why I'm not even a little bit worried about a robot taking my job
The only reason it's taken this long for capitalism to bring forced labour back into the home, is that the fields of robotics and AI are generally unconcerned with solving problems for women.
The Wall Street Journal put out a piece this week trialing a $20,000 robotic domestic helper. In the 9 minute clip, you can watch the 1X Neo achieve such feats as struggling to open a door, and floppily rolling a rather nice jumper into a ball.
1X Neo is just the latest in a long line of Mechanical Turks. We've had both automatons and grifters for longer than you think. A chess-playing robot toured Europe in the 1770s, wowing public audiences and royalty alike with its grandmaster-like prowess. The brains of the "Mechanical Turk" was, of course, a real guy shoved in the cavity of the machine.
The 1X Neo, just like the Mechanical Turk, is piloted by a human: in this case, a teleoperator who controls the robot using a VR headset. Which just goes to prove, any time a salesman promises full automation, we really gotta start understanding that as a grift. It nearly always means that the real human labour required to make the thing work has been offshored or outsourced.
If and when 1X Neo evolves to rely on an AI model instead of an operator, we have to remember that dozens of engineers and hundreds of data annotators worked for years to create the illusion that humans are not and were never involved.
Why not get a real human woman —and yes, domestic workers are overwhelmingly women — to clean your house? Who's the target market for this machine, that doesn't work yet, and costs more than a year's weekly cleaning services?
Probably that rare but real category of clients with class or race anxiety over having a human worker in their home. You don't have to worry about the cleaner stealing your Patek Phillipe, when the cleaner is in fact a genderless grey sack of servos with no pockets.
What I don't understand, though, is paying a premium to let the company use your home as a lab.
By the CEO's own admission in the WSJ clip, the company desperately needs training data, and the only way to get it is in a real-world environment. If consumers really understood how valuable their data is, I'm not sure they'd keep paying corporations for the privilege of surrendering it. 1
This particular robot is called X1 "Neo" but there's nothing new under the sun about having a personal domestic helper. I'm not the first to point out the etymological origin of the word "robot" is 'forced labour'. The only reason it's taken this long for capitalism to bring forced labour back into the home, is that the fields of robotics and AI are generally unconcerned with solving problems for women.
As is so often the case, what is sold to us as innovation actually reveals the limits of the capitalist imagination. With all the resources and technology available to us in the 21st century, the eye-watering billions invested in AI, the wildest idea the best and brightest minds can come up with is...a robot housewife.
Unlike less corporeal AI helpers like Siri, Alexa and ChatGPT, the X1 Neo has been carefully designed to appear completely genderless. It's like the design team tread carefully to avoid accidentally reminding us that the robot is replacing a woman. The face has bright, wide, cartoony eyes, but no mouth. The four words the website uses to describe our new home helper are "light", "quiet", "soft", and "gentle". The perfect housekeeper! Right?
As much as the design tries to avoid invoking the feminine domestic, the CEO says the quiet part loud when he's trying to reassure us about surveillance:
"I'm a big fan of what I call, Big brother, big sister, principle. Big sister helps you, and big brother is just there to kind of monitor you. And we are very much the big sister."
As much as they try, they can't get away from the fact that consumers are comfortable with the idea of a woman cleaning, a woman helper, a mum, a sister or a paid female cleaner. The idea of a 20-something male computer vision engineer piloting a robot around your house is something different all together. So as soon as the journalist starts to ask about privacy, that's when the 1X Neo becomes "big sister".
At the end of the WSJ video, in the same way all tech founders couch their work in terms of social good, the CEO talks about returning dignity and autonomy to elderly and disabled people.
The audacity of asking people to provide training data for free, and the absolute lack of understanding about the true needs of their customers, leads me to guess that individual home users aren't even the real client base here. Once the Gen 1 customers train the AI, the company will probably sell fleets of robots to private equity-owned aged care conglomerates.
Once again, and louder for the back: the problems created by capitalism —isolation, indignity, burnout — are never going to be solved by capitalism. Is there a future where home robots help create a better quality of life for disabled people and our elders? Of course. But don't let that prevent us from questioning why their lives are undignified in the first place.
A robot home helper does nothing to address the ableist and isolating architectures of modern life. Some people are gonna love the idea of a robot helper, sure, but don't let that stop us from asking why so many women in the 21st century are burnt out on domestic labour.
Don't let the addition of another consumer appliance in the home — which is all that the 1x Neo is — prevent enquiring minds from asking why domestic work is still primarily the domain of women, and inefficiently replicated again and again across private households.
So why aren’t I worried this cute lil golem will steal my job? These home robot developers fundamentally misunderstand their customers.
At the end of the WSJ clip, the journalist describes the X1 Neo as a toddler who needs years of training. If there’s one thing my clients don’t want, it’s to train a big oversized baby how to do menial domestic chores.
If I've learned a single lesson from my married hetero clients in my years as a cleaner, none of them need a robot, there's usually already a humanoid in the home that could be assisting with laundry.
1 This economic slight of hand, this reversal of the flow of value in the customer/vendor relationship, is the only true innovation to come out of home automation. The EightSleep "smart bed" (endorsed by all the worst people you know) uses a similar model: charging users a monthly subscription to let the company hoover up valuable health data generated by their sleeping bodies. And I mean valuable! The inside scoop is that a single night of sleep data can cost a company up to USD$4000 to capture in a lab. If I ever catch any one of yas on a smart bed, I will roll up a newspaper and donk you on the head.