Would you feel like entrusting your house keys to a butler who could, at any moment, call someone to peek into your bedroom? Would you let him clean, cook, tidy up, while he watches you with eyes that perhaps aren’t his? These are the questions we should ask ourselves when faced with Neo, the new domestic robot presented by the Californian company «1X», a automaton with disturbingly human features that promises to revolutionize home care. But at what price?
How human is Neo?
There’s something uncanny about watching Neo move. His features are human, too human, some would say. The face resembles an archaic statueessential in its features, but it is the body that disturbs: soft, supple, almost alive. When you see him acting in the promotional video for «1X», the pages of Asimovthose stories where the robots seemed more human than the humans themselves. It makes you think of Andrew, the protagonist of the story «The bicentenary man» (which inspired the 1999 film of the same name starring Robin Williams), who took two hundred years to be recognized as truly human.
We have entered a “strange valley”, that one Uncanny Valley Where the resemblance to the human is so strong that it causes repulsion rather than empathy. Neo knows how to iron, fold clothes, make coffee, tidy up rooms. A prodigy of the so-called “embodied artificial intelligence”, the embodied Ai that leaves the laboratories to enter our homes.
Behind the perfect car
The truth is that behind the perfect automaton hide human beings of flesh and blood (at least for now, who knows in the future). When Neo fails to perform an action, when he gets stuck at a seemingly trivial task, an invisible army of teleoperators steps in remotely to guide him. The «1X Experts»they call them into the company, as if they were technicians from a cosmic call center.
It is Moravec’s paradox manifested in its crudest form: these automatons can calculate impossible trajectorieslift weights that would break our backs, but then they get stuck in front of gestures that a child makes without thinking. Just like in Asimov’s stories, where robots possessed superior intelligence but remained incapable of understanding the nuances of the human soul.
The Mechanical Turk of the 21st century
Giambattista Vico spoke of «historical courses and recurrences». It must be said that, in this case, history repeats itself with distressing fidelity. Let’s explain better: in Eighteenth centurythe Hungarian inventor Wolfgang von Kempelen he deceived Europe with his Mechanical Turk, the chess automaton who even defeated Napoleon, before being defeated in turn by the great American writer Edgar Allan Poe. It was later discovered that A dwarf was hiding inside the cara real human chess player who moved the pieces instead of the automaton.
Today we have Neo, and before him Elon Musk’s Optimuscaught dancing remotely controlled by human operators. And then i Amazon stores «Just Walk Out»where low-paid people in developing countries worked instead of electronic eyes. Technological progress once again proves to be a stage illusion, a magician’s trick where the human hands of a puppeteer shake behind the curtain.
The eye that watches you while you sleep
But the real nightmare It’s not tech fraud. It’s privacy which dissolves like fog on a cold Milanese morning. We have already sold the floor plans of our homes to «Roomba»those robotic vacuum cleaners that mapped every corner and then resold the data to the highest bidder. With Neo we take a further step. Try to imagine it: you are at home, in the most intimate moment, and the “butler” calls for reinforcements. On the other side of the world, someone turns on a screen and sees you. He watches you. He could record, speculate, blackmail. And you would be at the mercy of his artificial accomplice, disguised as a caring servant.
The CEO of 1X, Bernt Øivind Børnich, says that we are still in a transitory phase, that of the “puppeteers”in which human operators are still needed. Yet, he assures (so to speak) that soon artificial intelligence will learn and there will no longer be a need for humans. There will probably be limits to the autonomy of the robots, of the “avalanche guards” that the teleoperators will manage. But who watches over the security guards? Who guarantees that those remote eyes don’t go where they shouldn’t and don’t do what they shouldn’t do?
The price of progress technological
Neo will be available from 2026, for five hundred dollars a month as a subscription, or for purchase starting from twenty thousand dollars. The company has already collected thousands of pre-orders, with a deposit of two hundred dollars. There are those who are ready to welcome this future, evidently. In Asiawhere a certain cultural predisposition to animism facilitates acceptance, Companion robots are already widespread in retirement homes, kindergartens, schools.
In the West, however, the reception was colder. The Internet responded with skepticism and viral memes, as always happens when the future knocks on the door before the present is ready to open. We are already talking about «To the slops»that artificial aesthetic perceived as unpleasant typical of works generated by AI, which now also contaminates robotics.
It’s no longer science fiction
The tales of Isaac Asimov they often started with a problem: a robot that behaved unexpectedly, one of the Three Laws of Robotics that seemed violated. Then it arrived Susan Calvin, the robopsychologist in love with automatons, explaining that it wasn’t the robot that was imperfect, but our understanding of it. In “Bicentenary Man,” Andrew fought to be recognized as human, to have the right to die like a man.
Today those great stories of science fiction (which we all thought would remain fictional fiction) they are becoming reality. Robots are real, they enter our homes, observe us, learn from us. We are in uncharted territory, where technology often outruns ethicsand innovation precedes regulation. An extremely dangerous territory.
Neo is just the beginning, the messenger of a future that will also arrive in the West, sooner or later. The next question therefore is not whether we will be ready, but whether these stories will have a happy ending or if, as in the best detective novels, we discover too late that the perfect butler is indeed the murderer.
