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Hey everyone,

Thank you for being a reader for so long. We're expanding our coverage, and today's a first for us: a whole edition built around one theme, Robotics, instead of our usual mix.

Let us know what you think of this edition, and whether you'd want to see more robotic-exclusive editions from us, in the poll below.

If you're reading this, thanks for giving it a shot with us.

A $30-an-hour robot that cleans your home in San Francisco. A human is still driving it.

The process is simple: You reserve a robot named Chelsea, Elon, or Tony for a San Francisco home, and it vacuums, wipes counters, takes out the trash, cleans up. One robot costs $30 an hour. Two cost $60. By comparison, San Francisco has a minimum wage of $19.61.

What you're actually paying for

Now here's the more important part than the price of a single robot: these robots are not working solo. CEO Alexander Koch is clear that a human is always supervising and guiding the AI "at different levels" during every task.

When CBS News directly asked, he was blunt: the robot can't climb stairs itself, doesn't know where to vacuum unprompted, and is currently getting most of that called out for it by a human.

Therefore, $30 an hour buys a robot operating under a mix of AI and live human control, not a machine that autonomously walks around doing chores. The robots run about $50,000 each to make (the plan is to first train them to imitate human cleaning and eventually do it better). Koch states a complete technician phase-out is possible around 2028 or 2029, not now.

The skeptics have a point

Not everybody believes the tech is ready for this. Ken Goldberg, a UC Berkeley engineering professor with more than four decades of experience in the field, dismissed the entire notion as "premature" because even picking things up off a floor is still an actual hard problem for robots, much less wiping counters or cleaning under an appliance.

Tau's own footage is notable for what it does say: the company posts at real-time video speed to sidestep the sped-up-demo tactic that has overshadowed many robotics startups' marketing.

There's a privacy wrinkle too. For each robot, there are two cameras onboard to see everything, the recordings of which subsequently train Tau's AI.

Koch claims the company maintains full control of the cameras, networking and computing involved, but inviting a camera-toting robot into your kitchen and bathroom is one level of privacy concession, hiring a human another, and Tau hasn't disclosed how long it retains footage collected or who'll be allowed to access that footage.

The real bet isn't cleaning

It's currently invite-only, with a target of 1,000 households at launch, and aiming for 1,000 cleanings per week in San Francisco by 2027 before expanding to other US cities.

Cleaning seems more like the first move than the whole chess game: it's repetitive, it takes place indoors, and people already pay for it, so it makes a good way to get real-world training data for a company with much bigger designs on what humanoid robots can eventually do.

Inside the Rise of Robotic Systems in Modern Hospitals

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