The human in the box: why household robots are still remote controlled

Would you order a household robot if you knew that in the most complicated moments it is not a system doing the steering, but a person at the other end of the line?

According to a test by the Wall Street Journal, that is exactly the case at present with 1X Technologies' Neo. Practically every more complex task runs via a human operator.

Robot Slavery

The term that gives the episode its title is deliberately harsh. The historical reference point is “Der Türke”, an 18th century chess automaton with a human sitting inside it. The modern one is Amazon Mechanical Turk, named after exactly this automaton, where humans complete tasks that appear to be performed by machine.

The questions that follow from it are uncomfortable and justified: who is tidying up here for whom, and at what hourly wage does the human sit in the box?

Note what this means for data protection. A remote controlled robot in a flat means that a stranger looks into that flat through its cameras. Faces are pixelated, that is part of the safety measures. The rest of the flat is not.

For the purchase decision that is the decisive piece of information, and it appears in no advertising video: in which situations does a human take over, is that displayed, and who is that person.

Why the humanoid form right now

The technical part explains why, of all times, movement is coming now into a field that stagnated for decades.

Safety measures are part of the picture: faces are pixelated, force and speed are throttled. That is sensible and at the same time it limits the range of use, because a throttled robot is simply too slow for some tasks.

The data protection side glance

In passing, both talk about real incidents: Chinese robot vacuums and Norwegian buses that send data to Asia.

That belongs more closely to the topic than it first appears. A household robot is a mobile camera with a microphone that drives through every room and creates a complete map of the flat. With a robot vacuum that is already the case, and with a humanoid at eye level there is the addition of what lies on tables and on shelves.

The test question before buying is therefore not what the device can do, but which data it collects, where that data goes and whether it works without a network connection.

Conclusion

The episode's balance sheet is a double one: we live closer to Asimov's laws of robotics than assumed, and further from real autonomy than the glossy video suggests.

For your own judgement, a simple rule follows for every demonstration. Ask whether remote control was used in this recording. If the question goes unanswered, the demonstration counts as a demonstration of mechanics and not of autonomy.

By 2030 both expect humanoid household robots in German living rooms. Probably, though, in a considerably less spectacular form than expected, as the Paro robot seal in elderly care or a robot vacuum with a gripper arm show.

That is the more likely path: not one device that can do everything, but many that can do one thing well.