I was elbow-deep in a bulk ferment when Wyatt read me the Tesla earnings release off his phone, and I want to be very clear about my reaction, which was to look at my starter Marguerite and say, out loud, “absolutely not.” Marguerite is six. She has a name, a temperament, and a specific spot on the counter where the light hits her at 4:12 in the afternoon. She is not being handled by a $30,000 chrome nephew that learned to fold laundry from a YouTube compilation.
For those who missed it: Tesla told investors their profits are up but they’re going to spend a truly upsetting amount of money on humanoid robots and AI, which they framed as good news. That is the framing. Good news. A publicly traded car company is warning shareholders that it will soon be a lot poorer because of the metal butler it’s inventing, and everyone clapped.
I posted about it in Real Homes, Real Hands (12k members, wonderful group, no seed oils in the recipes) and within about forty minutes the consensus was clear. Nobody in that group is letting one of those things in the house. Ronna in Vermont said her chiropractor’s wife saw a demo unit at a trade show and it “smelled like a new printer,” which — I don’t know what to do with that, but I believe her, and I don’t want that smell near my children.
My sister-in-law Kendra, who works the front desk at a pediatric practice and is honestly more qualified than most people with the actual license, said the thing that stopped me cold. She said, “Brooke. Think about the EMFs.” A six-foot humanoid running on lithium and neural nets and standing next to my toddler at breakfast. Standing there. Humming. Learning her.
People keep telling me I already have a Roomba and I need to be consistent. The Roomba does not reach. The Roomba is a hockey puck with ambitions and I respect it for staying in its lane. What Tesla is proposing is a thing that opens cabinets. A thing that could, theoretically, on its own, decide to reorganize my spice drawer, which is arranged by the moon and not by any system a machine could learn without violating my privacy.
I will say — and I am trying to be fair, because I don’t want to be the anti-technology mom, I love our chest freezer, I love our reverse osmosis system, I love the app that tells me when the chickens are laying — there ARE things I would let a robot do. It could carry firewood. It could stand outside and receive Amazon packages so the driver stops throwing them. It could hold a light for Wyatt when he’s under the sink. Outdoor tasks. Grip-based tasks. Non-food tasks. Nothing that touches the fermentation shelf. Nothing that goes upstairs.
The homeschool co-op moms had a whole conversation about this at pickup on Thursday, and Larken (who used to work in supply chain before she deconstructed) made the point that we don’t actually know what these robots are trained on. Somebody’s videos. Somebody’s kitchen. A stranger’s routines, absorbed into a database, and then poured back out into MY home in the shape of a helper. That is not help. That is a houseguest with no last name.
Also — and I want this on the record — Elon has never made sourdough. I don’t need to look it up. You can just tell. A man who has made sourdough understands that a starter is a covenant, and you don’t hand a covenant to a bipedal appliance because it can allegedly fold a towel in under a minute. Marguerite would know. She already knows when I’m stressed; she rises differently. She would rise differently for chrome, and I don’t want to find out how.
So no. Not in this house. Wyatt can build one in the barn if he wants a project, and I will make it a little apron out of the old flour sacks, and it can carry firewood, and that is where the relationship ends. Marguerite stays on her shelf. The light hits her at 4:12. We are not inviting anything into this kitchen that Elon Musk had to warn investors about.