San Francisco Startup Pays $20 an Hour to Walk Robot Dogs for 4 to 6 Hours. If the Robot Gives Out Mid-Walk, You Carry It Home: All 33 Pounds.

The future of work is here, and in San Francisco it looks like walking a robot dog for four to six hours at a time.

A startup called Dimensional posted a job listing in a Bay Area jobs group on Facebook offering $20 an hour to walk its four-legged robots around the city. No robotics experience needed, paid training included. The listing has since been deleted.

There is a catch that every real dog owner will understand: sometimes the dog refuses to keep going. The robots can overheat or stop working mid-walk, and the listing said walkers had to be comfortable safely handling equipment weighing about 33 pounds, because you carry it back.

Back where? To the company's office, which is located, perfectly, in San Francisco's Dogpatch neighborhood.

The founder says the point is data. The human walkers steer the robots while their cameras and sensors record the route, to teach AI how to move through a real city. He told The New York Times their tests showed AI agents are still very bad at controlling the hardware, so humans are still needed.

The robot dogs reportedly cost about $2,000 each. No word on whether they need to stop at every fire hydrant.