Wanted: Robot-Dog Walkers. $20/Hour

A San Francisco start-up called Dimensional offered $20 an hour to people willing to walk robot dogs around city sidewalks for four to six hours. The job was not pet care but data collection: walkers steered the machines while their cameras and sensors recorded how they moved through an urban environment. The roughly $2,000 Unitree robots could be controlled by remote or phone, but they sometimes stopped when their equipment overheated, leaving walkers to carry the 33-pound machines back to the office. The unusual job captured a central irony of automation: robots intended to spare people physical labor still need people to guide, monitor and sometimes haul them.

Dimensional’s founder, Stash Pomichter, is developing an operating system that could let artificial-intelligence agents direct robots to do real-world tasks, from moving heavy objects to working in factories and providing security. The dog-walking trial showed that AI agents performed much worse than humans at controlling the machines, so people remain essential “in the loop.” The company has also tested a robot dog as an overnight office patrol that alerts Pomichter when it detects someone. Such uses are already emerging in settings like apartment security, where a remote human monitors a robot’s camera. The effort has drawn both curiosity and alarm: one local resident accused the company of preparing weapons and sent threatening messages, prompting Dimensional to contact police.