"I always thought that Homejoy were planning to automate as much as possible, if not everything, related to cleaning services using robotics and stuff, and that humans were only a temporary measure while developing technology." -devgutt 2015 [0]

This quote about robots doing home cleaning has been living in my head rent free, and refusing to cleanup after itself, for over a decade. It seemed so crazy to me in 2015 that anyone would seriously consider home cleaning robots to be on a realistic timeline. Yet here we are in 2026 and robots could plausibly clean our homes beyond vacuuming and mopping.

Humans training robots now completely makes sense to me. I think Sunday Robotics use of people wearing "skill capture gloves" [1] that both capture data and limit range of motion to that of the robotic hands is particularly clever. I wish success to both these and other companies in the space, so that someday soon there will be just a little fewer housework around the house, and we move a bit closer to the Jetsons.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9986693 [1] https://youtu.be/QeVnwtCANZ8?si=JoSps5MCxs7zPp0f&t=33

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pinkmuffinere 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> here we are in 2026 and robots could plausibly clean our homes beyond vacuuming and mopping.

It is very bold to just assert this is true. Certainly it will be possible eventually, but there's still _lots_ of disagreement in the industry about what is realistic within 3-5 years. See this rodney brooks article for a good overview of the difficulties: https://rodneybrooks.com/why-todays-humanoids-wont-learn-dex...

The fact that devgutt was talking about this in 2015 gives some hint at its unique combination of [seems really easy] and [is really hard].

	▲	ACCount37 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That article is a load of baloney, and I wish people stopped posting it around as if it's some kind of gospel. Modern robots are nowhere near being bottlenecked by hardware. They are all bottlenecked by AI. Today's hardware with perfect AI would absolutely demolish tasks like "clean a house". Today's AI with perfect hardware would still fumble. We know that because we can't even train an AI policy that would reliably solve tasks in a sim with perfect sensors and perfect execution.

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yoyohello13 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I used to be really excited for stuff like this. Now I realize, home cleaning bots will basically just be cameras in your house reporting back everything it sees to the advertisers/government. Not a very utopian outlook anymore.

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switchbak 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Robo vacuums are already doing this. What a time to be alive and all that.

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Jordan-117 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Not to mention it directly targets a job category overwhelmingly held by poor and marginalized women, especially immigrants, in order to boost the profits of the automation company and the hotel chains it serves. Destroying the livelihoods of some of the most vulnerable and exploited workers on the planet with no pretense of caring what happens to them or their families.

Any company like this actively working to liquidate entire categories of menial work with no tangible support for sufficient social safety net programs and retraining is both sociopathic and digging its own grave for the inevitable populist backlash against what's shaping up to be the biggest class war in history. It's too broad a change, too fast, and these companies are running society off a cliff with no care for what happens when gravity kicks in. (Apart from the techno-fascists who plan on bunkering down while crushing the desperate masses with surveillance and killer robots, ofc.)

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QuercusMax 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

At some point you're gonna be able to self host this stuff, which will likely be required for security reasons in some kinds of facilities. Now whether it's open and not spying on you still, that's another question.

	▲	dnnddidiej an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I feel like a self host will be too expensive for most (like self hosting frontier models at a decent speed)

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autoexec 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> It seemed so crazy to me in 2015 that anyone would seriously consider home cleaning robots to be on a realistic timeline. Yet here we are in 2026 and robots could plausibly clean our homes beyond vacuuming and mopping.

I don't think that they can plausibly clean our homes. I don't think it's much different from back in 2015 when everyone was talking about self-driving cars and auto-pilot yet here we are over a decade later and nobody is getting into their car and then taking a nap on the way to the office. Most people don't have any kind of "self-driving" car today at all. My guess is that if we have housecleaning robots in 2036 they'll be shitty at it and very much watered down from the Jetsons style future tech companies want you to daydream about today.

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lobf 3 hours ago | parent [-]

>nobody is getting into their car and then taking a nap on the way to the office.

Except that you can do exactly this with Waymo for the last 2 years.

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c0balt 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You can iif you live in on of the supported cities that is not currently suspended. Waymo is a promising participant here, but it very much isn't at the "just be driven to work stage" for almost everyone.

	▲	lobf 31 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		>You can iif you live in on of the supported cities that is not currently suspended. Yes. The claim was that “nobody” is doing this today when in fact tens / hundreds of thousands of people are doing this today. The tech is here, next is widespread adoption.

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autoexec 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Not "their car" and also extremely limited in availability and has remote drivers taking over when needed. We're not in the future just yet

	▲	lobf 30 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		The claim was that “nobody” is doing this. It’s weird to split hairs on whether or not the own the car. Who cares if you’re napping in a driverless vehicle on the way to work?

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olyjohn 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The Jetsons, where we polluted the Earth so badly, we had to live above the clouds. But at least we won't have to pick up our clothes.

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Avshalom 21 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

robots can not yet plausibly walk into our homes.

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Henchman21 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The Jetsons wrecked their world. All housing was on stilts. Flying cars were a necessity because there were no roads, only water. They melted the poles!!

All I’m saying is careful what you wish for. Wish fulfillment is always outsourced to the Djinn.