Could robots write novels, making authors redundant?
I had just completed my latest novel, The Passage East 1934, when I came across an article in the newspaper about a training programme for robots to perform menial household tasks.
For years, the idea of a humanoid robot tidying up your home, folding your laundry, or even making your morning coffee has felt like something just out of reach—equal parts sci-fi fantasy and tech industry promise. But as it turns out, getting robots into our everyday lives isn’t just about building better machines. It’s also about…well, filming yourself doing the dishes.
Yes, really.
A new kind of job has quietly emerged from the growing ambitions of the AI and robotics world. The requirements? Surprisingly simple: a head strap, a smartphone, and a willingness to record your daily chores. Glamorous? Not exactly. Important? Increasingly so.
As artificial intelligence continues to evolve rapidly, humanoid robots have become the latest battleground for innovation. Today’s prototypes can walk, dance, and even throw a punch with impressive coordination. But the ultimate goal—the so-called “holy grail”—is a general-purpose robot that can seamlessly operate in homes, shops, and workplaces.
And here’s the catch: robots don’t just magically know how to do things. They need to learn. A lot.
That learning depends on vast amounts of data, especially the kind that shows tasks from a human perspective. In tech circles, this is called “egocentric data” or simply “human data”—essentially, footage of people going about their everyday activities. Think cooking dinner, watering plants, or wrangling a slightly uncooperative vacuum cleaner.
To meet this demand, startups have sprung up to recruit everyday people as data contributors. One such company has been building a global network of remote videographers—regular folks equipped with cameras strapped to their heads, capturing life as they live it.
According to the company’s head of robotics data, the need for this kind of footage spans nearly every industry imaginable. From factories to hospitals, each environment involves different movements, workflows, and quirks that robots must learn to navigate.
Participants are given filming guidelines and a rotating list of tasks—everything from cleaning and gardening to pet care. The expectation? Around 10 hours of footage per week. It’s part gig, part experiment, and part contribution to the future of automation.
But it’s not just about ticking off chores. There’s also room for creativity. Workers are encouraged to record anything they think a robot might need to do in the future.
It’s a slightly surreal thought—that somewhere, your routine of wiping down countertops or organising a cupboard could help train the next generation of humanoid assistants. Yet it’s also oddly fitting. After all, if robots are going to live alongside us, they might as well learn from the experts.
And who better than the humans who’ve been doing it all along?
This leads me to a question. Could robots become authors? Could they sit down at a desk with a computer and a mouse, do everything from plotting to writing a novel, thereby making us authors redundant, irrelevant, mere onlookers? They could work nonstop for hours without needing a coffee break, suffering from brain fog, or experiencing writer’s cramp. The only sustenance they would need is periodic battery changes.
Ah, but writing a novel is a highly intricate creative process, I hear you ask. It isn’t like mopping the floor, loading a dishwasher, or cranking a machine’s handle in a factory.
To which I would retort: it isn’t beyond the realms of possibility that the bots working on these projects are able to equip robots with artificial intelligence, making them thinking machines, just as we humans are.
A frightening thought.
Will someone fetch me a cup of coffee? I have got a headache coming on.
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