1X Neo – Home Robot - Pre Order
1x.tech
1x.tech
We've seen that people behave worse when you introduce indirection. People act worse on the internet. Soldiers have an easier time killing with drones than in person. The ethical issue is in both directions: its inhumane to the operator, but I also don't want to feel like a fake person on a video screen to them.
This is then exacerbated when you realize that the people operating this machine are almost certainly not being paid well, creating obvious and legitimate negative incentives. Then you plop them into the households of people with the insane wealth required to afford this. You might think that I have just described the situation with maids (and to some extent, I agree! I have never really felt comfortable that dynamic either), but this is actually different, because you are adding in the indirection and making actions and interactions feel less "real" to both parties: the clients are likely to treat the robots worse than they would a human helper, and the operators may feel these rude clients they see on their monitors aren't as real as the people around them.
teleoperated robots don’t have that incentive and can pay “international low” levels of compensation
Besides having someone strange in your house, you also have the company probably recording stuff. Privacy wise... It's worse. But that makes me not as concerned with safety since it any misbehavior would quickly be detected.
I can think of at least one very prominent company that is currently recording, at scale, its users in its quest for full autonomy. As best I can tell, that company simply deletes videos when they are inconvenient.
Even needing a clearer feels living unsustainably - its living in a house too big to maintain.
And if the answer is that works takes up too much time, yes we work too many hours.
The cleaning lady is not some rocket scientist, she is someone that has very low skills and therefore does low skilled labor: cleaning houses.
This is false, having a clean house, clean dishes, cooked food is extremely valuable, but this is mot captured by money, because half of the population were basically indentured servants that were culturally expected to provide this work for free.
Say whaat? The woman's father literally paid good money to have her taken away. Everyone but the woman saw cash changing hands, but she was legally barred from owning property.
Freedom was for men.
If the present “owner” paid “good money” to take her away, doesn’t that mean she was a liability instead of an asset?
Of course, the indentured servants payed rent in kind, with their bodies, whether they like it or not.
I'll be curious if they move those positions to a lower cost-of-living area as they scale up.
From Wikipedia: "A fortified wall has ended unauthorized Mexico-US immigration, but migrant workers are replaced by robots, remotely controlled by the same class of would-be emigrants."
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbJGQl-dJ6c&pp=ygUUc2xlZXAgZ...
[0] https://mosh.org
Thinking about it now, if one would deliberately add much more latency (a few seconds), it might be possible to use real-world simulation as aid. At least for operations which can be decomposed into sequences of transitions between stable/safe states. Say moving dishes from dishwasher to cupboard. Picking up is critical, but holding in hand is (presumably) safe, placing in cupboard critical, once placed it is safe. Then one could let teleoperator do the entire critical move virtually, act it out in simulator only. See what the outcome is. If high risk of failure, deny operation. If good chance of success (per simulation) can allow to execute in the real world. More autonomous operation will need ability to simulate actions, project alternative approaches into the future, and a world model strong enough that can also plan and execute based on it. So there are potential synergies in a full-teleop, to hybrid teleop to autonomy transition. Note, this approach would also assume the relevant environment to be static. So it would not help handle the pet or toddler...
By the way, we've had robotic surgery [1] for years. These machines are very expensive, and it takes months, if not years, to learn to operate them flawlessly.
That really depends on how demanding you are. For example, I prefer to thoroughly wipe the dishes after taking them out of the dishwasher (if necessary). This is a fairly demanding task in terms of motor skills. I suppose we all have similar discrepancies from what is considered normal or good enough.
A human-knitted marvel that does it all. From telling cayenne apart from paprika to cleaning your toilet.... well, maybe. From what I can tell, it can flush but not wipe, so you'll still want to budget for a bidet.
Technically, it makes Level-5 autonomy look straightforward. At least roads have rules and standards; household bathrooms, not so much. But let's gloss over that, because I want to know more about the legal agreement you'll have to sign. IANAL, but I expect something akin to a carpet-bombing of blanket disclaimers: no liability for direct, indirect, incidental, consequential, punitive, or other damages—including injuries or loss of life—or really anything else that could go wrong, such as losing your mail, opening your door to assist in a robbery, setting your house on fire, flooding it, or sending your banking information to a Nigerian prince. Too bad iRobot never got around to explaining the legal side of things, but there's always hope for iRobot 2.
Is this a humanoid robot that's controlled by someone in a call center remotely doing your laundry?
Putting aside ethical reservations about how much they are probably paying per task, that feels like wash and fold with extra steps.
What they can do is, for everyone, have a base model, and then improve it over time. Then, with software updates they can improve the set of skills the robot can handle out of the box.
But this is the problem with current AI systems, without a continuous learning capability, you're always limited to the "default skills". As soon as you have something out of the box for the robot to do, you end up needing Indians to learn it.
All of AI is flawed in this way. LLMs for instance have almost no continuous learning capability, that is why we don't have AGI yet. They can't learn new skills. Therefore, they can't adapt to new jobs they have not seen during training. They can't even play pokemon properly or any complex game for that matter, because games involve learning new skills during gameplay.
It’s a training session. They’re not training the model on the robot in that moment, they’re collecting training data, don’t overthink the details.
Companies found out that hiring indians and teleoperate the “robot” is far cheaper than having an autonomy or AI algorithms with sensors on-board. Speaking of, all these food delivery “robots” were/are teleoperated as well over the internet as well.
Presumably, this is a way to collect diverse training data for the robot to be trained on. Wash and fold as a service is valuable (to some people), and presumable the “extra steps” are offset with the in-home aspect of this.
Meanwhile, the ethical considerations are huge. Laborers are literally training their replacement, and probably at questionable wages. They’re also explicitly inviting someone into your home remotely, and that person can see and interact with your house. Feels like a privacy and safety risk. Additionally, it seems likely that this would be a literal Trojan horse to allow international labor to work within the US without dealing with actual immigration. Oh and just for good measure, it’s taking the jobs traditionally held by some of society’s least privileged and most desperate workers.
Anyways, if it actually works, I want one.
Edit: I feel compelled to note that apparently they’re hiring in Palo Alto for these roles, today.
That one doesn't have to do, hence the appeal.
Truly it does look like that.
> Use NEO as a mobile bluetooth speaker anywhere in your home.
I expect my robot vacuum to vacuum the floor, because it's a little wheeled disc on the floor. It's not going to be able to cook for me. But this thing? Yea, it should cook for me.
Humanoid only seems useful if it can do stairs - something many form factors fail at. Though I'd expect a centaur form factor could do stairs better and probably is cheaper.
But it did remind me of my friend Ben Skora and his robot AROK. Fabricated in his garage using sheet metal (Ben rebuilt cars), power window motors, dryer vent pipe for arms, a Richard Nixon halloween mask inside a motorcycle helmet, two car batteries and wheels as shoes, bicycle brake clamps covered with rubber gloves as hands, a front panel of lights that blinked, and miles of wiring that never worked 100%.
The whole system was analog. Tones from two princess phone keypads controlled the motors and he could talk and listen remotely (20 ft away) using a hacked set of walkie-talkies. Don't ask me how.
AROK was built in ~1971-1973 and now resides inside a glass case at the Moraine Valley Community College Technology Building. [1]
He built AROK to help around the house, do chores, walk the dog, etc.
[0] https://cyberneticzoo.com/robots/1975-arok-ben-skora-america...
[1] https://www.morainevalley.edu/news-story/arok-the-robot-roll...
It would seem like the ideal target for this would be say a hotel operator. A team of these could clean a large number of rooms on an unoccupied floor of a hotel at once. Even if this was tele-operated remotely, this seems like it could be particularly beneficial for hotels in remote locations where its harder to hire people locally.
"For 20k$, you can pre-order one now"
The pre-order is only $200
But yes, it gives a good perspective about what's the state of the robot right now
Mind blowing.
I'm skeptical of v1 of this technology, but I could imagine a mature version of this technology could be great.
And $500/mo for essentially an always-available housekeeper seems very reasonable.
Where I live, having a housekeeper come for a few hours once a week costs about $100 a week, or $400/mo. Having a robot that could potentially always be there to:
* Tidy up.
* Clean
* Do laundry
* Help with other stuff
Seems well worth $500/mo. I don't expect that V1 of this technology will be able to effectively do all that stuff, but I'm hopeful that v2 or v5 might be able to.
On a related note, "folding laundry" seems to be a really hard challenge for machine learning to solve. Solutions like "Foldimate" kind of work if you individually hand it every piece in the right way - but nothing seems to be cable of having a human dump a bin of washed clothes in and spitting out nicely folded laundry. And everything so far that's promised to do that seems to be vaporware.
Maybe, but you should factor in that many chores can't be done at all, and those that can be done will take ~10x as long.
Sure, my old washer could wash a load in say an hour and the dryer could dry that load in 2 hours. So 3 hours per load. Except that was only true for the first load. The second load has to wait for the dryer to be done with the first load, so it actually takes 2 hours to "wash" and then 2 hours to dry, so 4 hours total. And that assumes that I'm home or available at just the right moment to swap the loads. And forget running a load overnight. I mean I can, but why would I want to leave a sopping wet mass of clothes sitting waiting to be thrown into the dryer. The new one takes anywhere from 4-6 hours for a cycle to run. Seems like a terrible trade off, except I can start a load at 11 at night, and have a cleaned and dried load in the morning. I can throw a load in before I leave for work, and it will be cleaned and dried when I get home. It doesn't matter than it took an extra 3 hours because I wasn't there waiting on it, and I didn't have to swap the loads.
A side and unexpected benefit of this machine too is that it's actually faster at drying loads of bedding. The big problem with a classic tumble dryer and bedding is that it spins in one direction constantly. Early on when the bedding is all wet and heavy it starts rolling into a ball, and no matter how good your dryer's sensors are, you will almost inevitably open that dryer to a mass of hot on the outside bedding and damp on the inside. You'll unravel the mess, and throw it back in for another round or two. Because the drum unit for the all in one is the same as the washer unit, it spins in both directions while drying, just like the washing machine does. As a result, bedding never gets wrapped and balled up during the drying phase and the bedding comes out dry first time every time.
The irony and complete disconnection from the reality of 99% of people is quite mind blowing indeed
The last few years of tech have been full of keynotes with AI that can make art, AI that can send heartfelt messages for you, AI to make music, etc - All things people actually like to do and want to do.
This is a $500/mo robot that can do household chores so you don’t have to. Many people in America (estimated >10%) spend a few hundred a month already on actually hiring cleaners to visit their house and clean biweekly. This is cost-comparable and a task no one wants to spend time on.
This is a luxury, but it’s a top-25th percentile luxury not top 0.1%.
> This is cost-comparable and a task no one wants to spend time on.
It's a robot that will be mostly remote controlled by a wage slave to pick up your dirty socks, this is black mirror tier, not startrek tier.
Point being, we might be at an iPhone-like pivotal moment for home robots.
If you showed a 1980s EE any component taken from the Neo, it'd look like science fiction. Some of the least sophisticated parts (motors & batteries) are still an order of magnitude better than anything available 40 years ago; the most sophisticated (processors, memory, camera sensors) are at least six orders of magnitude better. The Pentagon of the 1980s would have fought a small war to get their hands on a few of the MEMS IMU chips that we put in video game controllers.
1. Remote teleop with transfer learning
2. Quiet operation (nobody else is doing this)
3. Pulley based hands
For that price, absolutely
Plus I have epilepsy and live alone so this might just save my life
Imagine being a kid and waking up to this sitting in your room, silently watching you sleep.
Imagine how terrified your dog is going to be of this thing, shuffling around or getting stuck with its foot on the edge of a rug.
Imagine finding it going through your underwear drawer when you come home from work early.
Man makes up stories. Scares himself.
Some people make jokes, and then the rest don't get the joke so they think it's real and go along with the meme out of wanting to fit in. Eventually, the neurotic find everything scary and dangerous. Everyone else just skips over this nonsense while you guys self-reinforce. Social media's worst effect.
* Water Plants
* Turn off lights
* Get the door
* clean up trash
* Load/Empty dishwasher
* Tidy House
* Laundry
* Bartend Party
* Feed Pets
* Play music as the most over engineered Bluetooth speaker
In other words, nothing very labor/skill intensive yet.
And if you let your robot feed your pets, they will eventually love the robot more than you. I suppose that's the last activity you'd want to hand over to an inanimate object.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43132260 ("Neo Gamma (Home Humanoid) (1x.tech)"—48 comments)
Small and medium-sized businesses will start thinking that it's much better to lease a unit for $500/mo. than $2,000/mo. in payroll for one human. Then they own the unit after 3 years. We're going to need some form of UBI soon.
The total addressable market for giant fighting robots on the other hand...
I think that it's hilarious (in a grim way) that we got this thing : a 30kg robot with no proven reliability performing dynamic/active balancing at all times and everyone jumps to the fear of 'The Scary Foreigner' rather than the fact that this actively power-damp'd mass is actively trying to fall backwards or forwards, being held together by whatever control loop, onto your toddler or pet.
A single non-redundant power-failure is orders of a scarier proposition to me than a foreigner with a bad attitude : you can fix that with management and action auditing , more than a single person in the loop, etc. You can't fix the future awaiting technical failure.
We still haven't fixed bad technicals in any industry yet -- we occasional get bad planes delivered to customers. We have technical failures in pacemakers.
For purpose of this discussion I'm ignoring ethics (other than slaves and there I resorted to legal concerns to sidestep the issue) - If it was possible for me to get an affordable human in my house I would no longer be able to ignore those issues.
I personallly would -not- want an alpha / re alpha large robot roaming my house. If it hullicinates or a horrible bug a lot of things could get destroyed in a hurry.
This feels like like Musks promises of a fully autonomous self driving car.
So if you get the product now, then when the robot is operating, there's basically an extra person in your home.
You can apparentlty choose when it operates, and you can also block certain spaces in your house from the robot able to reach it. But it does feel to me like a recipe for disasters.
If a company needs pre-orders in this business, they probably lack enough funding to play.
I'll personally wait to own best hardware (Unitree) and purchase my own 3P tele-operation service contract.
How'd they somehow revive Gene Roddenberry to come and pose with Neo?
IDK, this is not a problem I need to concern myself with. I’m clearly not the target demographic.
As long as 1X stays in business or enthusiasts exist, I have to imagine there will be some option to clean/replace the head covering on the $20,000 robot.
Think about a MacBook that’s a couple of years old. Glossy letters on the keycaps, a couple of sneeze splatters on the screen, some cosmetic scratches.
As for cloth, I feel similarly about my worn flannel shirts and some chunky-knit sweaters, but not car seats or white shirts with some tomato-sauce stain on them.
Assuming this style of robot catches on, the designers or enthusiasts may find ways to make the cloth wear feel cozy instead of ratty.
How would remote human operators scale, especially for the $20k "ownership" model? I presume the actual hardware probably costs them at least $10k to make, so after about 400 hours of "remote operator use", it's all loss on the company?
I suspect they have a limit on use, or a pay-to-use-remotely thing they neglected to announce.
There are a lot of best cases in the above. Time will tell if it works. I'm not betting on it, but I'm cautious so don't read too much into that.
It's pretty clear that they're still working on the AI training so 'human in the loop' is not part of their long term business model.
What else are we getting AT BEST beside taking out the trash and gimmicks?
The Kohler rep near me was pretty surprised when someone walked in and offered ridiculous cash for the seat on display. The buyer explained... "There is no way I can impress my guests more than having them realize that even the toilet seat is gold plated." Kohler wound up selling the whole run.
Nothing, perhaps, less than a Humanoid robot that is almost as good as Roomba.
People will pay a crazy amount of money to show off.
everyone that ever tells me that has hardwood or tile floors and a mostly uncluttered house with no doors.
yes: cleaning robots are a solved problem for people with clean uncluttered houses free of long-hair pets or a spouse/etc with a laundry-throwing problem.
That is even disregarding the privacy implications of a robot that walks around the house with a fucking camera attached to its noggins. If anyone thinks that the camera is only there for the job and kit collecting data is fooling themselves. Because I will bet my ass that that’s how the company actually makes money from investors.
> Initially, NEOs cooking capabilities will be restricted from use. NEO can provide you with great recipes or help with the cleaning up instead.
TBD on if it ships on time, how good it is, etc, but fuck, this is pretty cool.