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PaperclipPerfector  17d ago (text post)   2376 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.

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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