A recent article revealed that Minecraft is helping real-world robots learn how to perform complex tasks! These robots are given simple in-game activities - in this case, moving a block of gold ore into a nearby furnace - without any instructions or clear indication of how they are supposed to do so. Over time, they learn and ignore certain actions that have no bearing on putting the gold in the furnace (for example, placing the gold block on the ground is useless for smelting it, so the robot learned to ignore this behavior).
Awesome as this is on its own, it's hoped that teaching robots in an environment like Minecraft will make it easier to teach them how to learn other real-world tasks - like doing laundry, cooking brownies, and other similar chores - by using their learning behavior to remove certain obviously useless actions for a given task. As an example, a robot would have no need to use the coffee maker to do a load of laundry, but without any learned knowledge or experience, it has no way of knowing this yet, without being told beforehand.
While a lot of this is preliminary, could we see real-life robot helpers at home in the future? Very possible! Who would've thought Minecraft could help bring that to us?