I enjoy cooking, so it's not much value to me to have a robot cook my meals, even if it cooks the food I like. But, I'm not going to insist that EVERYBODY can or should just cook their meals. I know MANY MANY people hate cooking or don't have time for it. Even getting decent groceries is a chore many people would rather avoid. Cooking and eating at home usually means either wasting money on disposable dinnerware, or somebody spending the time to scrape the dishes/load the dishwasher/empty the dishwasher. Even that bit of cleanup dissuades people from cooking at home. So, MANY people end up spending a lot more money on either buying mostly pre-made meals, or living off junkfood, or getting unhealthy fast food, or getting take-out, or going to sit-down restaurants.
We know there is a market here -- many people would love to have more home cooked meals just to avoid expensive and/or unhealthy restaurant meals. We know many people use services like "Hello Fresh" just to short-cut the home cooked meal process. We know many people pay ~25% extra for each item, plus fees and a tip just to have Instacart or other services do their shopping and deliver their groceries.
Okay, now imagine that there's a family of 4 or 5 people. A robot becomes available that can pick up their groceries (via self driving car or robotaxi?), and then come home and cook 3 meals a day for the entire family, and clean all the pots and pans and dinnerware afterwards. Again, far far future stuff. Yes, Imagination
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Okay...now, in todays dollars, a $20K robot paid off over the course of 5 years costs about $350 a month.
For a family of 4 or 5, how many avoided restaurant meals does it take to save $350/month? No, it's not going to work if you're replacing dollar-menu fast food restaurant meals with fillet mignon cooked at home....but good, healthy home meals cooked from basic ingredients are remarkably inexpensive relative to most restaurant faire.
Now, keep in mind that same robot can also potentially do the laundry and put the clothes away after. Mow the lawn. Trim the trees. Wash the cars. Make the beds. Dust the house. Vacuum. Clean the windows and mirrors. Scrub the toilets. And, of course, "etc." so you can maybe think of some chore that you either don't enjoy doing, or that you might currently pay for as a service.
Of course this is all "first world" stuff. No starving family living in a dirt floor hut is going to get one of these bots...but maybe in this same far future, we won't have so many suffering people in the world.
My examples also rely on some sort of an idealized group (family, friends, whatever) that lives together. Obviously, this robot has zero value to somebody that lives alone and is perfectly happy with a filthy living space while they game all day and subsist on energy drinks, chips, and multivitamines.
And of course, this is just personal use...since that's what the above conversation was about. Businesses will order up robots to fill many roles. Even just sticking to the "daily food" subject, restaurants would similarly replace waitstaff, cooks, and the cleaning crew with robots.
And since it gets brought up repeatedly...yes, robots replacing people at jobs might put many people out of work...but Elon has long pointed out that the definition of an economy would necessarily change, and something like "Universal Basic Income" will likely be needed. But, again, far future imagining here. The fact that today's political scene would implode isn't the point.
