Shift will clean homes for free to train future robots

106 pointsposted 10 hours ago
by evilsimon
(theverge.com)

158 Comments

necubi

9 hours ago

Better this than the Bot Company, which has been apparently renting out AirBnBs for robot testing and leaving them trashed: https://sfstandard.com/2026/05/28/sf-startup-secretly-testin...

darth_avocado

33 minutes ago

Actually shift should just partner with Airbnb. Airbnb takes out the cleaning fee from the app, customers benefit, owners get a free cleaning service, Airbnb wins, Shift wins. And if Airbnb invests in Shift, even better.

fmbb

6 hours ago

Seems like there is some synergy to be found here!

cogogo

7 hours ago

Move fast, break things

zeafoamrun

3 hours ago

Like your favorite lamp.

Garlef

an hour ago

Isn't Airbnb 99% commercial nowadays? Who would leave their fav lamp in there?

mcmcmc

9 hours ago

I mean is it? At least the AirBnB owner has some recourse, any attempt to fight exploitation from “free services” goes nowhere

giwook

9 hours ago

The article specifically mentions at least one property owner who has been denied any recourse because of the lack of before/after photos (presumably before that specific rental).

somewhatgoated

an hour ago

How do you rent out your place and don’t take any photos before?

bathtub365

an hour ago

I’m sure Airbnb operators get comfortable turning it over every few days without having to constantly take photos. Most guests don’t bring robots in to smash up the dishwasher and dent the walls

kylehotchkiss

7 hours ago

At least the AirBnB owners got paid to have their homes mutalated by robots

ceejayoz

7 hours ago

If they’re suing, that seems to be insufficient.

Among other issues, it likely causes knock-on problems for tomorrow’s reservations.

bluGill

8 hours ago

After thinking about this for a while, I'm not sure it really happened. It wouldn't surprise me if the house was not trashed, just a landlord manipulating evidence when they think they can make money in court. There is no particular reason to trust either side and we have not seen what evidence really exists. In particular the reporters didn't do a good job of digging in - at the very least where is the response from the Bot Company?

archonis

7 hours ago

Who needs occam's razor when you've got a mobieus shaped breadknife?

MadnessASAP

2 hours ago

A company operating above board would be sure to carefully document the state of the rental before and after whatever work they were doing. Any tradesperson/installer/technician/repair person will have tales of how they were accused of stealing grandmas wedding ring from the bottom of the sock drawer while repairing a leak in the kitchen.

So either Bot Company damaged property and is trying to pretend they didn't. Or they are incompetent and failed to document the state of the property or handle the owners complaints appropriately.

Given that their training robots and would therefore be collecting as much data as possible, including camera data, I'm leaning towards malice instead of ignorance.

ChoGGi

7 hours ago

Could be a greedy landlord, but they did turn off his security cameras, so I'm giving him the benefit of doubt for now.

stbtrax

6 hours ago

I don't entirely doubt the landlord but the bizzarre part is the landlord showing up to take their trash and then somehow finding bundles of wires inside the unit. Why would an airbnb host enter the unit to take trash?

MobiusHorizons

5 hours ago

That’s part of the process of resetting a property for the next reservation. It’s not bizarre, it’s literally what Airbnb landlords do (or sometimes hire other people to do, but that lowers margins)

chrisweekly

5 hours ago

"Why would an airbnb host enter the unit to take trash?"

Not every airbnb host has a professional cleaning staff, and some of those who do may sometimes wish to check the status of their property. I don't find anything strange, let alone "bizarre".

fragmede

4 hours ago

Mid visit though?

jcgrillo

2 hours ago

Does the un-regulation cut both ways? A landlord usually needs to notify tenants 24hr in advance if they're going to enter the property. Does an AirBnB host need to follow any similar rules? It's not like the renters have a lease, it's not their residence.. Do they have any rights to privacy or notice at all?

maxbond

3 hours ago

They said they saw the wires through the window. Presumably they didn't enter the unit.

TZubiri

3 hours ago

I read that the host took the trash, which was outside the house, and through the window he saw the cables and the man with the laptop.

janalsncm

5 hours ago

> The Bot Company did not respond to requests for comment

hsnv

9 hours ago

I've always found the idea of letting strangers clean my home strange. Maybe I grew up in the wrong tax bracket.

I see cleaning your own home, as well as other chores (dishes, laundry) as an act of self-hygiene. If you want a robot to do your chores, that gives me the same feeling as desiring a robot to bathe you, wipe your bottom and genitals after the toilet, brush your teeth for you etc.

Of course these are not apples to oranges, but I can't shake the feeling that you lose something about being a living, breathing being when you give up these mundane chores.

BeetleB

an hour ago

> brush your teeth for you

aka electric toothbrush

> wipe your bottom and genitals after the toilet

aka a bidet (or a toilet seat with a bidet)

> robot to bathe you

aka a shower

> dishes

aka a dishwasher

> laundry

aka a washer

If you want to do stuff yourself, use a manual toothbrush, learn how to wash your own clothes without a washer (people do this all the time, BTW), wash your own dishes without a dishwasher, don't use dry cleaning services, and use a bucket to take a bath. Also, don't use a vacuum cleaner.

> but I can't shake the feeling that you lose something about being a living, breathing being when you give up these mundane chores.

Say that when you have 3 kids, and cook most of the meals (i.e. no takeouts).

trollbridge

6 hours ago

A robot that could wipe after using the toilet (admittedly fairly easy with modern-day powered bidets), clean someone up, help them shower, etc. would actually be a really big deal for care of the elderly. Currently this is a job a human has to do.

It would allow elderly to regain a certain amount of independence. Often they start having trouble with just 1 or 2 of these tasks, but then a home health aide is needed or they have to get put in a nursing home. The cost of this kind of care is $5000 - $20k a month. So there's a lot of money on the table for a good robot.

robots0only

6 hours ago

Any robot that does this reliably is easily more than a decade away.

falcor84

5 hours ago

Did you mean that to sound distant? Because my reading is that if we have robots reliably doing these sorts of delicate tasks in a decade or two, it would be amazingly revolutionary and disruptive to the economy.

somewhatgoated

an hour ago

A decade for this kind of robot seems very optimistic. The latest one being prototyped in Japan can roll you on your side and help you out on socks.

Cleaning your ass or helping you shower is magnitudes more sensitive and complex

VladVladikoff

4 hours ago

As long as it hits before my kids have to wipe my elderly ass I’m golden.

cmrdporcupine

an hour ago

I mean, they kind of owe it to us.

I changed a lot of diapers.

taneq

an hour ago

It depends, really.

dopidopHN2

2 hours ago

If only there was some type of social network for taking care of each other at différent stage of life!

NikolaNovak

9 hours ago

I don't think it's a tax bracket thing, or even necessarily a culture/upbringing thing --> I was brought up white-collar working middle class -ish (Eastern European middle-class, which probably doesn't map cleanly to North American middle class; buying a bottle of coke was a Birthday thing), but then was refugee from a civil war for a while, with the appropriate tax bracket. And my grandma certainly instilled much of the same sense in me :)

Thing is, today, as an adult, I'm painfully aware that I'm mortal and life is limited and time is the most precious resource available to me. I'm not religious so I don't believe in after-life reward for being a good boy either. So I'm a little bit more mindful / little less self-flagellating, than I used to be, about these things.

For myself in particular:

* Yes, I shower and wipe my own bottom :)

* I am the dishes and laundry queen in my family, though I definitely use laundry machine (curious where that would fit in your matrix btw? :)

* I don't mind the act of lawn mowing but I absolutely resent the randomness of it - at some point north american society decided that we/they will 1. Adopt a very specific fast growing grass for ALL the lawns and 2. Having it more than ~5cm long is an affront to man and god and neighbourhood alike. Why they haven't just culturally picked cloverleaf or something is beyond me

* I like organizing my living space but I get zero sense of satisfaction out of vacuuming, dusting, and general maintenance. Many other people love it! In turn though, they probably get zero need to constantly rearchitect their home network like I do :->

In sum - I personally put laundry machine and auto-vacuum in very different category than showers and wiping bottoms, but if you lump them together, much power to you, though I don't think it's a tax bracket thing necessarily :)

ryandrake

8 hours ago

The way I see it is: My time is worth $0 unless I'd otherwise be earning money.

So if you're an hourly contract worker, and you would otherwise be billing $100/hr to write code or something, then it makes sense to pay a gardener to mow your lawn and a plumber to fix your toilet, as long as it's less than you're making.

But instead, if you'd otherwise just be doom scrolling on your phone or jerking off, you might as well mow that lawn yourself. Paying someone any amount of money is a waste.

I pretty much DIY everything around the house. I work hard for my money, and it feels lazy and wasteful to just ship it off to someone else to do what I am fully capable of doing myself. Maybe when I'm 80 and have trouble walking, I'll pay someone to move furniture around or wash my roof. But not while I'm able bodied.

JoshTriplett

6 hours ago

> But instead, if you'd otherwise just be doom scrolling on your phone or jerking off, you might as well mow that lawn yourself. Paying someone any amount of money is a waste.

It sounds like you're saying "pay someone to save you time if you use the time to work, but not if you use the time to relax". One of the best possible uses of money is to save you time, no matter what you use the time for.

SoftTalker

2 hours ago

Mowing the lawn relaxes me. I find it meditative, and at the end I look back at the neatly cut grass and can see what I've done. It provides a sense of satisfaction. It's also a good excuse to get off my ass for a couple of hours and get a little exercise.

appreciatorBus

3 hours ago

That assumes there is no value whatsoever in doing your own chores. If you want to value time w/friends & family over chores, fair enough, but doing chores is definitely a better & more valuable use of time than zoning out tik tok or gambling etc.

taneq

29 minutes ago

Do you not effectively put a dollar value on things you do for entertainment / personal satisfaction / fulfillment? Pick any two activities, and you can probably identify a dollar amount (which might be infinite) that would induce you to do one rather than the other.

So let's say you're playing a video game, and someone asks you to mow their lawn. How much money would they have to offer you to induce you to do so? That's the marginal dollar value of that video game over mowing their lawn.

Or let's say you're playing a video game, and you need to mow your own lawn, but you don't want to. How much would you pay someone else to mow it so that you can keep playing your game?

Of course, those two amounts would be different because you probably feel differently about mowing your own lawn than about mowing someone else's. The difference between the two should (if you're being consistent, which humans seldom are) be how much would someone have to pay you to mow their lawn instead of your own.

elzbardico

3 hours ago

I used to be like you. One day I found out that my oldest daughter was almost 18, and my youngest one was already 13. I wish I had paid someone to have mowed that fucking law more times and played more time with my kids, spent more time with my wife.

Trying to fix it now. But the time I've lost already, this time is gone.

SoftTalker

2 hours ago

Kids need to see adults taking care of their responsibilities and not living a life of playtime.

taneq

27 minutes ago

There needs to be a balance, not all-or-nothing in either direction.

bluGill

8 hours ago

I have a bidet to help wipe my bottom... It isn't enough that I can skip wiping completely, but it greatly reduces that chore.

I sometimes dream of being rich enough to afford a servant to do this for me. But realistically even if I was that rich I wouldn't subject someone to that indignity.

BeetleB

an hour ago

> brush your teeth for you

aka electric toothbrush

> wipe your bottom and genitals after the toilet

aka a bidet (or a toilet seat with a bidet)

> robot to bathe you

aka a shower

> dishes

aka a dishwasher

> laundry

aka a washer

If you want to do stuff yourself, use a manual toothbrush, learn how to wash your own clothes without a washer (people do this all the time, BTW), wash your own dishes without a dishwasher, don't use dry cleaning services, and use a bucket to take a bath. Also, don't use a vacuum cleaner.

jrmg

9 hours ago

I thought the same until we started getting our house cleaned every two weeks.

It’s so freeing.

It feels well worth even a few hours of my work to pay for the time of the (so efficient) cleaners. So much better value than things most people don’t think twice about paying for (streaming services, faster Internet, a nice car, etc…)

nlh

8 hours ago

I'll take it one step further - we have a 2-year-old toddler and recently I realized that I was spending a full, solid, real 1-1.5 hours per day doing the same kitchen & play area clean-up. Every day. No matter how hard I tried, the daily chaos of my wife & I working from home, preparing meals, and our family spending time in this part of the house meant it just needed this work.

I hired a lovely person recently who comes to the house for exactly that hour a day every day and now does this task for us. It's the most "luxury" labor service I've ever hired, and it, easily and without question, the best use of $$ I have ever spent on a service. I have an extra hour to hang with the family now and our kitchen & play area are now fully reset and spotless every night when we go to bed and every morning when we wake up.

It's not streaming service cheap, and I'm thankful that my business can generate enough $ to allow me to pay for this service, but man is it freeing and wonderful.

SoftTalker

2 hours ago

The real cause is that you and your wife never learned how to keep house. I'm in the same boat. My house is cluttered. Not like hoarder bad but stuff just piles up. I've been a guest where the house is always neat and everything is put away. The hosts just never let anything get out of place. Everything they own has a place and it always goes back there immediately after its used. They maintain this organized well kept home almost effortlessly, because they were taught how to do it at a young age by parents who were the same way. Whereas for me, it would take me several dedicated hours a day to get everything picked up and put away.

bayarearefugee

7 hours ago

I can see the charm in hiring a cleaning person you trust, but I personally wouldn't extend that to paying a faceless corporation to send a robot to do it.

I'd much rather pay a nice human significantly more money than have it done by a stinking robot.

ShowalkKama

9 hours ago

>If you want a robot to do your chores

you mean like a dishwasher or a washing machine?

Lammy

8 hours ago

You are confusing letting a machine make decisions about what needs to be done with using a machine to remove toil from the things I have decided.

ehsankia

3 hours ago

No? The only different between these robots and a washing machine is that in theory, the robot is generalist and can do many tasks, whereas a washing or laundry machine can only do one task. You can still in theory fully control what task the robot works on. Also, in theory, the robot would be the glue between all the other machines, like filling up the washing machine, then moving it to the dryer, etc. It deciding what to do isn't a "prerequisite" for the robot.

bluGill

8 hours ago

I'm sure when these came out someone was thinking that they think about what stains to remove.

MattGaiser

4 hours ago

I guess I am mostly intrigued that those lists would differ greatly with respect to cleaning.

userbinator

5 hours ago

For me, it's the invasiveness and lack of agency; your house is the most private space in your life. At least if I do the cleaning myself, there won't be anyone else to blame for things broken or gone missing.

sailfast

7 hours ago

I would love for a robot to wipe me after using the toilet - and I have a washlet for this!

It’s not about tax bracket. You can still pay your cleaning folks a reasonable wage and be kind to them. You can still treat them like human beings. It’s vulnerable to have another person tidy up after you, but fine in the end. Turns out vacuuming isn’t really that personal.

It’s one thing to have NEVER done the mundane chores and entirely another to save some time in your day while you’re at work to have someone help with it.

lostlogin

7 hours ago

This got disturbing pretty quickly. Scatology meets HN.

cucumber3732842

6 hours ago

It's like the family guy episode:

"Dad we're putting you in a nursing home"

"I don't wanna"

"Dad, there's people where who'll wipe your ass for you"

"Louis pack your things"

hansonkd

9 hours ago

In general once or twice a month cleaners aren't hired to "tidy up", they deep clean.

a bit like the difference of brushing your teeth and going to a hygienist.

ramses0

3 hours ago

Housekeeper. House Cleaner.

The first organizes things and may do the laundry or put away groceries or something. I wouldn't know for certain, as my income doesn't yet reach to those heady heights.

The second vacuums, mops, cleans bathrooms, etc.

SoftTalker

2 hours ago

But, to have a House Cleaner, you must do the Housekeeping.

House Cleaner is not going to vacuum around your piles of dirty laundry.

sublinear

9 hours ago

I think the point still stands for the type of nerd on HN.

Deep cleaning isn't that hard and, for now, it's relatively inexpensive. There are still only a handful of products where price gouging has occurred due to influencer marketing.

All that needs to happen is another "Tide Pods" type of incident for Amazon to ban commercial cleaning supplies or anything with an SDS. Of course we make the robots do dirty work in this future, and boom you've got another form of surveillance threatening the 4th amendment.

"What's the matter bro? Tryin' to clean up a murder scene or what? huh huh huh"

signatoremo

5 hours ago

You are the minority - [0]

According to that article:

- The global cleaning services market is predicted to grow to roughly $482 billion in 2026 and $859 billion by 2030 with a 7.5% annual growth rate.

- There are over 1.4+ million cleaners currently employed in the U.S.

- The U.S. janitorial services market is worth $112 billion, with 1+ million cleaning businesses as of 2026.

- The average annual pay for a cleaning business owner in the U.S. is $127,973 a year.

- The average annual salary for a house cleaner in the U.S is $35,034.

- 73% of cleaning business owners expect revenue growth in 2026.

- 55% of cleaning businesses raised prices in the last 12 months.

- 41% of households use recurring cleaning services, as customers shift from one-time bookings to weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly plans.

[0] - https://www.getjobber.com/academy/cleaning/cleaning-industry...

not_a_bot_4sho

5 hours ago

> You are in the minority ... 41% of households use recurring cleaning services ...

Wouldn't that put OP in the majority?

quietbritishjim

4 hours ago

If 41% of households are actively employing a cleaner then it seems very likely that more than 50% would be happy to have their home cleaned if only they could afford it (as opposed to the commenter starting this thread, who seems to see household cleaning as a positive part of their life).

yen223

3 hours ago

How big of a bubble do you have to be in to be thinking "I like cleaning" is the majority position among normal people?

ian_holt

2 hours ago

Unfortunately, we seem to lose more than we really gain, much of the time. Often it is 'sold' to us as 'convenient' but, I suspect, more often than not we don't gain that much

fhub

3 hours ago

I outsource a bunch of things in life. Different things at different stages of life. Some of those things I have outsourced I don’t dislike doing myself. But often it comes down to freeing up time and, to some extent, keeping money flowing back to people in my community.

derektank

4 hours ago

I would absolutely purchase a robotic tool that brushes my teeth for me. I’m sure it would be much better I am at cleaning my teeth. I already use an electric toothbrush and a waterpik for exactly this reason.

dnnddidiej

5 hours ago

Not everyone has the time or energy to do it. I estimate 10-20 hrs of chores a week for 2 adults 2 kids. Having cleaners is a nice touch when both parents work.

reaperducer

9 hours ago

Maybe I grew up in the wrong tax bracket.

I knew a middle-aged waitress who had a cleaning woman come in every week or two.

After being on her feet for 10 hours dealing with jerks in a diner six days a week, she was too tired to do more than basic cleaning. The price was well worth it to her.

bluGill

7 hours ago

The real question isn't how much money you have when in the middle class, it is what will you give up. I have hired cleaners and I love the time savings, but it isn't worth it to me so I almost never do.

joenot443

6 hours ago

Do you consider a dishwasher to be a robot that does your chores?

jcgrillo

2 hours ago

About as strange as letting someone else work on your car. Some people can do it without any discomfort. Could not be me.

TZubiri

3 hours ago

Presumably they feel more empowered, like an elephant must feel when a flock of birds are grooming them.

somethoughts

7 hours ago

It would seem like such an obvious win-win if these cleaning robotics companies just won a couple of contracts with some tech forward hotel chains.

  - Faster R&D since hotel rooms are regular/familiar
  - Cost center for hotels so revenue would be higher/straightforward
  - No privacy issues since robots would not be present in rooms with guests
  - Easier servicing/maintenance since multiple robots at same location

tikhonj

7 hours ago

My guess is that they're currently nowhere near robust or effective enough to make that realistic. They need to bootstrap somehow, if only get good enough to convince hotel management that their approach will be realistic in the future.

ASalazarMX

6 hours ago

This is my take too. Hotels wouldn't be happy if a robot knocked a water jar on the carpet, or scratched a wall, but a home owner? We're doing it for free and you asked for it!

Hotel's girl management might be more undertanding than I assume, though.

thalesac

5 hours ago

in that case they could operate the robots remotely just like self driving cars sometimes

ForHackernews

6 hours ago

>girl management

autocorrect glitch?

tikhonj

6 hours ago

Haha, yes, meant to write "hotel management". I'll update the answer to fix that.

throwaway85825

6 hours ago

Basically every AI startup promises the world instead of descoping to something that is achievable and profitable. Easier to scam investors than make a working product.

woah

6 hours ago

These guys may actually just be angling to sell off the training data. diverse training data is more valuable

adrianmonk

3 hours ago

Also, cleaning kitchens is a huge part of the job. Hotel rooms either have no kitchen or a very minimal one. You're not going to learn how to clean an oven or load a dishwasher in a hotel room. (And loading a dishwasher requires categorizing thousands of things as dishwasher safe or not! Stainless steel skillet, yes; cast iron skillet, no; etc.)

bruhlikereally

4 hours ago

Yeah, this seems like a much more likely option. Get a ton of good, completely unique scans of real world environments you could never replicate in testing and even if your product sucks and you fail entirely, you’ve got a really good dataset to sell to a big company that’s close on a product and needs data to enhance/refine on.

bruhlikereally

4 hours ago

Does not make any sense for them since it’s not a unique environment. You could rent one hotel room or build a cheap replica and get all of your training done in one shot. They’re obviously trying to hit unique environments with many different unforeseen obstacles to overcome.

oidar

3 hours ago

> Does not make any sense for them since it’s not a unique environment.

nonsense. If it worked for one hotel, that would be ground breaking. Hotels would line up to have theirs be the next test case.

fmbb

6 hours ago

I’m not sure it can ever be cheaper than a human cleaner so maybe the hotel industry does not want to subsidize the training.

aleyan

9 hours ago

"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

pinkmuffinere

8 hours ago

> 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

6 hours ago

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.

pinkmuffinere

an hour ago

> Modern robots are nowhere near being bottlenecked by hardware. They are all bottlenecked by AI.

It is possible for both elements to be insufficient.

yoyohello13

8 hours ago

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.

switchbak

7 hours ago

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

enraged_camel

2 hours ago

I believe most robo vacuums have lidar and other sensors. They don't have cameras.

QuercusMax

6 hours ago

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

6 hours ago

I feel like a self host will be too expensive for most (like self hosting frontier models at a decent speed)

Jordan-117

5 hours ago

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.)

autoexec

8 hours ago

> 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.

lobf

7 hours ago

>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.

c0balt

7 hours ago

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

5 hours ago

>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.

autoexec

7 hours ago

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

5 hours ago

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?

autoexec

3 hours ago

They were at least thinking about it a year ago (https://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/waymo-toyota-automated-dr...) and maybe it will happen someday but I consider the fact that it hasn't happened as evidence that the technology isn't ready. At the very least it's a sign that car companies don't want to invest in enough Filipino "drivers" to let everyone pretend that their personal car is driving itself ( https://www.techspot.com/news/111233-waymo-admits-autopilot-...)

I'm not sure there would even be a market for a much more expensive vehicle that can't drive itself outside of the very small number of carefully mapped out and managed zones they are currently capable of operating in. Maybe in another 10-20 years we'll see some progress but for right now they're still working out how to tell the difference between a flood and a puddle which is a huge problem and only one of countless others they haven't addressed yet while they continue to beta test on a small number of our public streets.

This isn't splitting hairs, it's technology not living up to promises that were being hyped over 10 years ago. In 2012 it was "Everyday folk will have access to cars that drive themselves within five years" (https://www.computerworld.com/article/1526480/self-driving-c...) but nobody today has access to a real self-driving car and even those who live in an area waymo supports aren't your average person, they are the very very small exception to the entire rest of the country (to say nothing about the rest of the world).

olyjohn

8 hours ago

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.

Avshalom

5 hours ago

robots can not yet plausibly walk into our homes.

Henchman21

7 hours ago

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.

pjmlp

25 minutes ago

Everyone is trying to make it possible, without thinking if they actually should.

I wonder how they expect people to work, to be able to buy all the junk they put out.

rglover

8 hours ago

Ha! My wife just asked me about a random job she found on Craigslist the other day. It was for what looked like a shell company, offering $10/hr to have you strap a camera to your head while you do specific chores like laundry, dishes, etc. She asked me what I thought it was and I said "someone is farming training data." Turns out.

falcor84

5 hours ago

Well, either that, or a fetish.

lenerdenator

3 hours ago

Honestly, given the potential impact on the job market, the fetish is far more honorable.

lucaspiller

3 hours ago

If training robots doesn't pan out, they could always pivot and use the data to train AI to control humans instead. Some industries such as Amazon warehouse pickers and drivers are effectively already this.

https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

LowLevelKernel

3 hours ago

Who is funding this? Can I wear that cap and clean my own house and get paid if I share the video?

mrbluecoat

22 minutes ago

"Shift will break dishes for free to train future robots"

deweywsu

7 hours ago

And so it begins; even the blue collar jobs aren't safe.

AlexandrB

8 hours ago

Lol, not a chance. I'm sure whatever agreement you click through when you agree to this has all kinds of limitations on liability and an arbitration clause, so when they leave pictures of your house in an open S3 bucket you have no recourse to seek compensation. I'd rather let a stranger off the street live in my house - at least they have human emotions like shame.

jdubs1984

3 hours ago

Shift will file for bankruptcy

sonofhans

9 hours ago

”We get training data.” E.g., photos of your children, an inventory of your books, the contents of your medicine cabinet. They may not have plans to sell this stuff, but whoever acquires them certainly will.

autoexec

9 hours ago

Exactly and any "future robots" that are actually capable of cleaning your home will be doing the same thing. It'd be streaming 24/7 audio/video/sensor data of everyone and everything in your home back to the company where all of it will be analyzed and used to make assumptions about you and your family which will be sold and resold.

At this point I wouldn't allow an internet connected roomba into my home, I'm sure as hell not going to let a robot maid in.

slicktux

9 hours ago

I’m a little more hopeful that the future will allow for local (network free) frontier AI technology. Being that I’m a tech enthusiast and computer science nerd I tend to live less on the bleeding edge of technology because of privacy infringing hardware. Take for example meta glasses. So many people have adopted them because they don’t care about privacy as much as I do. So they get to live with the latest and greatest. Though, running a local LLM on my laptop (that is state of the art) has made me a little more hopeful that the future is around the corner. Who would have thought that one day we could run advanced AI on a laptop that’s able to do RAG and CAG.

autoexec

8 hours ago

I fully agree that the only hope is offline/open source systems that we can verify are working for us and not anyone else. The more complex the hardware is the more difficult it'll be to keep them safe. To avoid bugging my home it's easy enough to open up my PS5 controllers to pull the two microphones out, but I imagine it'll be a lot more work to make sure there are no radios connected to a SoC tucked away somewhere in a household robot.

I'm not sure I'd call meta glasses the "latest and greatest". Even if there were no privacy concerns I wouldn't feel left out when it comes to giving facebook the ability to plaster ads on every surface in your field of vision. The tech has a lot of potential, but the product people are using today is trash I feel better off without.

Bender

8 hours ago

I think an interesting case would be if the data was provided to law enforcement directly or indirectly and they use it to gain access to a home if they see drug paraphernalia crack pipe or other items of interest illegal weapons under exigent circumstances or similar laws. Autonomous robots could become the ultimate snitch.

Would a robot report a wife beater? Child abuser? Could a robot legally physically intervene if a human cries for help from another human? Will the robots be hacker proof? Will robots assassinate people in their sleep?

autoexec

8 hours ago

Considering we already have Apple wanting to scan your devices for whatever their AI thinks is child porn we're heading in that direction. There was one report of Amazon Echo reporting a domestic violence situation to 911. The Sheriff said that it happened, Amazon said that it didn't but failed to explain how the 911 call happened saying that the echo isn't even capable of calling 911 although it can place phone calls, and Alexa Emergency Assist and Echo Connect are/were both capable of reaching 911. (https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/amazon-alexa-c...). If one of those services wasn't in use, I'd guess an employee was listening and called putting amazon into damage control mode.

Bender

7 hours ago

My thought process around such things is that tech follows the same rules as the pirate code. Tech will do what tech can do until executive bonuses are repeatedly impacted. As such I think it's best to just keep that stuff away from humans and homes until laws and case law evolves or devolves into whatever it will ultimately become.

I submitted a poll [1] on this and a few people here would permit these bots in their homes. I also asked people in my local community and their answer was a resounding no.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48302523

bluGill

8 hours ago

They might for a while. However it is somewhat likely that the courts will shut this down as an unreasonable search since no probable cause existed. Though if the beating is bad enough to require hospitalization and the robot calls 911 to get that, the rest of the evidence will be admitted in that case, but only because the robot has reason to call 911, and in turn it was an emergency search.

there are lots of different ways to take this, have fun arguing about the different edge cases and what the constitution (notice that I did not specify which constitution - there are many countries with different ones and different courts!) says.

catapart

9 hours ago

I wonder how long it will be before we see politician/celebrity houses with full 3d walkthroughs made from gaussian splats that source from this kind of "every type of interior in the world" mass data set. I wonder if that will prompt some kind of legislative action against this type of service.

ljsprague

9 hours ago

There’s a scandal/controversy occurring right now after someone leaked photos of the inside of Ariana Grande’s apartment.

catapart

8 hours ago

yikes! that's pretty gross. I hope there's some appropriate consequences.

m463

9 hours ago

Slum lords will love this between renters. or airbnb owners.

Even though it is free, they could even take it from the deposit of renters moving out.

charcircuit

7 hours ago

I would prefer that $0 for cleaning gets taken out of my deposit.

TZubiri

3 hours ago

>"hey may not have plans to sell this stuff, but whoever acquires them certainly will."

If accquirer acquires, it's because seller sold.

micromacrofoot

8 hours ago

they don't need photos, they already know everything you buy

doctorpangloss

8 hours ago

your photos of your kids, your books, and the contents of your medicine cabinet are already in a bunch of giant corporations' databases attributed to you...

2OEH8eoCRo0

9 hours ago

Finally a reason to display my Mega Butt VHS tape prominently in my library.

plagiarist

9 hours ago

Shift will record a point cloud of every object in your home for free.

p1esk

10 hours ago

Where do I sign up?

Barbing

9 hours ago

NYC ZIP codes only: shiftapp.nyc/book

And since it's humans they probably won't do all that damage like in the other thread today ("SF startup is testing robots in Airbnbs, and trashing them, lawsuit claims"): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48317093

fortran77

8 hours ago

I'm not bothered by a lot of tech that other's object to. I'm fine with having an Alex in my house, a connected car, Microsoft Windows. But I can't imagine consenting to _this_. There's too much personal data the can inadvertently collect, and too little oversight with little upside for me.

sublinear

9 hours ago

> As its website puts it: “You get a spotless apartment. We get training data. Everyone wins.”

I don't really agree in certain cases of apartment cleaning.

I learned a lot with my first one bedroom apartment, and I wouldn't trade that experience for anything. There's a fine line between luxury/convenience and laziness/helplessness.

It doesn't really sit right with me even though I do think a proper science fiction cleaning robot can become a great thing.

asdff

9 hours ago

This is true for most AI solutions. "Automate the note taking/slide generation communication." Turns out that stuff is important for building understanding. Yeah, making slides might be boring. But what you are really doing is telling the story of what you are actually working on, and in making these slides, you can shore up any plot holes or other issues. Likewise for writing, learning to synthesize information and tell it again helps build your understanding of the problem space. Likewise for notetaking keeping you more engaged with whatever it is you are documenting.

All this delegating leads to real atrophy of understanding. No one wants to admit it though. Certainly not the people whose salaries depend on not admitting it.

Mezzie

4 hours ago

This would be great for me.

I have MS. Currently, my sister lives with me and does the chores (I pay our bills), but she's planning on moving out soon.

Paying for a human cleaner is doable but expensive for me, and my disability means keeping up with chores can be difficult or dangerous. For example, I have balance issues that can make using a ladder or stepstool dangerous.

It's less that I'm lazy and more that I don't want to crack my head open + there are multiple times a year when all I can do is work and rest in bed.

jcgrillo

2 hours ago

> Footage from inside your home is, of course, what you’re paying for the cleaning service with. On its website, Shift says customers’ “privacy is fully protected,” with sensitive details like names, faces, or personal information from screens and ID cards blurred and anonymized before being used for AI training.

OK, but do they store the footage in such a way that it's not tied to my physical address? This dataset is useful in one particular way--to identify valuable targets to rob. When they get hacked, will the attackers be able to exfiltrate these data in an actionable way? I don't get why folks don't ask the obvious questions. The company's answer to this question (probably involving lots of squirming and weasel words) would have made the story interesting.

EDIT: <facepalm>these are probably the people who have an amazon alexa, a google nest, a ring door lock, an app to remote start their car, and another app to control their oven</facepalm>

mmmlinux

9 hours ago

Are these the same people that were renting airbnbs and wrecking them using them to train their robots?