Our homes are, as comedian George Carlin put it, just a place for our stuff. But what if, asks a new generation of startups, all that stuff could just…disappear? Inventors, architects and designers all over the world have lately converged on ways to do just that. Their technology can make parts of apartments and homes, and all their contents, slide out of view at the touch of a button. Former researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, ex-Apple and Tesla engineers toiling in San Francisco and a design and architectural firm in Spain are among those devising what can only be described as robotic furniture.

Despite dazzling advances in AI, robots are still horribly ham-fisted. Increasingly, researchers and companies are turning to machine learning to make them more adaptive and dexterous. This typically means feeding the robot a video of what's in front of it and asking it to work out how it should move in order to manipulate that object. For instance, researchers at OpenAI, a nonprofit in San Francisco, taught a robotic hand to manipulate a child's block in this way. By signing up you agree to receive email newsletters and notifications from MIT Technology Review.

The robot is building a tesseract. He motions at a glowing cube floating before him, and an identical cube emerges. He drags it to the left, but the two cubes stay connected, strung together by glowing lines radiating from their corners. The robot lowers its hands, and the cubes coalesce into a single shape--with 24 square faces, 16 vertices, and eight connected cubes existing in four dimensions. And the robot is Brian Greene, a physicist at Columbia University and bestselling author of several popular science books.

Exactly how that breaks down between the likes of, say, Universal Music Group and up-and-coming artists, YouTube doesn't say. In recent months, Content ID has been updated to use smarter fingerprinting that can detect tricks like stretching a video's aspect ratio, flipping the image horizontally, or slowing down the audio. It's also been plugged into Google's machine learning algorithms.