What I Learned Watching a Humanoid Robot Do Laundry

Welcome back to, TIME's new twice-weekly newsletter about AI. If you're reading this in your browser, why not subscribe to have the next one delivered straight to your inbox? This summer, I found myself in the strange position of watching a humanoid robot try to load laundry. It squatted beside a washer-dryer unit, reached with one hand into a laundry basket that it was holding with the other, and put some clothes into the drum. But twice in a row, it dropped a piece of clothing and couldn't pick it back up. An engineer with a litter-picker grabbed the fallen cloth and sheepishly moved it behind the machine, out of my line of sight.