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Think through robot-training jobs and your work

Dimensional pays people to steer robot dogs around San Francisco so the robots can learn to walk alone. Work out what jobs like this mean for you.

By Alan Brown

Video cover: This company pays $20 an hour to walk a robot dog

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🐕🤖 This company will pay you $20 an hour to walk a robot dog.

🏢 It's called Dimensional, a San Francisco startup that has bought more than 100 robot dogs and 50 humanoid robots.
🎮 Walkers steer a $2,000 Unitree robot dog along the sidewalk for 4–6 hours. No experience is needed, and the pay matches walking a real dog.
📷 While you steer, its cameras and sensors record the walk, so the robot can learn to navigate the city without you.
🔥 The catch: if it overheats, you carry the 15 kg robot back to the office.
🏭 The goal: robots for factories, data centres, construction sites and security. Robot dogs also patrolled stadiums at the 2026 FIFA World Cup.
📰 The New York Times report, via The Star: www.thestar.com.my/tech/tech-news/2026/10/28/wanted-robot-dog-walkers-us20-an-hour

Context & limitations

Dimensional's own tests found AI still steers worse than humans, which is why it pays people. The prompt below helps you think about what this means for your job.

Do this yourself

Help me think through how "robot training" jobs could affect my work. Context: a San Francisco startup called Dimensional pays people $20 an hour to steer robot dogs on 4–6 hour walks, while the robot's cameras and sensors record the walk so it can learn to navigate on its own. First, ask me one question at a time: 1. What my job is and the main tasks I do in a normal week. 2. Which of those tasks are physical, repetitive, or follow the same route or steps each time. Then give me: - A table of my tasks, rating each one: easy for a robot or AI to learn from recordings, hard, or not realistic yet, with one sentence on why. - Two or three skills I could build that make me the person who trains, checks or runs these systems rather than the person replaced by them. - One concrete thing I could do this month. Check current sources for real examples, and say clearly where you're guessing. Don't overstate what robots can do today.

Paying people to teach robots is becoming a real job category. Thinking through which parts of your own work could be recorded and learned the same way helps you plan before it happens to you.

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