Welcome back to In the Loop , 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?

What to Know: My day with the robots

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. But the robot’s limitations were too obvious to hide.

Buzzy startup — I was visiting the headquarters o

See Full Page