Dishes piling up? Trash well past the brim of the can? That thin layer of dust on your furniture starting to stratify? Well, if you’re in New York City and open to unusual propositions, there’s a company willing to take care of those and other unresolved house cleaning tasks you might have, all for free. The catch: you let the cleaners record the entire process inside your home from the cameras affixed to their “magic hats” to help train AI.
The German startup behind this proposition, MicroAGI, invites New Yorkers amenable to this unusual trade offer to sign up on the task-recording platform Shift. At the site, untidy prospects can peruse a 3D tag cloud of chores the cleaners can sort out. Classics like vacuuming, dusting, and dishwashing are, of course, on offer. But if you’ve been meaning to get your fridge, pantry, or even a whole closet reorganized, they’ll apparently do that as well.
Announced with a recent post on X, Shift’s introductory video attempts to explain how one’s free cleaning service might go down. The video opens with a plucky young lad knocking on an apartment door, ready to deliver some elbow grease. The company’s US GM, Harry Kilberg, then appears to convey Shift’s mad love for the 5 Boroughs by saying “the future has always started in New York. This time, it will start in your apartment.” We then see the famous “Lunch atop a Skyscraper” photograph while the instrumental track from Jay-Z and Alicia Keys’ 2009 “Empire State of Mind” plays in the background. There is no longer any doubt as to whether or not this tech company is tapped in with Real New Yawkers.
On their site, Shift attempts to reassure its future dataset providers with a robust FAQ. The company promises all names, faces, and other sensitive data that might be caught on cam are automatically anonymized. They go on to explain that they “blur all personally identifiable information from screens and ID cards, to pieces of paper and cell phones, to help protect both you and your home.” There doesn’t seem to be anything in Shift’s FAQ about how one could later request to have the video from their session removed from the training dataset after it’s recorded and uploaded.
The company, which says it’s already paying tens of thousands of people around the world to record themselves doing repetitive motion manual labor says there’s no place too dirty for your free cleaning before qualifying that “cleaners may decline any specific task they are not comfortable performing.” Shift’s terms of service says the company is not responsible for any theft, personal injury, or property damage that might occur during a cleaning, but don’t worry. The “independent cleaning professionals” you’re inviting into your home have been “vetted by [their] partners,” so that should probably allay any remaining concerns.
Shift says the data gleaned by recording all these menial tasks will go on to train “the next generation of household robots.” That future sure sounds nice and like something we will all have access to.
MicroAGI’s founder and CEO, Bercan Kilic, posted on LinkedIn that Shift will be launching in London, Munich, and Zurich “very soon,” so stay tuned for video drops featuring double-decker buses and “West End Girls” instrumentals in Shift’s near future. But those in The Big Apple willing to feed the beast for a comped spring cleaning better act fast, because this is a limited-time offer. Just don’t expect the cleaners to be able to get rid of whatever’s causing that sudden whiff of brimstone once you sign on the dotted line.
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