Tech companies desperately want to film you doing chores

This week, an AI training startup called Shift said it would clean New Yorkers’ homes for free. It has plans to expand into other cities as well, including London, and looking around my flat, I get the appeal.

But there’s a catch. There’s always a catch.

In exchange for the cleaning, Shift wants footage of its cleaners at work: scrubbing dishes, wiping counters, dusting tables, mopping floors. It wants everything. Video of all the boring domestic labor we’d happily outsource if we could — and that robotics companies are racing to teach machines to do so they can sell us something to do it for us.

That’s harder than it sounds. Unlike chatbots, image generators, and other AI tools that have exploded in recent years, robots have to deal with the physical world. That means understanding space, motion, force, friction, weird shapes and materials, awkward lighting, and everything else...

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