Dear Friends,

We are still living deep inside the fog of AI hype. It’s a haze that has generated enormous excitement, but also a fair share of illusions—fantasies about what’s actually possible today versus what remains decades out of reach.

These myths have spilled over into the world of robotics.

In this edition, I want to pull back the curtain on the ‘robot butler.’ We’ll look at why humanoid robots are stuck in a strange halfway state: they exist, yet they are perpetually ‘not quite ready.’ We’ll also explore why the automation of housework, at least as it’s being sold to us, is really just a new form of unpaid labor.

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Personal Is Political

Guess how excited I was the first time I saw a picture of a robot folding laundry?

Honestly, I was more thrilled by that single image than by watching an entire army of Unitree robots perform martial arts at the 2026 Lunar New Year Festival. As a stay-at-home dad, nothing would make my day more than offloading the “dull and boring work”—the loading, unloading, and folding—so I could spend that time reading books to or playing with my kids.

But that pipe dream burst quickly. The truth is, humanoid robots capable of completing household chores don’t exist yet. They struggle outside of "strictly controlled environments," which is really just code for a home without humans.

Take the Figure robot, for example, the humanoid robot named one of the best innovations of 2025 by Time Magazine.

Even though Figure 03 is technically “available” to buy, it is still fully tele-operated . Yes, they require humans to operate them (ridiculous). Yes, they rely on household data to train them further (obnoxious). And no, thank you, for me.

In an interview with Time Magazine, the CEO of Figure said it would take almost two years for the robots to be ready and at least ten years before robots become common in our homes. Why all the noise now?

This is not simply overpromising to attract the trillions of dollars needed to speed up development. The public rollout of these machines has become part of the strategy of robotization itself.

It resembles what Leopoldina Fortunati and colleagues call the “roboid” phase of social robots: a long but increasingly normalized period between prototyping and full commercialization. With a few exceptions, like the Onero H1 (which is also considered not a viable product by one observer), they exist in an in-between stage, constantly needing more data mining and undergoing training, much like today’s generative AI.

Even so, this is precisely where the conversation needs to begin. Our homes are too important to be shaped solely by the priorities of tech startups, especially when the question of whether housework can, or should, be automated remains highly political.

Housework Technology: The Historical Afterthought

Feminist scholars like Judy Wajcman have long argued that domestic technology is treated as an afterthought in the history of innovation. Machines like rice cookers, vacuum cleaners, washers, and dryers have existed for generations. Yet technologies associated with cooking and cleaning—work historically relegated to women—have seen remarkably little transformation, limited mostly to incremental upgrades.

Even when domestic technologies advance, the so-called Cowan paradox remains: housework does not shrink. Instead, it expands. As the authors of After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time observe, innovation in the domestic sphere has tended to follow technical constraints and profit incentives rather than the actual needs of users. More often, innovation favors autonomous “leisure” activities over the persistent drudgery of care.

Houseworkers, mostly women, are often expected to use their “freed up” time to perform more intensive emotional labor. In short, household technologies have not reduced the total time spent on daily domestic work. While humanoid robots may be years away, the domestic sphere is already partially mechanized. Over the past few decades, the “digital revolution” has reshaped home life through software, algorithms, and voice assistants like Siri and Alexa. Consequently, houseworkers now carry a heavier mental load in organizing and managing these household devices.

Unpaid Training as the New Care Work

The robotization of the housework does more than just ask us to surrender our privacy to enrich Silicon Valley; it demands that domestic workers and caregivers perform a new form of invisible, unpaid labor.

Across the globe, the lion’s share of reproductive labor falls to unpaid household members, including unmarried daughters and daughters-in-law, as well as exploited migrant workers. In a scenario set out by the big tech, these workers will become the ones “tweaking” and “fine-tuning” the machines, constantly picking up the slack where sensors fail. Instead of a “butler” robot that serves us, we have become the “tech support” staff for the hardware.

In the 1970s, the Wages for Housework movement emerged from the feminist struggle to demand compensation for reproductive labor. Given these new trends of unpaid workers training and maintaining AI, it is only just that houseworkers revive this demand for the digital age.

Until next time,

Kriangsak (Kiang)

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