We still don’t have flying cars, but a cousin to the Jetson’s “Rosie” cartoon character has arrived for consumers in 2025, ready to pour you a bottle of wine or do the dishes. With occasional human augmentation.
Neo appears to be the first potentially-practical housekeeping robot or android made available to consumers. Developer 1x, states on its website that Neo can be scheduled to do a slot of chores for the day, but is augmented by human controllers when a unique chore is too complex for it to handle alone.
Human controllers will take control of Neo via an Virtual-reality-like helmet in order to get done the chores that need to be done. That portion of Neo’s workflow may give some consumers pause. The 1x human employees may have access to seeing and moving within the Neo owner’s house on occasion.
“You have to be OK with this for the product to be useful,” said Bernt Bornich, the Palo Alto CEO of 1X, told the Wall Street Journal. “Instead of using the classical gears, we can actually pull on tendons, loosely inspired by biology and muscles. This allows Neo to move around not only quietly and smoothly, but also be very, very light weight, and be very low-energy in motion, just like people.”
Neo is reported to weigh just 66 pounds and can lift 150 pounds. Neo is designed with a soft physique and gentle demeanor, to encourage safety. It can even make a little conversation, or tell a joke.
But Neo is primarily a labor robot, and at $20,000, you might have to work pretty hard yourself to afford it. Yet, it looks like on the 1x website the company will accept a $200 down payment, so maybe they accept financing too.
The age of household robots seems to be upon us. Although it appears to be a soft-opening of Rosie’s kin. Hollywood once dreamt of such creations–The Jetsons, Westworld, and, God-forbid, The Terminator. But it’s hard to see the harm in an articulated machine that will help you bring in groceries, or unclog the toilet.
As always has been, it would seem, the risk may come from ourselves. We may have to let strangers into our most private of personal spaces for Neo to get his job done. We do that for human housekeepers, so maybe Neo will find success in its chosen career.
Maybe when we finally get flying cars, Neo can chauffeur us around to our doctor’s appointments, and kids soccer games.
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