Abstract:
On October 28, according to the New York Times, a start-up company in San Francisco issued a strange recruitment notice earlier this month. It is recruiting people to walk its robot dogs. No experience is required, and the hourly salary is US$20 (about 133 yuan).
U.S. company recruits robot dog walkers
The hourly wage for walking a robot dog is about the same as walking a real dog, but the robot dog needs to spend more time wandering around on the sidewalks of San Francisco to complete its daily tasks such as "peeing and defecating". The job posting states that each dog walk will take four to six hours.
The job posting has since been deleted. It was posted in the Bay Area Careers Facebook group by a startup called Dimensional. Interestingly, this company happens to be located in a neighborhood in San Francisco called Dogpatch.
The job posting attracted only a handful of comments, none of which found it strange. “My son was interested and could start working right away,” one mother wrote, but later said her son never actually took the job.
Recruitment Notice
Dimensional founder Stash Pomichter said that the company is developing an open source operating system for robots. The 26-year-old hopes to embed AI agents into robots so that consumers can command robots to complete tasks in the real world, just as people give instructions to services such as Meta agent Muse to let them complete tasks for them online.
Pomichit firmly believes that people should be able to command robots to lift heavy boxes and carry various items. "To be honest, humans are still doing these physical jobs. It's so primitive." He said in an interview.
Why walk a robot dog?
However, before robot dogs can save humans the trouble and embarrassment of carrying groceries, Dimensional still needs to improve the robot's autonomous navigation capabilities so that it can move on its own in urban environments. Therefore, companies need to hire robot dog walkers.
By controlling and guiding a robot dog named RoboFido, they generated what Bomichte calls "ground truth" for the robot. At the same time, the cameras and sensors on the robot dog recorded the entire dog walking process.
After seeing someone walking down the street with a four-legged mechanical "pet", a resident lamented that San Francisco is really a strange city, and it is getting weirder. The resident also provided a video to The New York Times.
Dimensional is not a hardware company. Bomichte said that the company has purchased more than 100 robot dogs and 50 humanoid robots from manufacturers in the United States, China and Germany, and is developing an operating system that can be integrated with AI agents to allow these robots to act more autonomously.
Yushu Robot
This month, the company’s robot dogs, which are sent for walking by people, cost US$2,000 each and come from the Chinese company Yushu Technology. These robot dogs can be controlled by a handheld remote control or mobile phone application when they leave the factory.
Dimensional compared the walking performance of robot dogs under human control and AI agent control, and found that the latter's performance was still unsatisfactory.
“What we found from the dog-walking experiment is that agents are still very poor at controlling hardware,” Pomicht said, “and humans still need to be involved.”
Dimensional aims to enable robots to work in factories, data centers and construction sites, or as security guards. Already, similar applications are emerging: A robot dog patrols an Atlanta apartment complex, with a human operator participating remotely in the Philippines. The robot is essentially a mobile security camera for remote human observers.
Pomichit said he has programmed a robot dog to patrol Dimensional's warehouse-like office at night. He gave the robot the prompt, "You are the best police dog in the world," and asked it to track anyone who entered the building after midnight.
If the robot dog detects someone, it will send a text message to Pomidget. He can then check the surveillance video to determine whether the visitor is an employee who is eager to work overtime or a stranger who breaks in without permission.
Robot dogs are roaming the Dogpatch community this month, but not everyone is amused. Dimensional hopes to give AI agents a physical body in the real world.
But at the same time, more and more people are beginning to worry that more powerful AI may try to kill humans. This Terminator movie-style horror association has angered one man. He went to Dimensional's offices and later sent a disturbing text message to a company employee, claiming that the robot dogs would be used as weapons. In a text message seen by The New York Times, the man wrote: "Have fun helping you massacre innocent bystanders, you scumbag." Dimensional later reported the incident to the police.
Pomichit said: "We may have to deal with more things like this in the future. By then, we may need more patrol robot dogs."
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