We have been promised domestic robots since the 1950s. Cartoons were full of them: a robot that cooks, hoovers, tidies the bedroom and folds the laundry.
Seventy years later, we have AIs that write novels, pass medical exams and program software. And still no robot to empty the dishwasher.
How is that possible?
What is hard for us is easy for the machine
Robotics researchers have a name for this phenomenon, and it is very simple to understand.
What we find difficult — calculating, playing chess, writing a technical text — we learned late, at school, with effort. These are recent skills on the scale of humanity.
What we find easy — walking, catching a glass, recognising a face, folding a shirt — we do without thinking. But that is precisely because millions of years of evolution perfected it in us.
For a machine, it is the opposite. Chess is clear rules: easy. Catching a glass is a nightmare.
Why catching a glass is so complicated
Take a second to think about it. When you catch a glass, your brain does all of this without asking your opinion:
It estimates the weight before you even touch it. It adjusts the force so as not to drop it or crush it. It senses if it is slipping and tightens the fingers in a hundredth of a second. It knows that a full glass is held differently from an empty one.
Your hand contains thousands of sensors that send this information continuously. No robot yet has a hand that resembles yours, closely or remotely.
The AIs that write so well learned by reading billions of pages available on the internet. To learn how to fold a t-shirt, there is no giant library of folding. The robot has to learn through experience, with a real body, failing thousands of times. It is slow, it is expensive, and it damages hardware. One solution is emerging: training robots in simulations, like a video game, before releasing them into the real world. That is how a robot the size of an insect has just learned to do backflips.
Your home is hell for a robot
There is a second reason, and it concerns your living room.
In a factory, everything is tidy, identical, in the same place. Objects always arrive the same way. A robot can be very efficient there, and that is why factories have been full of them for a long time.
At your place, it is chaos. A cat walking past. A sock under the sofa. A toy in the middle of the hallway. A glass left in an unusual spot. Every home is different, and every day it changes.
A robot that is efficient in an orderly world is lost in a disorderly one. And the world of humans is very disorderly.
So, when?
Things are moving forward, genuinely. Humanoid robots are starting to come off production lines. Companies are distributing for free the software that moves their mechanical arms, to speed up research.
But the order will always be the same: first factories, then warehouses, then hospitals and shops, and last of all homes. Because the home is the most unpredictable place of all.
One piece of advice: if someone promises you a robot that will do all your housework within two years, smile politely.
What we take away
The next time you fold a t-shirt while watching TV, without even thinking about it, remember one thing.
You are doing something that the best engineers in the world, with billions of dollars, still do not know how to make a machine do.
That is no small thing.