fathom other people seem to have feelings.
Now I’m getting even angrier imagining the email that went around internally on how to spin this and why it was a short term loss but will be for the long term good. Of trying to kill off the idea of cleaning people and then jacking up rates.
> I always thought robots being used for evil would be cool dystopian dictatorships that would try to grind me under its boot but I would resist. Instead it’s just
It's... both.
the banality of evil is a recurring theme in human history.
Yes, but I was kinda hoping Hannah Arendt’s lessons had been internalized and we would progress. More the fool I.
One thing that I've been noticing more and more, is that it looks like every dystopic work of art, be it 1984, brave new world or idiocracy, ends up being used as an instruction manual.
So far we were implementing only the first two ones, with AI, it looks like we decided to accelerate Idiocracy implementation too.
Same. The one that cemented it for me is The Matrix is only a quarter-century old, yet some people watched it and thought, "Oooh, good idea!" You can't even complain the context was gone.
It sounds like they cost a couple hundred dollars in damages I’m not sure it damns a whole generation
Well let's get right on that then. If you'd kindly share your address and those of your favorite friends and family, we'll go distribute a couple hundred in damages to each of them.
Where was "a generation" mentioned? The "silicon valley ethos" is not a generational thing.
Cups and plates in the wrong places, the horror!! This generation is cooked. /s
I wonder why that was on the same level of complaints about broken things.
> refrigerator shelf was cracked ... broken glass or dish ... wooden nightstand drawer was chipped
No, this isn't a generational thing, if you don't see the problem with trashing someone's house (let alone doing so to the tune of $12k) that is a comment on your values alone.
But why don't they take the same money and get a cheap industrial unit and build some mock rooms up. Surely it costs the same as hiring and subsequently fixing peoples houses.
If I'm supposed to buy a robot to clean my house, I personally don't want to have to go looking for where the stupid thing has put my cups and plates or whatever whenever it straightens up. I expect there to be a place for all the things and all the things to be put back in place. That's not "er mah gerd the world is ending because millennials am I right!"; that's "your idiot robot can't do the one job I bought it for".
Moving fast and breaking things is fine, as long as you fix them and make things right.
If you break a production server you don't just leave it broken...
I'm assuming these companies have VC cash, so not just paying for repairs and risking negative publicity seems extremely foolish.
No it's not. I hate normalising that approach.
Do things right is where we should be heading.
A good doc on this subject: https://machines.cargo.site/
Move fast and break things is an ethos borne out of the assumption that fixing things is relatively cheap. Hence it made sense in software where experimentation is dirt cheap. But even then, the idea is quite a stretch: ask anyone who worked in a startup who had to sell to even just SMEs, not to mention big conglomerates. The idea hits a hard wall and starts to crack when the business hits a customer who can't fix things for cheap. Even Zuck, father and posterboy of the idea, had to eventually pivot messaging to "Move fast with stable infra".
And the more "software eats the world", the less this paradigm is gonna be a feasible market strategy. I've harbored these thoughts from way back and hence I was (and continue to be) skeptical of unregulated start-ups/new tech ideas who interface with the real world: Hyperloop, Tesla self-driving, and Theranos come to mind. An interesting case study in my view is _Github_ who in theory, having software engineers for customers, should be pretty well-insulated from the expensive repair costs of the real world. And yet we'd all agree they need a GINORMOUS dose of that sweet sweet "stable infra".
> “Sorry :( Did my best!” said a pithy message the group left on a whiteboard on his scuffed-up dining table.
Well, no wonder people don't have faith in the people selling AI.
Love that part. It really illustrates how incompetent these people are. That’s why the need for robots, they are projecting their incompetence on other people!
Also, if this is the best they can do and left such a mess, don’t let them operate robots or any machines! Teach them to use a mop and then maybe upgrade them to a vacuum, and if they pass, let them use a sink garbage disposal under adult supervision.
The were incompetent enough to go to real world testing when these issues would have been obvious from a basic model kitchen test. Obviously their bot is in the very early development stages where it can't do any of the basic things right, they're nowhere near the phase where they needed real world testing. You don't need a real house to tell that your bot keeps damaging furniture, floors, and other items. You iron that out in the lab, then go in a real setup.
And yet they weren't able to build a model house or even just some model rooms for a controlled environment and practice there full time first. They could have done round the clock testing, with full flexibility of the arrangement, no need to waste time moving hardware around and risk damage, no liability, and more. A fake house costs next to nothing. A (fake) model kitchen is cheaper than an Airbnb stay.
Have you seen how many public demos from manufacturers of advanced robots like Boston Dynamics are using "artificial" obstacles and layouts? It's obvious they did a lot of development in those conditions. You don't need someone's home to find out if your robot can grab a plate without destroying it, or climb a flight of stairs.
The company could also test the bots in their employees’ homes for no cost. If employees aren’t comfortable with the bots in their own homes, then they shouldn’t let them loose in others’.
I personally would not want my employer putting anything with an AI or camera inside my home. That would be a non-starter. And I work for a company that uses cameras and compvis.
I don't want any of my personal life observed by my professional life and vice versa. It is bad enough that /I/ have to observe both and try not to pass judgement on myself.
CEO is also an employee and I bet they have second or third homes they would be happy to use to help their company stock price rise.
Also obviously the money is running out when you rush to testing
I think you're right and hope this stunt damages their valuation. As an investor I would have serious doubts about a company which at this stage doesn't have the brain or the money to have a proper development plan and resorts to desperately throwing anything out there, hijacking an Airbnb rental as their lab. That reeks of incompetence, maliciousness, and desperation rolled into one.
I was on the fence about investing in them and ultimately passed on it. Reading the article, glad I did so.
That’s been true of EVERY AI company
I mean I have done this but I'm probably ADHD & Autistic
Tech now believes it should behave amorally
It reaches for people without morals, and instructs them to pursue profit without regard for morality.
I'm very, very, very glad to hear that these people are getting sued.
They should expect to feel a hostile world if they put their every effort into creating a hostile world
The irony is the company is trying to make robots to help clean airbnbs for renter turnovers. Instead they are messing up airbnbs and making them harder to clean before turnovers.
It's fine to make mistakes, that's how you learn. The problem here was that they didn't announce to the host that they are doing a test of their in-development equipment.
So the host wasn't able to add the additional risk and hassle to the price, which in this instance would have been a quite legitimate ask as the robot damaged their revenue generating property.
It's very ironic that Airbnb itself has done similar practices in the past where it ignored hospitality regulations to establish their business model, i.e. not asking for permission but for forgiveness.
The Airbnb style response would be to gig-ify this model where you ask an independent contractor to buy the test robot, rent the Airbnb, and test it out instead of you doing it yourself. Then the contractor bears the risk of damages to the property.
> The problem here was that they didn't announce to the host that they are doing a test of their in-development equipment.
I might be okay forgiving skirting the disclosure rules BUT only if they tried to be model tenants and, if there was any damage, took steps to proactively make things right. If you're breaking the rules, even if there was no damage, you should definitely be cleaning up and putting things back in place.
But that like costs money and/or time.
This was my thought. I can understand not wanting to go to the hassle of trying to explain that you're testing an experimental prototype robot to a confused Airbnb owner.
What I find inexcusable is not owning up to the damage and paying to fix it when your prototype goes on a rampage of destruction.
Moving fast and breaking things is fine, as long as you fix the stuff you break...
> Moving fast and breaking things is fine, as long as you fix the stuff you break...
What? No its not. Breaking things can cause harm that is not always "fixable", particularly if its not your thing to break.
Well, that statement kinda implied what was broken has to be fixable, at least I thought it did.
And what is going to be impossible to fix or replace in a budget !hotel room?
Even if it is fixable, there are costs involved for the fixing. A broken hotel lamp will sit in a landfill for all eternity.
"Moving fast and breaking things" could be acceptable in cases where there is an ulterior objective whose potential value could be >> these costs, but in general it should be evaluated more carefully.
In a rental unit you should not have things that can’t be replaced. People who rent it will break things, either by accident or purpose (there are always idiots around).
> We are backed by Greenoaks, NFDG, Spark, Eclipse, Kleiner Perkins, Y Combinator, and many others who
are too broke to pay for scratched furniture?
You don't need to rent someone else's house to test your robot. These people all live in houses.
Should have signed up for Old Glory Robot Insurance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4Gh_IcK8UM
The problem here was that they didn't announce to the host that they are doing a test of their in-development equipment.
I personally think the problem here is that they were delusional enough to think this was the way to 'test' their prototype clean-o-bots. But as you point out (and...sigh...you're spot on on all points), we live in a world where doing things like beta-testing robo-cars in real live traffic is perfectly cromulent as long as you capture market share and outlast the lawsuits and 'disrupt' something.
> Founded by alums of Tesla and the autonomous vehicle company Cruise, the San Francisco startup has received hundreds of millions in venture capital funding and is valued at $2 billion
Stop outsourcing the cost of your vision to the rest of society. Especially when it’s peanuts to you and meaningful to, in this case, the host of what they call an apartment and you seem to think is a test course.
I mean, it's good that they're testing things in different places. Environments vary.
But hundreds of millions sounds like enough money to get some industrial or dead commercial space (even in/around SF) and outfit it to be like an apartment. Or six different ones, and six others two weeks from now, and two weeks after that. The cost of the space and the carpenters/painters/drywallers/handymen/managers/whatevers would seem to be something of such relative insignificance that it doesn't even show up on the budgetary radar.
They want realistic randomness in the apartment layouts. This is a quick, effective way to get that. If they were honest with the hosts, it wouldn’t even be a bad idea.
Lack of honesty is only one issue. Destroying things, leaving mess and forcing someone else to fix it iw the big one.
And that is very much on brand for these groups.
You don't need that until the very end. They should be modeling many houses first, and they can get that by having employees measure their own house. They should also know something about the edge cases and have a lot of very unrealistic houses modeled.
Then they should have a lab with real furniture and movable walls so they can do controlled real world tests. Once the above tests are done you add confidence with random real world tests.
The types of problems seen here are things that your lab tests should fail and keep you out of real world tests. Particularly when the test subjects don't have some sort of test agreement
Or, just throwing this out there, secretly list their own places and have robots clean up after the guests to evaluate -real places- that have -actually been used-. The key here though is that the places need to be theirs (or at least be a clear contract with the actual owner with full consent and understanding).
A robotics startup at this phase is unlikely to successfully clean an apartment. Usually it’s a lot more about data collection and training. Cleaning an apartment is very hard. The humanoid startup Figure showed their robot moving a few dishes from a nearly empty dishwasher to empty cabinets, and they’re an established company. Actually cleaning is very very hard and the systems are just not very capable yet.
Nobody in this startup landscape gives a shit about anybody or anything that isn’t, at that very moment, contributing to their product development, market share, or raising capital. Even then, they only give a shit if they can’t avoid it and still get what they want. The second they are no longer useful, they’re thrown out like a bag of moldy tangerines. Morally bankrupt “leaders” employing people too inexperienced to know better or too disempowered to change anything.
This is the product of "rugged individualism" so prized of Reagan/Thatcher politics. Thatcher meant exactly this when she said "there's no such thing as society".
I've got mine, you can all go f*ck yourselves.
We need to get back to a place where other people matter, where the implicit social contract is honoured by everyone, and there are consequences for breaking it.
I was watching some midcentury American Prelinger (sp?) archive video where some dapper and devastatingly square professor extolled the virtues of capitalism. Nearly point-for-point, his rationale for capitalism being fair and egalitarian was dismantled starting in the 80s.
which itself seems to have been just a ruse:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=QTcL6Xc_eMM
No, that wasn't the meaning. In context, the lead-up to the quote was:
> people have been given to understand "I have a problem, it is the Government's job to cope with it!" or "I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!" "I am homeless, the Government must house me!" and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing!
In subsequent years she often invoked society in phrases like "civil society", "free society", and "responsible society". The quote means that government won't help you very much, and indeed that you should be self-reliant. But it would be a distortion to extrapolate that into "be bad and inconsiderate and uncooperative". Individualism doesn't require the individuals to be unpleasant to one another. It just means they aren't an organized collective or hive.
To be frank, nowadays nobody even cares about product fit, if it really works. What matters is creating a narrative compelling enough first to raise capital, then use this capital to create a narrative for a profitable exit. The product itself is secondary.
There'd be loads of people with rough houses they're about to renovate who'd take payment to allow you to test a robot.
tbqh the airbnb owners are also outsourcing the externalities of short term rentals to make a quick buck. It's outsourcing all the way down
Two wrongs don't make a right.
Indeed, but they do make a pretty compelling schadenfreude.
> Stop outsourcing the cost of your vision to the rest of society.
They won't because that's a fundamental principle of the model they believe in.
> Founded by alums of Tesla
Learned from the best of them, I see.
Modern tech culture is a blight on society.
Well said. Unfortunate anyone would necessitate the Airbnbanhammer, and the lawsuits, but could be important tools here.
Scamming homeowners out of relative peanuts is super cringe. Everyone looks bad:
- Employees - Management - Investors - Previous companies listed
& “move fast & be antisocial” Bot Co. too. Photograph/video walkthrough the rental beforehand, safeguard antiques/uniques, professionally restore to 100%, nobody ever has to know. Or call host, drop cash.
Make people whole - this is so much easier than your robots, guys.
> Founded by alums of Tesla
That tracks.
The only way to stop this is for charges to be brought against the employees who made the bookings under false pretenses.
Why the employees? Do you think they were operating without direction from their managers?
If we want to put a stop to this sort of behavior from businesses we can't be punishing employees for this behavior, we have to run it up the chain.
You are, in fact, allowed to hate both the player and the game. It is long established that "just following orders" is not a defense.
I don’t know if the concept of the Nuremberg defense is really applicable to, you know, basic property damage.
Really?
You might want to ask most contractors, or contract lawyers, about that.
"I was just following orders" for basic property damage typically doesn't hold up in court for them either.
I don't understand the alternative, that it would be legal to break the law as long as it were a petty crime and you were being paid to do it? It's a principle, it applies broadly. We tend to think about it in terms of the most dramatic and memorable example but that's neither here nor there.
I'm not saying it should be, but I am saying we should prioritize the people giving the orders
> we should prioritize the people giving the orders
We should. I don’t see an easy way to do that.
I do think there is a straightforward case to be brought against the bookers. So I’m saying start there and then idk have them co-operate against the company.
Nah fuck them both. They went in an left apartments in disarray and didn't give a fuck. That's just basic human decency, regardless of whether or not your boss is a prick too.
What, superior orders? Of course we need to punish both.
Why should this be criminal and not civil?
They intended to defraud this home owner engaged under contract for their own profit. This wasn't unforeseeable or accidental damage nor due to a misunderstanding on their part.
It's also not a dichotomy. It can be both criminal and civil. Victims always have the right to seek compensation in parallel with criminal punishment.
Another excellent legal statement from The Mafia /s
Aside from the obvious joke, I feel like a lot of people miss that you can pursue BOTH civil and criminal cases for a given crime. If a billionaire murders your spouse you absolutely can sue them for wrongful death. That doesn't preclude them to also going to jail for 20+ years.
It's probably easier to handle as civil negligence. Criminal damage has an intent component. Of course it would hinge on discovery - as soon as you find an email to the effect of "we know this will cause damage, let's test it on someone else's house", that counts as intent.
so, so close to having people legitimately and earnestly start saying "we don't serve their kind here" while gesturing to humanoid robots
Human only "safe spaces" will be a thing. Where they draw the line will be the question.
These bots are going to arrive suddenly and in huge volume. I’m not sure when it will happen, but when it does, it will be extremely fast. The software is basically ready, and the hardware isn’t too far off. The processing latency will be problematic but with local inference improving quickly, this will all come together into the perfect storm for the arrival of the bot army. I don’t think any of us are prepared for it.
No, neither the hardware nor software is anywhere even remotely ready, where by "ready" we mean "safe to share living spaces with unsupervised children and pets without EVER accidentally reducing your toddler to a fine paste, literally a 0% chance". That's the minimum that people will accept, and that's more than ten years away, if it ever happens.
Good news, the current apocalyptic memory prices will mean that only apocalyptically rich people will be able to afford them at the toddler-pasting stage if they come out any time soon!
Meanwhile, there's a tired mom of triplets who's wondering "how fine? (a paste)"
Both of the preceding comments are true. These things are about to arrive in vast volume, because the factories to build them are already starting to run. And they're nowhere near ready for that.
It took over a decade for Waymo to get from "able to drive around SF for demos" to "3x safer than humans, with thousands of vehicles on the roads".
A lot of these things may end up in closets, next to the VR headset and the 3D TV.
You'd be surprised. I think Waymo have already proven this; not perfectly safe, but below the care threshold. And the demand for childcare is huge. Of course, what then happens is how the ensuing child neglect case falls out.
We're probably going to end up with the situation where the burden "it is considered criminal child endangerment to leave your child alone with the robot" falls on the parents, not on the robot manufacturers.
That's not how product liability laws work in the U.S. or in the E.U.
The first time a child gets harmed by a robot, the company making that robot will go spectacularly bankrupt. If a child gets killed by a robot, it would likely end the consumer robotics industry for a decade or more.
The software is not basically ready. You’ll see actually good demos long before it’s really ready, and we haven’t seen them yet.
Robot vacuums have been around for a decade now. Some are apparently decent.
Nobody really cares. Robot vacuums are still a single digit % of the vacuum market.
It turns out that saving a few minutes on housework isn't something people are willing to spend thousands, or even hundreds, of dollars on when the cheaper options are more versatile and more robust.
If the morally bankrupt SV techs aren't careful, the line will be "Shoot the damn things on sight", and then there will be a bounty on them.
The billionaires will still be mostly served by humans, probably former SWEs as the oligarchs will find all this situation amusingly entertaining.
Of course, the're will be a few robot dogs patrolling the fences and hidden behind closets on the rare occasions the servants decide to rebel.
Southwest Airlines just banned humanoid robots on their flights.[1]
[1] https://aeronauticsmagazine.com/news/no-robots-allowed-south...
Move fast and break other people’s things?
Doubtful these clowns even have commercial insurance for these rentals. What a deceitful and dangerous way to build a business - to save (what?) a few thousand per rental?
Good. Fuck AirBNBs
It's an interesting approach to the fact that navigation in human spaces is very difficult to generalize, which is probably the main reason that robotics has lagged, say drones.
Pretty disgusting behavior. Total lack of respect for others property. The individuals should be named and shamed for participating rather than putting it under the umbrella of the Bot Company.
Moral issues aside, this is a pretty clever way to get a wide variety of training data
Can any lawyer clear this up for me?
If the company ends up having no commercial success and the lawsuits for damages rack up, can they just close the company file for bankruptcy and face no consequences? Or is there some civil or criminal risk to this behaviour?
Did an individual or the company rent the Airbnb?
From the article it sounds like an individual did.
Hmm? Airbnb isn't on the hook?
Officers of the company can be at risk under certain very poorly defined circumstances. Basically, you have to prove that they personally were at fault and were just using the company as a legal cover for their misdeeds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piercing_the_corporate_veil
If this were happening in the real world, they would have to personally back some of the corporate debts before banks would lend them money. But this is Silicon Valley, where banks and VCs just give away money to their buddies.
As a slight hint, one of the more common types of corporation is an "LLC". LLC stands for Limited Liability Company.
If the company's owners had unlimited liability for problems the company caused, that wouldn't be much of an LLC, would it? The primary purpose of an LLC is to make it so that the owners (often the founders) cannot personally be held responsible for debts the company incurs, even debts incurred through their instructions.
This also includes debts caused by punishment for the company breaking civil contracts, but doesn't make individuals who use the company to break the law immune to criminal charges. But the standard of evidence for prosecuting that type of malfeasance is pretty high...
> primary purpose of an LLC is to make it so that the owners (often the founders) cannot personally be held responsible for debts the company incurs
It’s more so investors who aren’t involved in day-to-day decision making can invest without worrying that the founders will create liability for them.
This. You can still go after management in certain circumstances
I said the owners can't be held liable, I meant the owners can't be held liable.
You can "in certain circumstances" (negligence, overt criminality...) go after the managers. You probably can't go after the managers for things like producing a business plan they could have plausibly believed was legal and causing the company to incur civil liability.
In the situation described in this article, probably both the owners and the managers (likely the same people!) get away without being held accountable, and the victims have no recompense because the company folds.
LLCs are the limited liability form also most easily subject to veil-piercing (meaning, the courts ignore the limited liability shield to go after the assets of the owners) as most LLCs fail to properly maintain all the technical minutae necessary to actually keep the liability shield in place.
Insufficient capitalization is the #1 reason for piercing the veil (and also works well against corporations). This involves not putting enough investment into a company to pay the foreseeable debts it would incur from its activities. This means: if your LLC incurs debts knowing it lacks the ability to pay them off, the courts can pierce the LLC and go after you.
Usually you just hear about people suing the company, they are easier to collect from. Often they have insurance that will pay out a claim that is faster to pursue than a lawsuit. And if the damages are really large a single employee could go bankrupt. Also because the company is vicariously liable for the actions of their employees in the scope of their duties.
But anyone that personally causes damage through negligence or intentional acts can be sued personally as well. If the employer is bankrupt the employees involved would be the only ones pursued. And these damages are relatively small individually, bankruptcy is not an issue.
Also there are some exceptions to the limited liability for company owners or directors like for illegal activity and fraud.
In a case like this, it would be typical for all possible defendants to be named.
Since the Airbnb bookings were ostensibly made by individuals, most attorneys would also name those individuals (in addition to the company if the company was named).
Having your founders/management/employees rent houses via Airbnb is a really bad strategy for limiting your liability using a company.
Lawsuit results get priority in bankruptcy court and so are still likely to pay out. The exact order varies by country, type of bankruptcy, and I'm not a lawyer. in general when you are bankrupt there is money just not enough and the courts decide who gets it. That money often exists after selling everything (desks, computers, chairs...) even if there is none now. The courts then decide who gets it, court fees, bankruptcy lawyer fees (if reasonable), banks, then the owners. Often the banks will take the company as a whole and put in new management if the business is otherwise good (think plumbers where the business is likely good but they can fail for bad management, tech companies like this they may give up on)
For the record, this is another YCombinator startup...
At some point does morality ever enter the equation, or does YC deliberately go out of its way to select people with utter disregard for the laws or rights of other people?
The fact that this made it to the news cycle is indicative enough of the airbnb owner smelling money once they found out a robotics company is involved, regardless of the extent of damage/wear
This kind of simping is surely indicative of something.
Eh? This sort of corporate misbehaviour would obviously make the news; it’s both scummy and just bizarre. That makes for good news.
Knowing the cost of home ownership, it’s not unlikely to imagine the reported damages are well within what he’s asking. Given that repair work, filing paper with the courts, etc is a major PITA, if this guy was just looking for a payout you’d think he’d ask for a lot more.
This is just the most perfect Silicon Valley microcosm.
How many startups work is they simply break the law. The gamble is that you can get big enough fast enough that you can then lobby for a change in the law before governments catch up. Uber and Airbnb are like the posterchildren for this. Taxi services are regulated. You can't run an illegal hotel in a residential area. Simple.
So what we have here is another company who doesn't want to make a test kitchen or house. No, that's too expensive. So they'll instead use another startup to effectively steal a lab. It's layers upon layers of illegality, basically.
So if this succeeds and this company creates waves of domestic robots, we can then start to imagine what the next layer is. Will somebody rent an Airbnb with domestic robots so it can then sublet those robots to somebody else or use them for tasks they weren't designed for?
If it can clean a kitchen, it can cook meth. Probably.
"Move fast and break other people's things."
Did the host leave them fresh-baked cookies and an open invitation to "hang out"?
That guy definitely fucks that robot, right?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7sd_yhc8IY
Yeah.
This is not Donovan's "home", as the article states. It's his house and rental business. And he was snooping on his guests when he was taking the rubbish bins out and happened to notice cables and people typing on laptops inside the house - which I'm sure is an explicit violation of Airbnb policies.
> Hosts are allowed to have exterior security cameras and recording devices, and are required to make sure their location is disclosed in the listing’s description (ex: “I have a camera in my front yard,” “I have a camera over my patio,” “I have a camera over my pool” or “I have a doorbell camera monitoring my front door and the hallway of my apartment building.”)
https://www.airbnb.com/help/article/3061
How could seeing people in a house from a public area possibly be an explicit violation of policies?
They turned off his security cameras so he went to take a look. At least that's the impression I got.
I'm a little surprised he didn't knock and ask to go in.
> He looked through a window and saw black cables taped to the walls. A man was typing on a laptop sitting next to what appeared to be a robot.
This sounds a lot like criminal invasion of privacy.
Edit: What are you downvoting? You can’t secretly watch Airbnb guests through a window you rented to them for the same reason you can’t put spy cameras in their bathroom.
Sounds like looking though a window.
> You can’t secretly watch Airbnb guests through a window
Systematically? No. Casually? Of course you can. Why wouldn’t you be allowed to?
These aren’t corporate landlords, after all.
> The “Peeping Tom” Laws Penal Code 647(j) explicitly states it is not a defense to this charge that the defendant is a cohabitant, landlord, tenant, cotenant, employer, employee, or business partner or associate of the victim.
https://kelmanskylaw.com/crimes/peeping-tom-law-pc-647j-ca/
Here the "reasonable expectation of privacy" is not because they were in the nude, but because they were secretly using your home to test clumsy robots and wouldn't like to be caught.
$13,000 in damage you say? Where have I heard that number before... [1]
Keep it real, Kyle. It doesn't seem like you learned anything from the failure of your last company.
[1] https://weartv.com/news/local/report-pensacola-woman-charged...
$12,383.50
Which is below the CA 12,500$ limit for small claims court.
Haven't checked whether the case was brought to small claims, but that'd be my guess.