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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   2615 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 2, 2025

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This might have a CW angle, it might not have. But I have to bitch about the Neo robot.

For the uninitiated, the Neo X1 Home Robot is a home assist humanoid meant to perform the daily tasks in the household for people that don't have maids. It is Rosie the Robot of Jetsons fame, except in a deliberately less fuckable package.

And also 100% teleoperated. They claim its only partially teleoperated but we all know its 100% brittle edge shit.

I am deep in the robotics space and one thing repeatedly emphasized in deployments is DO NOT TELEOPERATE IN PRIVATE DOMICILES. Obviously the security and privacy implications are immense and pose incredible liability risk for operators. If robot has a call home check in function like Alexa and is sometimes on and sometimes off how do you prove the negative that the robot was off at the time of any incident happening? Its a minefield.

You know whats a bigger minefield? Sexual harrassment.

The Neo X1 is teleoperated with livestreamed footage to a Quest 3, complete with haptic feedback on the controllers. The Neo X1 is basically a captive Omegle audience, and you can basically torture any operator by strapping a Mr Hands video to the camera field of view and touching the robots hands every few seconds to force the haptic feedback. And while operators are obviously free to terminate a session for harrassment mitigation, you really think someone that shells out 20k for a robot that REQUIRES this type of teleoperation for fulling long tail tasks will accept that his 20k robot can just decide to not work?

The future of general purpose humanoid robotics is really interesting, but Neo X1 is basically a juicero moment for the industry and the longer Boston Dynamics or Tesla fail to come up with something the more fake and gay the entire concept becomes.

Isn't the point of the telepresence operators to help generate training data for complex tasks? Like it's the same idea as autonomous vehicles: first have the human operator in control and record data with sensors, then progressively shift tasks over to an automated system with a human overseeing the task, with the human only intervening where necessary. This works even better with telepresence since the human can just remote into a robot that gets stuck, fix it, and move on to another robot with a different edge case.

This model sounds plausible to me, but I'm not involved in the robotics space, so I'd be curious to know what you think.

In terms of the safety aspect, I'd be much more concerned about the customers than the operators. The human operator can always just take off their headset if they are being harassed, while the customer cannot. And there are pretty obvious issues with having a roving camera controlled by a human operator in someone's home, like the scandal where gig workers for Irobot posted pictures online of customers on the toilet. It turns out that they were shipping images back to a contractor for data labelling. That seems like the much more obvious failure mode for the Neo.

In the long run yes, but I'd argue that you want to start by focusing on making the telepresence operation as good as possible. Mass data collection has serious privacy implications and tempts you to optimise your business model for selfish objectives (data collection) over customer service. This is a hard-sell as it is, you want to put absolutely all your effort on making it as easy and comfortable and good as you can IMO. As the Japanese say, 「お客様は神様です」(The customers are gods.)

Then, once you have your business up and running, and your tech platform and hardware is in a really nice, mature place, you can offer opt-in discount campaigns for data collection or do what iRobot does and allow your employees to take one home for free if they consent to data collection.

The X1 has a bigger problem that I noticed. When watching a video of it, it looks like the center of balance is somewhere completely different than where a human's center of balance is. This made simple things like bending down to close a dishwasher door take forever to figure out.

I can see some kind of justification of an initial "orientation" period that has a human expert on the other side, helping a robot learn where everything is and how to care for the specific appliances in the customer's house. But the problems of the X1 goes beyond that.

I watched a video and I just don't see this catching on. The thing took 5 minutes to load a few items into a dishwasher, and that was with 100% remote operation. You can talk about minefields all you want, but the bigger minefield is that 100% teleoperation is expensive. I'm sure the robot itself costs no small sum, and beyond that a portion of the $20,000 purchase price has to go towards paying someone to do housework more inefficiently than they could in person. And the "housework" they do seems to be limited to light tidying up; you aren't going to get one of these things to clean the bathroom, or dust and vacuum. In other words, it doesn't do anything that you'd actually pay someone to do. It's useless! And the operator needs special training to do things that need no special training, and presumably having an operator actually available is key to the whole thing since you don't want a robot that's an expensive paperweight because there's no one there to remotely operate it. So, unlike an actual maid, you have to pay someone to be on call constantly in case someone wants you to move a book from one table to another. For $20,000 I can hire a cleaning service who will undoubtedly do a better job.

Interesting. My feelings are the opposite of yours: as someone with AI-robotics experience I’ve been thinking just teleoperate the damn thing ever since I saw the Stanford R1 doing housework.

I can see the problems you mention but I don’t think either problem is insurmountable.

  1. Have the robot have a clear kill-switch that physically disables vision (via a shutter), and also cuts off power to the motors and other sensors. This also eases concern over abuse of the customer by the operator.
  2. Lease the robots to the customer rather than selling them. They’ll be cheaper and the entitlement will be less.
  3. Make it clear in the marketing that the robots are 100% remote controlled and and that you are buying competent high-level service, not your own personal machine slave.
  4. Have a proper procedure for recording data in cases of harassment. Recorded data is only saved if an incident is reported (no general archiving so reduced privacy issues).
  5. To the extent economically possible, market at older people who need care rather than at people with a maid or butler fetish.

I get the appeal of teleoperation since it solves 99% of the bullshit edge case tripups that any type of robot runs into, but then the economic proposition dies entirely. Teleoperation performs the low frequency near-regex tasks like dusting tchotckes or fetching packages but it still can't do priority care like flipping grandpa to prevent bedsores or popping dementia grannies pills into her mouth. Once I'm paying for a subscription with another human being accountable I want everything I'm paying for. Users accept the limitations of their roomba, but if its high level its gotta actually be a high level assistant. And given how it took 5 minutes to get a glass of fucking water the assistance quality leaves much to be desired.

To my mind the economic proposition comes from:

  1. the fact that one well-trained worker can cover far more ground when they don't have to worry about transport costs.
  2. they never actually enter your home so you don't have to worry about theft and so on.
  3. related but there's a lot of people who have never had a maid but would use a remote-controlled robot because it feels less invasive.

Much of the market for labour is somewhat patchy - even my relative with severe mobility issues spent most of a decade only needing 90 min in the morning to get dressed, 30 min (most of which is unused) to warm a microwave meal for lunch, the same for dinner, then some care for bed. In practice this ends up looking a lot like full-time care, but it doesn't have to. Likewise dusting once a week or tidying the desk once a day. Possibly you pay for use time not daily (with a minimum spend to make it viable).

And the robot would have to be designed from the ground up for teleoperation. I would give it some sort of wheel / track arrangement for speed and stability (or maybe something more like HUBO) with a torso that can raise and lower to provide a stable basis for manipulation. Then try and optimise the arms for speed and responsiveness, although I appreciate there's only so much you can get here (speed/forward-accuracy/dexterity pick two).

Clearly this isn't what they're going for (and the design looks like a horror-movie where the big twist is there's a person stuffed inside) but that's how I'd try it.

Problem of teleoperation is the same problem of ride hailing services: lumpy demand. Your operator isn't going station to station, he's having to spin up multiple assistants only for them to lay idle later on. It ends up being a permanent remote butler, but without the flexibility of on-demand functionality.

I am also ignoring the basic executive deficiencies of all robots for variable tasks. Rugs and cables are navigation deathtraps, let alone stairs. Grabbing stuff without haptic feedback for edge delineation or roughness is a recipe for overpressure. Even teleoperated robots will struggle, and I would argue struggle even more because humans are too used to our own feedback mechanisms and translating imperfect feedbacks makes things worse - look at how crap we are if we need to do fine work with thick gloves on.

Neo strikes me as using the claim of training data development as an excuse for rolling out a halfbaked teleoperated product in advance of other home assist robots. It stinks of narrative control being favoured over capability readiness, and the only weirdos that will accept a manifestly incapable robot like that are perverts that get off on violating the theoretical operators privacy.

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