I watched a humanoid robot clean my apartment. It felt like a taste of the future.

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I’m not the sort of person who typically pays for a house cleaner. I’m too frugal, and I kind of enjoy putting on a podcast and going to town on my tub with a Magic Eraser. But when I saw an X post about a new humanoid-robot cleaning service in San Francisco, I immediately signed up for the waitlist. I wanted my apartment to feel like The Jetsons, even if just for an hour. I was also motivated by journalistic interest. In order to ensure an authentic experience, I didn’t tell Tau Robotics, the startup behind the X post, that I was a journalist—though I did use my real name, so it’s possible someone looked me up. Tau’s long-term goal is to make autonomous cleaning robots a reality, but they’re not quite there yet: For now, the robots are piloted remotely by humans, who watch what’s going on via cameras mounted in the robots’ heads and wrists. As the robots clean, they collect data that Tau will use to train up their more independent descendants. Every counter successfully wiped and T-shirt successfully folded will help the models that power the robots learn to do better on the next go-round. Because this data is so valuable to Tau, the company charges less for cleaning than one might expect for such a cutting-edge product. At the time I booked, Tau was offering $30 for an hourlong cleaning with a single robot; now the charge is $60 per weekly cleaning with two robots, or $100 for a one-time visit. But even at the cheaper rate of $30 per hour, Tau’s robots aren’t a great bargain. They are thorough but slow, so if you, like me, are tempted to stand around watching them for their entire visit, it would probably be a better use of your time to just take care of the cleaning yourself. But the robots are physically capable of cleaning, and they’re undeniably cute. Tau has armed each four-and-a-half-foot-tall robot with a 3D-printed “head” with antennae that allow it to communicate with Tau’s headquarters, as well as two 3D-printed claw “hands” (the more humanlike alter