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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.
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