Shift will clean homes for free to train future robots

https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/939765/ai-training-data-startup-shift-free-cleaning

by evilsimon • 2 months ago

191 259 2 months ago

theverge.com

p1esk• 2 months ago

Where do I sign up?

Barbing• 2 months ago

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

sublinear2• 2 months ago

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• 2 months ago

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.

Mezzie• 2 months ago

This would be great for me.

I have MS. Currently, my sister lives with me and does the chores (I pay our bills), but she's planning on moving out soon.

Paying for a human cleaner is doable but expensive for me, and my disability means keeping up with chores can be difficult or dangerous. For example, I have balance issues that can make using a ladder or stepstool dangerous.

It's less that I'm lazy and more that I don't want to crack my head open + there are multiple times a year when all I can do is work and rest in bed.

sonofhans• 2 months ago

”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.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 2 months ago

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

catapart2• 2 months ago

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• 2 months ago

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

autoexec6• 2 months ago

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.

slicktux• 2 months ago

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.

Bender2• 2 months ago

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?

janice19992• 2 months ago

... 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• 2 months ago

The Audacity of these people

m463• 2 months ago

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.

charcircuit• 2 months ago

I would prefer that $0 for cleaning gets taken out of my deposit.

doctorpangloss• 2 months ago

your photos of your kids, your books, and the contents of your medicine cabinet are already in a bunch of giant corporations' databases attributed to you...

micromacrofoot• 2 months ago

they don't need photos, they already know everything you buy

TZubiri3• 2 months ago

"hey may not have plans to sell this stuff, but whoever acquires them certainly will."

If accquirer acquires, it's because seller sold.

hsnv• 2 months ago

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.

hansonkd• 2 months ago

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.

sublinear2• 2 months ago

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"

ramses0• 2 months ago

Housekeeper. House Cleaner.

The first organizes things and may do the laundry or put away groceries or something. I wouldn't know for certain, as my income doesn't yet reach to those heady heights.

The second vacuums, mops, cleans bathrooms, etc.

reaperducer• 2 months ago

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.

bluGill5• 2 months ago

The real question isn't how much money you have when in the middle class, it is what will you give up. I have hired cleaners and I love the time savings, but it isn't worth it to me so I almost never do.

ShowalkKama• 2 months ago

If you want a robot to do your chores

you mean like a dishwasher or a washing machine?

Lammy• 2 months ago

You are confusing letting a machine make decisions about what needs to be done with using a machine to remove toil from the things I have decided.

NikolaNovak3• 2 months ago

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 :)

bluGill5• 2 months ago

I have a bidet to help wipe my bottom... It isn't enough that I can skip wiping completely, but it greatly reduces that chore.

I sometimes dream of being rich enough to afford a servant to do this for me. But realistically even if I was that rich I wouldn't subject someone to that indignity.

ryandrake• 2 months ago

The way I see it is: My time is worth $0 unless I'd otherwise be earning money.

So if you're an hourly contract worker, and you would otherwise be billing $100/hr to write code or something, then it makes sense to pay a gardener to mow your lawn and a plumber to fix your toilet, as long as it's less than you're making.

But instead, if you'd otherwise just be doom scrolling on your phone or jerking off, you might as well mow that lawn yourself. Paying someone any amount of money is a waste.

I pretty much DIY everything around the house. I work hard for my money, and it feels lazy and wasteful to just ship it off to someone else to do what I am fully capable of doing myself. Maybe when I'm 80 and have trouble walking, I'll pay someone to move furniture around or wash my roof. But not while I'm able bodied.

wiseowise3• 2 months ago

buying a bottle of coke was a Birthday thing

That’s not middle class. You were poor. I know that, because I was there.

jrmg• 2 months ago

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• 2 months ago

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.

sailfast• 2 months ago

I would love for a robot to wipe me after using the toilet - and I have a washlet for this!

It’s not about tax bracket. You can still pay your cleaning folks a reasonable wage and be kind to them. You can still treat them like human beings. It’s vulnerable to have another person tidy up after you, but fine in the end. Turns out vacuuming isn’t really that personal.

It’s one thing to have NEVER done the mundane chores and entirely another to save some time in your day while you’re at work to have someone help with it.

lostlogin• 2 months ago

This got disturbing pretty quickly. Scatology meets HN.

joenot443• 2 months ago

Do you consider a dishwasher to be a robot that does your chores?

trollbridge• 2 months ago

A robot that could wipe after using the toilet (admittedly fairly easy with modern-day powered bidets), clean someone up, help them shower, etc. would actually be a really big deal for care of the elderly. Currently this is a job a human has to do.

It would allow elderly to regain a certain amount of independence. Often they start having trouble with just 1 or 2 of these tasks, but then a home health aide is needed or they have to get put in a nursing home. The cost of this kind of care is $5000 - $20k a month. So there's a lot of money on the table for a good robot.

robots0only• 2 months ago

Any robot that does this reliably is easily more than a decade away.

dopidopHN2• 2 months ago

If only there was some type of social network for taking care of each other at différent stage of life!

dnnddidiej2• 2 months ago

Not everyone has the time or energy to do it. I estimate 10-20 hrs of chores a week for 2 adults 2 kids. Having cleaners is a nice touch when both parents work.

signatoremo• 2 months ago

You are the minority - [0]

According to that article:

- The global cleaning services market is predicted to grow to roughly $482 billion in 2026 and $859 billion by 2030 with a 7.5% annual growth rate.

- There are over 1.4+ million cleaners currently employed in the U.S.

- The U.S. janitorial services market is worth $112 billion, with 1+ million cleaning businesses as of 2026.

- The average annual pay for a cleaning business owner in the U.S. is $127,973 a year.

- The average annual salary for a house cleaner in the U.S is $35,034.

- 73% of cleaning business owners expect revenue growth in 2026.

- 55% of cleaning businesses raised prices in the last 12 months.

- 41% of households use recurring cleaning services, as customers shift from one-time bookings to weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly plans.

[0] https://www.getjobber.com/academy/cleaning/cleaning-industry...

not_a_bot_4sho• 2 months ago

You are in the minority ... 41% of households use recurring cleaning services ...

Wouldn't that put OP in the majority?

userbinator• 2 months ago

For me, it's the invasiveness and lack of agency; your house is the most private space in your life. At least if I do the cleaning myself, there won't be anyone else to blame for things broken or gone missing.

derektank• 2 months ago

I would absolutely purchase a robotic tool that brushes my teeth for me. I’m sure it would be much better I am at cleaning my teeth. I already use an electric toothbrush and a waterpik for exactly this reason.

fragmede3• 2 months ago

Autobrush!

https://tryautobrush.com/

TZubiri3• 2 months ago

Presumably they feel more empowered, like an elephant must feel when a flock of birds are grooming them.

fhub• 2 months ago

I outsource a bunch of things in life. Different things at different stages of life. Some of those things I have outsourced I don’t dislike doing myself. But often it comes down to freeing up time and, to some extent, keeping money flowing back to people in my community.

ian_holt• 2 months ago

Unfortunately, we seem to lose more than we really gain, much of the time. Often it is 'sold' to us as 'convenient' but, I suspect, more often than not we don't gain that much

jcgrillo3• 2 months ago

About as strange as letting someone else work on your car. Some people can do it without any discomfort. Could not be me.

BeetleB3• 2 months ago

brush your teeth for you

aka electric toothbrush

wipe your bottom and genitals after the toilet

aka a bidet (or a toilet seat with a bidet)

robot to bathe you

aka a shower

dishes

aka a dishwasher

laundry

aka a washer

If you want to do stuff yourself, use a manual toothbrush, learn how to wash your own clothes without a washer (people do this all the time, BTW), wash your own dishes without a dishwasher, don't use dry cleaning services, and use a bucket to take a bath. Also, don't use a vacuum cleaner.

BeetleB3• 2 months ago

brush your teeth for you

aka electric toothbrush

wipe your bottom and genitals after the toilet

aka a bidet (or a toilet seat with a bidet)

robot to bathe you

aka a shower

dishes

aka a dishwasher

laundry

aka a washer

but I can't shake the feeling that you lose something about being a living, breathing being when you give up these mundane chores.

Say that when you have 3 kids, and cook most of the meals (i.e. no takeouts).

margalabargala• 2 months ago

don't use dry cleaning services

I agree with the rest of your comment but fuck dry cleaning services. Who does dry cleaning regularly?

jasonfarnon• 2 months ago

Maybe things have changed but finances mostly forced my kids and those in the neighborhood to grow up this way. No dishwasher, bidet (we're in the US anyway), electric toothbrush, and definitely cooked all meals. Maybe takeout pizza or chinese every couple months? Is this really so outlandish to you?

wiseowise3• 2 months ago

Weird leap. If we go by your logic, then broom is replaced by a vacuum cleaner. Automating something completely, aka getting someone to for it for you is a completely different thing.

imhoguy• 2 months ago

I am quite similar but this will be inevitable when I get old:

desiring a robot to bathe you, wipe your bottom and genitals after the toilet, brush your teeth for you

My (EU) country is heading demographic catastrophe, so either I die in my feces or robots help me with hygiene.

Meanwhile I plan to downsize my home to reduce todays chores.

raincole• 2 months ago

tax bracket

From late 19th to early 20th centuries, it was common for British workers to hire charwomen to clean their places. Domestic service was the most typical job for women by the time. Historically it wasn't really something exclusive for the rich.

krisoft• 2 months ago

Do you feel the same way about walking? If you wanted to get anywhere on land pre Bronze age your only option was to walk. Then we started riding horses, later we invented carriages, much much later bicycles, cars, and airplanes. Do these also take away something about being a living, breathing being? Do you feel that your life is lessened by these options?

A different question is. Imagine that you are living with a partner and you agree on a distribution of labour. Let’s say you do the hunting and your partner cleans the house. They are happy with the agreement and fully consent to it. Do you feel it takes away from you being a living, breathing being?

plagiarist• 2 months ago

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

necubi• 2 months ago

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• 2 months ago

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

giwook2• 2 months ago

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).

ChrisArchitect2• 2 months ago

Discussion on that one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48317093

bluGill5• 2 months ago

After thinking about this for a while, I'm not sure it really happened. It wouldn't surprise me if the house was not trashed, just a landlord manipulating evidence when they think they can make money in court. There is no particular reason to trust either side and we have not seen what evidence really exists. In particular the reporters didn't do a good job of digging in - at the very least where is the response from the Bot Company?

archonis• 2 months ago

Who needs occam's razor when you've got a mobieus shaped breadknife?

ChoGGi• 2 months ago

Could be a greedy landlord, but they did turn off his security cameras, so I'm giving him the benefit of doubt for now.

stbtrax• 2 months ago

I don't entirely doubt the landlord but the bizzarre part is the landlord showing up to take their trash and then somehow finding bundles of wires inside the unit. Why would an airbnb host enter the unit to take trash?

janalsncm• 2 months ago

The Bot Company did not respond to requests for comment

MadnessASAP• 2 months ago

A company operating above board would be sure to carefully document the state of the rental before and after whatever work they were doing. Any tradesperson/installer/technician/repair person will have tales of how they were accused of stealing grandmas wedding ring from the bottom of the sock drawer while repairing a leak in the kitchen.

So either Bot Company damaged property and is trying to pretend they didn't. Or they are incompetent and failed to document the state of the property or handle the owners complaints appropriately.

Given that their training robots and would therefore be collecting as much data as possible, including camera data, I'm leaning towards malice instead of ignorance.

kylehotchkiss• 2 months ago

At least the AirBnB owners got paid to have their homes mutalated by robots

ceejayoz• 2 months ago

If they’re suing, that seems to be insufficient.

Among other issues, it likely causes knock-on problems for tomorrow’s reservations.

cogogo• 2 months ago

Move fast, break things

zeafoamrun2• 2 months ago

Like your favorite lamp.

KaiMagnus• 2 months ago

I want this as a setting in my future cleaning robots.

fmbb2• 2 months ago

Seems like there is some synergy to be found here!

arthurcolle• 2 months ago

Good cop, bad cop

darth_avocado2• 2 months ago

Actually shift should just partner with Airbnb. Airbnb takes out the cleaning fee from the app, customers benefit, owners get a free cleaning service, Airbnb wins, Shift wins. And if Airbnb invests in Shift, even better.

ElProlactin• 2 months ago

Airbnb takes out the cleaning fee from the app

Why would they do that?

Airbnb should invest in Shift, continue to encourage exorbitant cleaning fees, and subsidize discounts for hosts so that they're incentivized to fire their current housekeeping providers and switch to Shift.

imglorp• 2 months ago

The fact that they're not partnering with Airbnb tells us what we need to know. The top of this thread is more likely now: they're interested in surveilling the people, not the buildings.

BloondAndDoom• 2 months ago

I think I’m happy for some privacy abuse oriented startup and an Airbnb landlord screwing each other. It seems like a good thing for the world.

mmmlinux• 2 months ago

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

janice19992• 2 months ago

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• 2 months ago

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.

aleyan• 2 months ago

"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

yoyohello13• 2 months ago

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.

switchbak2• 2 months ago

Robo vacuums are already doing this. What a time to be alive and all that.

QuercusMax• 2 months ago

At some point you're gonna be able to self host this stuff, which will likely be required for security reasons in some kinds of facilities. Now whether it's open and not spying on you still, that's another question.

Jordan-117• 2 months ago

Not to mention it directly targets a job category overwhelmingly held by poor and marginalized women, especially immigrants, in order to boost the profits of the automation company and the hotel chains it serves. Destroying the livelihoods of some of the most vulnerable and exploited workers on the planet with no pretense of caring what happens to them or their families.

Any company like this actively working to liquidate entire categories of menial work with no tangible support for sufficient social safety net programs and retraining is both sociopathic and digging its own grave for the inevitable populist backlash against what's shaping up to be the biggest class war in history. It's too broad a change, too fast, and these companies are running society off a cliff with no care for what happens when gravity kicks in. (Apart from the techno-fascists who plan on bunkering down while crushing the desperate masses with surveillance and killer robots, ofc.)

pinkmuffinere2• 2 months ago

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].

ACCount37• 2 months ago

That article is a load of baloney, and I wish people stopped posting it around as if it's some kind of gospel.

Modern robots are nowhere near being bottlenecked by hardware. They are all bottlenecked by AI. Today's hardware with perfect AI would absolutely demolish tasks like "clean a house". Today's AI with perfect hardware would still fumble.

We know that because we can't even train an AI policy that would reliably solve tasks in a sim with perfect sensors and perfect execution.

olyjohn• 2 months ago

The Jetsons, where we polluted the Earth so badly, we had to live above the clouds. But at least we won't have to pick up our clothes.

autoexec6• 2 months ago

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.

I don't think that they can plausibly clean our homes. I don't think it's much different from back in 2015 when everyone was talking about self-driving cars and auto-pilot yet here we are over a decade later and nobody is getting into their car and then taking a nap on the way to the office. Most people don't have any kind of "self-driving" car today at all. My guess is that if we have housecleaning robots in 2036 they'll be shitty at it and very much watered down from the Jetsons style future tech companies want you to daydream about today.

lobf3• 2 months ago

nobody is getting into their car and then taking a nap on the way to the office.

Except that you can do exactly this with Waymo for the last 2 years.

Henchman21• 2 months ago

The Jetsons wrecked their world. All housing was on stilts. Flying cars were a necessity because there were no roads, only water. They melted the poles!!

All I’m saying is careful what you wish for. Wish fulfillment is always outsourced to the Djinn.

Avshalom• 2 months ago

robots can not yet plausibly walk into our homes.

stickfigure• 2 months ago

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

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

You will be amused.

Krasnol• 2 months ago

The company’s last video is 4 weeks old!

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

I'm astonished they (sill) exist. The idea is so beyond stupid, I thought it was a joke at first.

I'm still not really sure that its not one...interesting times.

AlexandrB• 2 months ago

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.

darth_avocado2• 2 months ago

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...

fortran77• 2 months ago

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.

ChrisArchitect2• 2 months ago

Related/unrelated?

Airbnb host alleges $12k in damages after SF startup tested a robot in his house

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48317093

gjvc• 2 months ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ChrisArchitect

rglover• 2 months ago

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.

falcor842• 2 months ago

Well, either that, or a fetish.

fragmede3• 2 months ago

Hey, $10 is $10.

lenerdenator• 2 months ago

Honestly, given the potential impact on the job market, the fetish is far more honorable.

somethoughts• 2 months ago

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

tikhonj2• 2 months ago

My guess is that they're currently nowhere near robust or effective enough to make that realistic. They need to bootstrap somehow, if only get good enough to convince hotel management that their approach will be realistic in the future.

ForHackernews• 2 months ago

girl management

autocorrect glitch?

ASalazarMX• 2 months ago

This is my take too. Hotels wouldn't be happy if a robot knocked a water jar on the carpet, or scratched a wall, but a home owner? We're doing it for free and you asked for it!

Hotel's girl management might be more undertanding than I assume, though.

thalesac• 2 months ago

in that case they could operate the robots remotely just like self driving cars sometimes

throwaway858252• 2 months ago

Basically every AI startup promises the world instead of descoping to something that is achievable and profitable. Easier to scam investors than make a working product.

fmbb2• 2 months ago

I’m not sure it can ever be cheaper than a human cleaner so maybe the hotel industry does not want to subsidize the training.

woah• 2 months ago

These guys may actually just be angling to sell off the training data. diverse training data is more valuable

bruhlikereally2• 2 months ago

Yeah, this seems like a much more likely option. Get a ton of good, completely unique scans of real world environments you could never replicate in testing and even if your product sucks and you fail entirely, you’ve got a really good dataset to sell to a big company that’s close on a product and needs data to enhance/refine on.

adrianmonk• 2 months ago

Also, cleaning kitchens is a huge part of the job. Hotel rooms either have no kitchen or a very minimal one. You're not going to learn how to clean an oven or load a dishwasher in a hotel room. (And loading a dishwasher requires categorizing thousands of things as dishwasher safe or not! Stainless steel skillet, yes; cast iron skillet, no; etc.)

bruhlikereally2• 2 months ago

Does not make any sense for them since it’s not a unique environment. You could rent one hotel room or build a cheap replica and get all of your training done in one shot. They’re obviously trying to hit unique environments with many different unforeseen obstacles to overcome.

oidar• 2 months ago

Does not make any sense for them since it’s not a unique environment.

nonsense. If it worked for one hotel, that would be ground breaking. Hotels would line up to have theirs be the next test case.

deweywsu• 2 months ago

And so it begins; even the blue collar jobs aren't safe.

jdubs1984• 2 months ago

Shift will file for bankruptcy

LowLevelKernel• 2 months ago

Who is funding this? Can I wear that cap and clean my own house and get paid if I share the video?

lucaspiller• 2 months ago

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.

https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

KennyBlanken• 2 months ago

The thing actually ordered around people how to clean a restroom step by step. Yikes.

I've never seen so much disdain for minimum wage workers.

------ "For example, when Jane entered the restroom, Manna used a simple position tracking system built into her headset to know that she had arrived. Manna then told her the first step.

Manna: “Place the ‘wet floor’ warning cone outside the door please.”

When Jane completed the task, she would speak the word “OK” into her headset and Manna moved to the next step in the restroom cleaning procedure.

Manna: “Please block the door open with the door stop.”

Jane: “OK.”

Manna: “Please retrieve the bucket and mop from the supply closet.”

Jane: “OK.”

And so on."

jcgrillo3• 2 months ago

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>

pjmlp• 2 months ago

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.

mrbluecoat• 2 months ago

"Shift will break dishes for free to train future robots"

whateveracct• 2 months ago

"clean"

breadzephyr2• 2 months ago

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 ;)

petesergeant• 2 months ago

This sounds like a decent deal for the segment of customers who are happy to have their shopping preferences mapped (which seems to be almost all) and don’t care if a 3rd party has their home layout.

Ylpertnodi2• 2 months ago

My home layout was approved by the local council, and is freely available for anyone to see. I get personal belongings, but who cares about home layout?

zamadatix3• 2 months ago

Yeah, definitely. On one hand it's obvious such companies will want this data precisely to make their systems work. On the other hand... once they have the data, we all know it also ends up wherever someone is willing to pay for it. Even if they say it's not the goal today... 10 years from now how do you know the owner of the data at that point will feel the same way? Doubly so since they don't seem to be making any privacy guarantees around the pricing, just attempts at anonymizing the high level things.

I find it interesting how many people get worked up about the "skilled/unskilled" terminology though. Just walking to arbitrary waypoints is an extraordinary feet in itself - if you dropped me in the past and told me to build something which walks (or even just traverses) as such I would likely not achieve it in my lifetime, despite having great insight into how we've already accomplished this goal. At the same time, people know listing "mastered the ability to walk as a child, proficient in running" in the skills section of their resume does not make sense. It seems easy enough to understand the difference in meaning between the two contexts (skills an average human is expected to have over, say, a rock vs skills which differentiate one as able to start a job without waiting for several years of additional development) rather than seek to pick the least relevant interpretation.

OTOH, there are definitely jobs which get conflated as having a low barrier to entry (for the average person) but actually take many years of training to be able to get a typical job in (and not just for the "high end" version of the job). That's definitely a misclassification, but not for something like cleaning homes where the average person is expected to be able to do it themselves.

ndsipa_pomu• 2 months ago

OTOH, there are definitely jobs which get conflated as having a low barrier to entry (for the average person) but actually take many years of training to be able to get a typical job in

Isn't the barrier to entry due to the jobs not allowing for mistakes? Cleaning has a high tolerance for mistakes (e.g. missing bits, leaving streaks on windows etc) and so it's fine for an inexperienced cleaner to learn from their mistakes whilst doing the job. However, people would not be happy for a lawyer or surgeon to be learning from their mistakes whilst working - they are expected to already be competent and mistakes are generally very damaging.

YeGoblynQueenne4• 2 months ago

> Just walking to arbitrary waypoints is an extraordinary feet in itself - if you dropped me in the past and told me to build something which walks (or even just traverses) as such I would likely not achieve it in my lifetime,

Sorry, I'm confused. Are you talking about bipedal robot walking specifically or path planning in general? The latter is a long-solved problem, right? And I'm sure bipedal walking was also basically solved in the 1980's.

matthewmacleod• 2 months ago

There is plenty of money to be made selling home layouts to police

Is there?

Michelangelo11• 2 months ago

Came here to post exactly this. Is there, really?

toasty228• 2 months ago

They'd save money if they knew exactly which spot of the wall to shoot through to kill the innocent sleeping person next door, that's at least a few dollars a week in bullets alone.

nkrisc2• 2 months ago

I can totally imagine the sales pitch to police departments: before you bust down the door of the local journalist who criticized you, look up their home floor plan and review 360 camera footage of each room, so you can get to their laptop before it locks when your surveillance team detects they’ve stepped away to use the bathroom.

morpheos1372• 2 months ago

yeah the parent was a rather dumb comment. police don't buy intelligence on the population en mass. how could they afford it snd how could they use it without probable cause? if you are already a target of an investigation they can get a warrant for free with due process.

breadzephyr2• 2 months ago

on further reflection, probably not. I have to remember how much home data is already publicly available (as others have noted).

drbojingle• 2 months ago

If the service is free, the product is you.

jiaosdjf• 2 months ago

The Stasi would blush

dawnerd• 2 months ago

Insurance companies too. They were one of the first ones to map out in detail building plans for entire cities.

i7l• 2 months ago

There is plenty of money to be made selling home layouts to police.

Perhaps more to thieves who can make sure they break into a place worth raiding.

jMyles• 2 months ago

No reason to reprhase-and-repeat.

bragr2• 2 months ago

There is plenty of money to be made selling home layouts to police.

The police basically already have this in the form of building records. Unless you live in a really old building or you've made unapproved modifications, they've got an accurate layout if they care to look.

jjulius2• 2 months ago

There's nuance, though. You're right in that they can get a general layout of the rooms in the home, but a mapped layout from a device like this gives them a lot more detailed information - where large objects are that potential targets could hide behind, or stash things.

One data point offers a drawing of where the walls are, another paints a picture of where everything the occupant owns is sitting.

Razengan• 2 months ago

If anything's for free, you are the product.

d--b• 2 months ago

I hope they do it better than those guys:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48317093

throwaway858252• 2 months ago

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.

bell-cot• 2 months ago

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?

hyperionultra• 2 months ago

So, klankers will fix it, clean it and make it? What will meat do?

standardUser• 2 months ago

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.

techtuate• 2 months ago

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

dvduval• 2 months ago

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.

KellyCriterion• 2 months ago

Sounds like a similar take to the one of pokemon?

https://gilescrouch.medium.com/pok%C3%A9mon-go-an-accidental...

Shift will clean homes for free to train future robots

Related Stories