Robert Gordon, an economist at Northwestern University, likes to play a game he calls Find the Robot. As he goes about his everyday life—shopping, traveling through airports—he looks for machines performing tasks that humans once handled. Most of what he sees doesn’t impress him. ATMs, self-checkout kiosks, and boarding pass scanners have been around for years. Beyond that, not a lot has changed. “It’s very hard for robots to do things that are extremely ordinary for humans,” Gordon says. “Turns out that teaching machines to do something like folding laundry is almost impossible.”

Image: A double-arm prototype robot moves a box during a media preview hosted by Hitachi Transport System at a warehouse in Noda City, Japan, on Aug. 25, 2015. Photographer: Akio Kon/Bloomberg