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.