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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.
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.
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