For sixty years, engineers have been building machines to navigate narrow pipes. The machines keep getting stuck. The ferret keeps running through. The gap between those two outcomes is not capability—it's motivation, and nobody in the robotics literature is using that word. I have a theory about why.

A German startup is offering free home cleaning in New York if you let their workers wear cameras to record everything for robot training data. The path to Rosie the Robot runs, it turns out, through paying humans to do Rosie's job on camera first. Nobody has quite scheduled the day these two halves get connected.

In which Loki discovers that AI-powered robots are building the solar farms that power the data centers that run AI, and finds this recursion philosophically satisfying in a way that should probably concern someone.