Video of the Week: Figure Helix Cleaning
- Mal McCallion
- 2h
- 1 min read
If, like me, you've been missing videos of robots doing chores, good news! Figure released this one for its Helix bot this week and it's .... well, actually quite boring from a content point of view.
Technically though - my days! Squirting cleaner onto the table and wiping it off, casually throwing the duster over its shoulder as it undoubtedly has seen humans do on many a video, chucking a cushion into the corner of the sofa like a pro.
The breakthrough here is that this is autonomous. It's not being told what to explicitly do, it's using its agentic capabilities to decide what and how to clean up. Yes, it does it extremely slowly. And the way it wanders out of the room at the end for some reason made me worry about its mental state - is it happy to have cleaned up? Is it reassessing its life choices? Is it going to spray the dog?
It's probably less than a decade away that you'll have one of these in your home. The whirring of its joints is likely to become a constant background noise that we'll get very used to.
The good news is that it will be a lot faster than this. Will we anthropomorphise our own and treat it like a human? Going by how so many of us have already personalised ChatGPT and Claude, it's likely. But I reckon pets will keep well away - and not just because we won't know what really happens when we're out ...
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