Startup Pays Humans $20 an Hour to Walk Robot Dogs, Finally Revealing Who the Real Pet Is

The future arrived in San Francisco this month on four legs, and it needed a ride home.

Dimensional, a startup based in the city's Dogpatch neighborhood, because of course it is, posted a job in a Bay Area Jobs Facebook group on Oct. 5 seeking people to walk robot dogs for $20 an hour. No robotics experience required. No poop bags required. Just four to six hours beside a $2,000 machine that still can't find the corner by itself.

The ad promised, "Start right away and get paid right after each completed shift. Paid training is included." Paid training to walk a dog is the most Silicon Valley sentence ever written. Somewhere, a golden retriever is calling a labor lawyer.

There was one physical requirement. Applicants had to be comfortable handling equipment weighing about 33 pounds, because the robots sometimes overheat or simply stop working and must be carried back to the office. So it is dog walking, except the dog plays dead for real and you are the ambulance.

This is the great promise of automation. For a century we were told machines would carry us. Instead we carry the machines, up San Francisco's hills, at $20 an hour, while a tourist films it for a video captioned "late-stage capitalism, but make it Labrador."

Founder Stash Pomichter explained the lesson with admirable honesty: "What we determined from our dog-walking experiment was that agents are still very bad at controlling hardware." Then came the sentence that belongs on every venture capitalist's license plate: "And humans are still needed in the loop." The loop, it turns out, is a leash.

The walkers steer with a remote while cameras and sensors record the trip, so the AI can learn how a human walks a sidewalk. What it will learn is to stop at every coffee shop, stare at its phone at crosswalks and sigh at scooters. In ten years the robots will be fully autonomous, and every one of them will walk like a tired 29-year-old on a gig shift.

Dimensional has bought more than 100 robot dogs and 50 humanoid robots from manufacturers in the U.S., China and Germany. That is either a research fleet or the first act of a movie where the humanoids eventually hire the dogs to walk the founders.

The dogs come from Chinese maker Unitree at about $2,000 apiece, which means a walker earns the price of one robot after 100 hours of walking it, and the robot still won't recognize them. A real dog at least pretends to love you for a biscuit. These ones want a firmware update and some shade.

Dimensional is building dimOS, an open-source operating system meant to let AI agents control robots with plain-language instructions. Someday you will say "fetch," and a 33-pound machine will fetch. Today you say "fetch," and a human fetches the machine.

The job post has since been deleted, which is the startup version of a dog hiding behind the couch after eating a shoe.

So yes, the robots are coming for our jobs. They just need someone to carry them there.