Robotics & Automation · Projected milestone
Robot plumbers and electricians
45% by 2042 · including earlier years
The year is an editorial timing estimate. The percentage applies to occurrence by the stated deadline. These estimates are not calibrated odds.
Robots fix leaks, rewire sockets and fit kitchens in ordinary homes, coping with the mess and variety of real buildings.
Explore this milestone on the interactive mapWhat the forecast means
Milestone stage: deployment
unknown
Broad practical trade execution in previously unseen buildings.
Completion criteria: Independent contractors document at least 100 jobs across diverse occupied homes and all three trades, with code-compliant inspection, paid customer acceptance, intervention and damage rates. Specialty tools may be swapped; humans may not perform the hard portions invisibly.
This page describes a forecast, rather than an achieved result. Read the methodology and assumptions.
Built on
Led to
No connections of this kind are recorded.
Sources & evidence
- Helix 2.5: Zero-shot generalization across 30 homes 2026-09-17
Figure reports three trained behaviors tested in thirty unseen homes without home-specific tuning, with aggregate whole-task success increasing from 9% to 56%. This is meaningful transfer and still falls short of dependable general household autonomy.
- What work can robots do? 2026-09-30
Anthropic models robot exposure across physical tasks, separating limited-setting capability from cost-competitive automation. Its index is an assessment rather than a census of deployed robots or a forecast that hardware progress stops.
Record reviewed 2026-10-18