The Neo Robot Economy
1X plans to sell Neos for $20,000 a piece and also let people rent them for $499 a month. If everything goes according to 1X’s plan, deliveries will begin next year as the startup makes a small batch of Neos available. That’s a big “if,” as YouTuber Marques Brownlee points out, but the Neo’s relatively low price—and the chance it’ll be ready next year—has ignited hopes that the era of advanced robotics at home is arriving sooner than expected.
Count me as one of those people who’d like a Neo, which sorta resembles a baby-faced C-3PO in yoga wear—but not quite for the same reason as many others, I’d imagine. I don’t want one for me. I want one for my aging parents in rural America, where finding quality, dependable housekeeping staff is difficult. Would I pay $499 a month for a robomaid to get my mom off her feet a bit more? Hell, I’d pay double, triple—quadruple. (Generally, I think the potential for AI and robotics to meaningfully transform eldercare is an overlooked part of both markets.)
Still, it is trippy to consider the economy I’m so eager to see develop. While I lament about the lack of good housekeepers in Appalachia, they exist in plenty of other places, and widespread adoption of Neos would almost certainly depress their wages. That’s, uh, obviously not great: We’d need to find ways to retrain those people for new jobs or face the macroeconomic consequences of greater unemployment.
Next, let’s think about teleoperators, the industry term for the people employed by companies like 1X to remotely operate robots such as Neo. The robot will require some support from teleoperators to function, at least for the time being. I can picture a future where we’ve replaced large swaths of our world with teleoperated robots—as humanlike AI remains a quixotic concept, and the robots still need our help.
For teleoperation to achieve a financially viable scale, we’d probably have to treat teleoperators as we currently do call center staff—pay them a paltry amount and outsource many of the jobs. That’s what we already do with some teleoperators.
Yeah, it’s a weird future I’m describing, where the labor dynamics are the mirror inverse of what we saw in the pandemic. During lockdown, many blue-collar workers had to physically go to their jobs, while their white-collar counterparts didn’t. It’d be the opposite if teleoperated robots replace the need for low-skill workers to turn up in person. Instead, those employees would stay home, and by contrast, in-person work would be a key signifier of economic and social status. (Hey, it’d be one way to end the work-from-home debate.)
Not everyone benefits from a planet full of Neos, and that tempers my excitement a little. Which, I think, simply qualifies as a very human response.