How A Robot Makes the Mundane Meaningful
My close friend and tech press compatriot Joanna Stern of The Wall Street Journal is currently on book leave, as she’s busy reporting and writing a book (due out next year) on artificial intelligence. As good friends do, I’ve been keeping tabs on Stern’s progress by reading her newsletter—which is totally worth subscribing to—and today’s edition really piqued my interest. In her piece, Stern chronicles her time having a robot, built by a startup called 7X Robotics, in her basement that (slowly) helps with folding laundry.
On its website, 7X Robotics bills itself as “[making] Windows standalone software to make your robot do autonomous home tasks like wash dishes and fold clothes,” adding the laundry product has the ability to “[fold] three t-shirts one after the other with no human aid.” The company has posted a short demonstration of the robot on YouTube.
Logistics notwithstanding—Stern writes in part 7X Robotics hopes to “package this up and start selling it soon”—the company’s laundry robot has immense applicability to accessibility, disability-wise. As a disabled person who copes with visual and motor conditions, it isn’t at all difficult for me to imagine how a mainstream consumer version of this product could make folding laundry eminently more accessible. Three t-shirts today isn’t that impressive, but that belies the point; the point is somebody like me, with lackluster hand-eye coordination and partial paralysis due to cerebral palsy, could have the robot assist with me a task that would otherwise be burdensome and inaccessible. Moreover, it’s a prime example of the genuine good AI can do as assistive technologies. As with chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini helping with web searches and essay research, for example, this laundry robot—or 7X Robotics’ dishwashing one—can help with household jobs that many disabled people can’t (or shouldn’t) do. Maybe you’re someone with arthritis. Maybe you have chronic fatigue. Maybe you can’t always remember the correct way the fold the kitchen towels. The resonance runs deep, transcending sheer coolness or convenience. Although it’s true there does exist a slew of on-demand wash-and-fold services to sign up for that offer accessibility gains too, they don’t take away from a future—however far-flung it feels in the present—where a disabled person could get one of 7X Robotics’ robots to fold their clothes in their home.
For more on robotics and accessibility, I wrote last year about Amazon’s Astro.
