”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

  today at 8:10 PM

  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.

  • Bender

    today at 8:57 PM

    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

      today at 9:16 PM

      Considering we already have Apple wanting to scan your devices for whatever their AI thinks is child porn we're heading in that direction already. 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. (https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/amazon-alexa-c...).

  • slicktux

    today at 8:26 PM

    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

      today at 8:58 PM

      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.

• catapart

  today at 8:05 PM

  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

    today at 8:40 PM

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

    • catapart

      today at 9:16 PM

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

• m463

  today at 8:41 PM

  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.

• janice1999

  today at 8:26 PM

  ... and also share those images with dozens of companies and potentially have those images leak online. Example: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/photos-robot-roomba-vacuum...

• whodidntante

  today at 8:26 PM

  The Audacity of these people

• 2OEH8eoCRo0

  today at 8:02 PM

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

Even if somehow this was a good idea, it seems like an expensive way to do it when apparently in they are already doing it for much cheaper in India.

https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/26/human-archive-taps-into-in...

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...

• mcmcmc

  today at 8:13 PM

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

  • giwook

    today at 8:26 PM

    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).

"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

  today at 9:14 PM

  > 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].

• yoyohello13

  today at 8:56 PM

  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.

Seems like a relevant time to post this Danny Gonzales video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N24UqL389rs

You will be amused.

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.

• ShowalkKama

  today at 8:29 PM

  >If you want a robot to do your chores

  you mean like a dishwasher or a washing machine?

• NikolaNovak

  today at 8:30 PM

  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 :)

• hansonkd

  today at 8:04 PM

  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.

  • sublinear

    today at 8:39 PM

    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"

• jrmg

  today at 8:35 PM

  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

    today at 9:10 PM

    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.

• reaperducer

  today at 8:28 PM

  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.

Just a reminder: "Roomba testers feel misled after intimate images ended up on Facebook"

https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/01/10/1066500/roomba-i...

• whalesalad

  today at 8:39 PM

  Three obnoxious takeovers to dismiss on that page: full screen takeover, 25% off summer sale. Cookie warning. 25% off first story sign up banner.

  The internet sucks.

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.

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

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

Where do I sign up?

• Barbing

  today at 7:51 PM

  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

> 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

  today at 7:59 PM

  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.