Я наблюдал, как человекоподобный робот убирает мою квартиру. Это было похоже на вкус будущего.

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 alternatives apparently aren’t durable enough, and claws do surprisingly well for most cleaning tasks). Mine was wearing a Tau Robotics shirt, and grippy socks so that it didn’t scratch hardwood floors. With all the human support they need, the robots are closer to radio-controlled cars than Waymos. Many tasks, such as making the bed and folding laundry, require what’s called kinematic guidance: The human pilot performs the necessary motions, and sensors transmit those movements to the robot, which copies them. These kinematically guided tasks produce especially valuable training data. Tau’s AI models might not have solved laundry folding yet, but learning from the examples of robots that have completed the task in the real world is how they’ll get there. But according to Tau cofounder Cornelia Weinzierl, to whom I came clean as a journalist a few weeks after the cleaning, the robot can already complete some other tasks—such as vacuuming and mopping—without any human help. If Tau succeeds in using all the data it is collecting to train truly autonomous cleaning robots, they could even become San Francisco’s newest tech tourist attraction as Waymos become more commonplace countrywide. The cleaning robot that came to my building last month was already a bit of a spectacle. It arrived in a blue minivan, out of which it was helped by Weinzierl and another Tau employee. That’s when the robot encountered its first obstacle: the eight stairs leading up to the building’s front door. I’d come down to greet Weinzierl and the robot, so I had a front-row seat to its struggles with my steps. It climbed as if it were drunk. Each successful step was as likely as not to be followed by a stumbling backward stagger that erased all its progress—though, impressively, it never entirely lost its footing. When I later discussed my experience with Weinzierl, she explained that the robot sometimes walks strangely because it is operated remotely from Tau’s headquarters, and the short signal transmission delay can affect its coordination. “The amount of work and time that we spend just optimizing, for example, timings and connectivity is crazy,” she said. Inside, the carpeted staircase leading up to my apartment defeated the robot entirely, and Weinzierl had to lug it up the last few steps. This, it turned out, was not typical. As the robot cleaned, it repeatedly stalled out, something Weinzierl attributed to it overheating in the unseasonably hot weather—until she heard from one of her colleagues that the heat had shut down not the robot but the equipment that its human controller was using to watch its progress through my apartment. Without remote assistance, the robot couldn’t clean, and so it, and Weinzierl, departed before my booked hour was up. (Back in September, Weinzierl or another Tau representative remained with the robot throughout its visit, but she says that’s no longer necessary.) You can’t fault Tau on customer service, though. Weinzierl quickly emailed me to apologize, comp the visit, and offer me another on the house (minus whatever price I assign to my data privacy)—and that was all before I told her I was a journalist. I scheduled the next cleaning for about a month later, after a couple of trips out of town, and it went much more smoothly—the robot got up my stairs without much assistance, though still with the drunken stagger. In the hour it was there, it did a creditable job of cleaning my kitchen (though it didn’t brave the stove) and even saved me my most dreaded cleaning task, the toilet. That was its most impressive performance: Three times the head fell off its toilet cleaning wand, and three times it managed to reattach it by poking around with the handle until it made contact at just the right angle. The robot is still rough around the edges, which is to be expected for a product in beta. It repeatedly left my taps dripping, it knocked over a (closed) bottle of olive oil, and it couldn’t manage to right an air purifier that it had toppled. But I easily forgave all those missteps because of how charming it was. As I watched it wipe down my countertops, I felt the same fond gratitude that I feel when a Waymo delivers me safely home after a night out. Still, it’s not all slapstick and whimsy. If Tau Robotics or its competitors succeeds in training robots to clean autonomously and inexpensively, people could lose their livelihoods, and the United States is a long way away from implementing policies to take care of those left unemployed by AI. But Weinzierl maintains that someday turning over cleaning work to robots could make a lot of sense. “Cleaning is not a job that a lot of people really actively want to be doing—there’s high turnover, there’s a high risk of injury,” she said when we spoke after the cleanings. “We need people, and we don’t have them, and no one wants to do it.” She said that the company is also starting to consider someday deploying the robots for other dangerous or physically challenging jobs, such as mold remediation and home health care. Tau Robotics still has a long way to go: The amount of data needed to train robots to do the varied and complicated tasks of apartment cleaning is probably enormous, and the company has completed only a couple hundred cleanings so far. But it’s remarkable that there are now humanoid robots able to clean your toilets and mop your floors, even if they need quite a bit of human help to do so. The Jetsons no longer feels quite so far away.