I watched a humanoid robot clean my apartment. It felt like a taste of the future.

I’m not the sort of person who typically pays for a house cleaner. I’m too frugal, and I kind of enjoy putting on a podcast and going to town on my tub with a Magic Eraser. But when I saw an X post about a new humanoid-robot cleaning service in San Francisco, I immediately signed up for the waitlist. I wanted my apartment to feel like The Jetsons, even if just for an hour.

I was also motivated by journalistic interest. In order to ensure an authentic experience, I didn’t tell Tau Robotics, the startup behind the X post, that I was a journalist—though I did use my real name, so it’s possible someone looked me up. Tau’s long-term goal is to make autonomous cleaning robots a reality, but they’re not quite there yet: For now, the robots are piloted remotely by humans, who watch what’s going on via cameras mounted in the robots’ heads and wrists. …