Among other issues, it likely causes knock-on problems for tomorrow’s reservations.
Not every airbnb host has a professional cleaning staff, and some of those who do may sometimes wish to check the status of their property. I don't find anything strange, let alone "bizarre".
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
It sounds like you're saying "pay someone to save you time if you use the time to work, but not if you use the time to relax". One of the best possible uses of money is to save you time, no matter what you use the time for.
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.
you mean like a dishwasher or a washing machine?
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…)
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.
I'd much rather pay a nice human significantly more money than have it done by a stinking robot.
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.
"Dad we're putting you in a nursing home"
"I don't wanna"
"Dad, there's people where who'll wipe your ass for you"
"Louis pack your things"
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...
Wouldn't that put OP in the majority?
a bit like the difference of brushing your teeth and going to a hygienist.
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"
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.
- 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 locationHotel's girl management might be more undertanding than I assume, though.
autocorrect glitch?
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
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].
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.
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.)
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.
Except that you can do exactly this with Waymo for the last 2 years.
Yes. The claim was that “nobody” is doing this today when in fact tens / hundreds of thousands of people are doing this today. The tech is here, next is widespread adoption.
All I’m saying is careful what you wish for. Wish fulfillment is always outsourced to the Djinn.
https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/26/human-archive-taps-into-in...
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/01/10/1066500/roomba-i...
The internet sucks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N24UqL389rs
You will be amused.
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.
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.
I'm not sure I'd call meta glasses the "latest and greatest". Even if there were no privacy concerns I wouldn't feel left out when it comes to giving facebook the ability to plaster ads on every surface in your field of vision. The tech has a lot of potential, but the product people are using today is trash I feel better off without.
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?
I submitted a poll [1] on this and a few people here would permit these bots in their homes. I also asked people in my local community and their answer was a resounding no.
there are lots of different ways to take this, have fun arguing about the different edge cases and what the constitution (notice that I did not specify which constitution - there are many countries with different ones and different courts!) says.
Even though it is free, they could even take it from the deposit of renters moving out.
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
Airbnb host alleges $12k in damages after SF startup tested a robot in his house
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.
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.
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.