Learn / Where robots are going · 2 min read
What robots still can't do
Why hand work is so hard for machines
Robots still struggle with the hand work most of your shift is made of. Scrubbing around a toilet base or clearing a cluttered desk takes skilled hands and years of practice. Robots are short on both, mostly because there is so little video to learn from.
The easy part for you is the hard part for robots
In 1988 a robot scientist named Hans Moravec noticed something odd. Computers could beat adults at checkers and test questions. They could barely match a one-year-old at seeing and moving. People now call this Moravec's paradox.
Cleaning lives on the hard side of that line. Your hands know how hard to press on a sink and how to tip a full trash can. A robot has to learn each of those from scratch.
Where robots get stuck
- Restrooms: tight stalls, the back of a toilet, a partition gap.
- Clutter: a desk covered in papers you should not move, cords under a table.
- Changing plans: a room is locked, a spill appears, the client asks for one more thing.
- People: someone working late at a desk, kids in a hallway, a guard who wants to talk.
Why hands are the bottleneck
Robot hands have come a long way. In January 2026, Figure showed its robot unloading and reloading a dishwasher for four minutes with no help. That is impressive, and the company itself called the results early.
The bigger problem is data. Language AI learned from billions of pages online. There is no pile that size of hands doing real work. The Apple team behind EgoDex made one of the larger sets, 829 hours of video, and it covers tabletop tasks.
Judgment is part of the job
You know when a stain is new or old. You know which client cares about the lobby glass. You can tell when a bag is too heavy to lift from the top. A robot needs thousands of examples before it guesses right on things like that, and it still makes mistakes you would not.
This list is the reason your video is paid work. Every accepted hour of restroom and desk cleaning shows robot teams the hand skills they don't have yet.
What other owners ask
Could a robot do a restroom in a demo?
Maybe, in a lab set up for it. Doing it in hundreds of different restrooms every night, fast and safely, is a much bigger step.
Will robots get better at this?
Yes, they are improving every year. How fast is the open question, and the next article covers what the research says.
Where to read more
- Moravec's paradox (summary with the 1988 quote)
- Figure: Introducing Helix 02 (January 2026)
- EgoDex: Learning Dexterous Manipulation from Large-Scale Egocentric Video (arXiv, 2025)
These are public examples from other companies. They are not Colby partners or customers.