Robots Will Free Us From Physical Labor. First, Somebody Has to Carry the Dog Home.
SAN FRANCISCO — The future of labor has four legs, onboard cameras and artificial intelligence. It also needs a human being willing to carry it back to the office when it gets too hot.
San Francisco robotics startup Dimensional advertised a job paying $20 an hour to walk robot dogs through city streets, turning one of technology’s grand ambitions — machines doing difficult work for people — into a position where people occasionally haul around the machines.
The assignment involved four to six hours of walking. No robotics experience was necessary.
A reasonably strong back, however, could prove useful.
The advertisement warned applicants that they needed to be comfortable handling equipment weighing about 33 pounds. If a robot overheated and stopped, its human companion could be responsible for bringing it home.
On the positive side, nobody needed a poop bag.
The now-deleted listing appeared in a Bay Area jobs group on Facebook. Dimensional operates in San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood, giving the undertaking a geographical appropriateness that almost seems suspicious.
The machines used in the walking experiment were approximately $2,000 robot dogs made by Chinese manufacturer Unitree. Operators could steer them using a handheld controller or mobile application.
Their purpose was not exercise, companionship or teaching an electronic Labrador to stop attacking the vacuum cleaner.
The walks were a data-gathering exercise. Human operators guided the machines while cameras and sensors recorded their surroundings and movements. Those demonstrations could help developers improve how robots navigate independently.
That distinction matters. A machine that can walk when a person directs it has not necessarily learned to decide where to go, how to respond to an obstacle or when to stop.
Dimensional founder Stash Pomichter said early experiments exposed the gap.
“What we determined from our dog-walking experiment was that agents are still very bad at controlling hardware,” he told The New York Times.
In other words, the artificial intelligence still needed adult supervision.
The company’s larger ambition is an open-source operating system that helps AI agents control robots performing physical work. The sidewalk excursions are part of that effort, not evidence that the machines are already ready to take over the neighborhood.
Dimensional’s software, called dimOS, is designed to connect AI instructions with different kinds of robotic hardware, including four-legged machines, humanoids and robotic arms.
Its public documentation also describes remote-operation tools that allow people to control robots through a browser or a virtual-reality headset.
That creates an important distinction for anyone watching a robot confidently march past a coffee shop: Its apparent independence does not tell you how much human assistance is involved.
A robot can be physically present on the sidewalk while a person elsewhere supplies the decisions. Dimensional’s tools explicitly accommodate that kind of remote control alongside its work on AI-driven operation.
The eventual goal extends well beyond mechanical pets. Reported applications include factories, construction sites, data centers and security patrols — places where robots might carry loads or perform repetitive physical tasks.
Before that happens reliably, developers must contend with ordinary hardware problems as well as software: batteries run down, equipment overheats and machines encounter situations their training did not adequately cover.
The humans walking alongside them provide examples of how to navigate the real world. They are also conveniently available when the equipment stops navigating altogether.
There is a serious engineering project underneath the comic image. Human-guided testing can reveal weaknesses before a machine is entrusted with more consequential work.
For the worker earning $20 an hour, however, the immediate arrangement is considerably simpler.
Walk the robot. Help train the robot. If necessary, pick up the robot.
Someday, it may carry your groceries.
Today, you may be carrying it.
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