alt Hacker NewsShift will clean homes for free to train future robots
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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...
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.
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"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
It seems to me, they could train the bot to do most tasks like the laundry and vacuuming and dusting and so forth without needing a large sample of homes. And we have the situation where one robot can train all the others so you need the robot in the home not a human unless it’s just supervising the robot.
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.
I don't know how such start-ups get funded and come up with such harebrained ideas. Unless its a marketing gimmick, I don't understand what this company is looking to learn. A tiny RAG learning with a small sample + maybe getting some professional cleaners and data from any Chinese robo cleaning companies on potential floor configurations would compress this cycle and save them a lot of money. Good luck to the investors - but if they signed up for this plan, they deserve a their money being cleaned up better than users' homes
Just a reminder: "Roomba testers feel misled after intimate images ended up on Facebook"
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/01/10/1066500/roomba-i...
So, klankers will fix it, clean it and make it? What will meat do?
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.
Who is funding this? Can I wear that cap and clean my own house and get paid if I share the video?
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...
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.
Seems like a relevant time to post this Danny Gonzales video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N24UqL389rs
You will be amused.
And so it begins; even the blue collar jobs aren't safe.
Training robots will require data they won't be collecting. All in all a pointless waste of money driven by hype and a fundamental lack of technical knowledge.
I used to have an easier time ignoring the mass surveillance angle. If I'm 1 in 300,000,000, then someone would have to have a good reason to waste resources on investigating little ole' me. But with AI, safety via obfuscation no longer exists (to the degree it ever did). It doesn't matter if I'm 1 of 30 records or 1 of 30 billion records - the difference is a a few minutes of processing time.
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.
So...if I just happened to know a landlord with several thousand college student tenants busy moving out right now - should he contact Shift? Or does he need to remind his tenants of his own high cleaning fees, then helpfully suggest that they contact Shift?
Shift will file for bankruptcy
I hope they do it better than those guys:
”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.
If anything's for free, you are the product.
Shift will record a point cloud of every object in your home for free.
Related/unrelated?
Airbnb host alleges $12k in damages after SF startup tested a robot in his house
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.
> 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.
"Shift will break dishes for free to train future robots"
"clean"
> 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>
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Are these the same people that were renting airbnbs and wrecking them using them to train their robots?
Looks to me like they want to get in on 3D mapping homes that haven't already been mapped by a Roomba or other similar bot. There is plenty of money to be made selling home layouts to police. At the same time the customer's home is being cleaned, all objects can be scanned to data-mine the customer's shopping preferences.
Maybe training AI and bots is part of what they're trying to accomplish, but I just can't help wonder what else they are trying to do. I am extremely suspicious of any tech companies that make it seem like a great idea to let their tech in my house.
I can't imagine what is going to happen when, if this company ever really develops cleaning bots, their bots misidentify something as a weapon or drug stash and automatically dial the police. Or one of their bots gets remotely hacked by a vengeful person who then triggers the bot to call in a SWAT team.
Also, if this kind of labor is the "unskilled" labor that we've all heard of (or have been told is "unskilled"), AI systems shouldn't need any training for it ;)