Robert Hart, in his piece This AI Startup Will Clean Your Home for Free to Train Future Robots on The Verge:
AI training startup Shift wants to clean your home for free. The catch — because, despite what its website says, there’s always a catch — is that it will record cleaners as they scrub, vacuum, dust, tidy, and wash, and use that footage to train robots. […] “Every home cleaned today lays the groundwork for a home that cleans itself tomorrow,” the company says in the video. As it happens, the dirtier the better. An FAQ on the company’s website says “more challenging cleaning environments can be especially useful.”
Thought this story was absolutely fascinating. It’s at the perfect intersection of amazing and terrifying. The obvious concern is privacy. The company claims to blur and anonymize video before using it for training, but I have little faith in those promises. The whole reason they’re giving this service away for free is that the training data is valuable.
However, privacy concerns aside, there’s also the promise of what technology like this could do. Robots that free people from back-breaking work aren’t a fantasy—they’re an engineering problem actively being worked on. A future with a shorter work week, more time to make things, and to be human is more possible than ever. Just don’t expect the company that extracted the training data to be the one that delivers it.