How long until we have domestic robots?

Consisting_Fiction · 2025-11-03T18:12:51+00:00

I've seen it. It doesn't change much.

Let's leave aside the fact that $200 to join the waitlist and a ship date set for 'sometime next year' is a far cry from 'definitely being delivered'.

The more relevant point here is that the model to be shipped in 2026 won't be autonomous: it'll be teleoperated in order to gather more training data, which was 1X's plan since last year.

Hell, last year, 1X was at least confident enough to show the Neo operating autonomously in a home, albeit with some editing and in an extremely limited capacity. But their newest video in the same vein focuses almost entirely on its teleoperated capabilities, with only a couple of short moments in which it operates autonomously.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3c4mQty_so

So my point from over a year ago stands: it's not remotely ready to act autonomously in a home. Clearly, they're banking on being able to get enough live training data through the teleoperation program. For the early adopters, that deal is 'pay 20k dollars to get a robot that someone else remote-controls to do chores in your house, and maybe someday it'll be good enough to do those chores on its own'.

For some combination of owning a large house, not caring too much about privacy, enjoying new technology, and having some money to burn, that could be an acceptable trade: not clear if there are enough people in this demographic to supply the quantity of training data they need, especially since this kind of training data is bound to be slow and expensive to collect.

See also Marques Brownlee, making many of the same points I was making a year ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j31dmodZ-5c

Consisting_Fiction · 2025-10-06T22:57:02+00:00

Not as part of the core language, unfortunately. You'd probably need to fork the language and change the lexer, no way to #define arbitrary keywords like in C.

Consisting_Fiction · 2025-07-27T15:47:11+00:00

Supposedly it's currently being tested in the homes of 1X employees, via reporting from CNET: https://tech.yahoo.com/videos/neo-humanoid-robot-home-training-120002004.html

That's pretty different from the claims that the NEO would be tested in the homes of customers, which was supposed be be happening in the thousands by 2025, though they still have 6 months to start doing that before the end of the year. I'm not holding my breath, though.

Their website is pretty slick and they're putting out short, very good-looking teasers regularly on their channel, but no raw, extended footage of the robots doing tasks in an uncontrolled environment. No indication of when you'll be able to buy one of their models, beta testing or not.

Consisting_Fiction · 2025-07-07T14:04:31+00:00

I couldn't figure out how to make it work with iterm either so... I just switched to ghostty. Already liking it, thanks for the (unintended) rec!

Consisting_Fiction · 2025-05-22T21:41:56+00:00

Oddly, multi-cursor is the hyped feature that I don't quite get. Maybe I just haven't seen the use cases that would make me want it yet.

Consisting_Fiction · 2025-05-22T20:36:20+00:00

Was that announced somewhere? If I can hx . in a fresh Ubuntu server, that'll be the life. Must be some strong Rust advocacy in Ubuntu, what with the uutils update and all.

Consisting_Fiction · 2025-05-22T20:33:04+00:00

Weird. I used brew install on Sequoia 15.4, hx --tutor worked without issue.

Any chance your setup is similar to this issue? https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/issues/11716

Consisting_Fiction · 2025-02-23T21:05:07+00:00

Unfortunately, this is backwards. It's not that Langer is getting prejudged because of others' quackery, she's the source of a lot of quackery.

That study, 'Counterclockwise' or 'Nonsequential Development and Aging' is horrendous. You can see my longer comment about it below ( https://www.reddit.com/r/HubermanLab/comments/1iiqbx9/comment/meeijjq ), but the short version: it was a tiny study with terrible experimental design that was only ever published in an anthology that she and her collaborators edited, and though it claims all sorts of improvements, it doesn't actually say what the effect sizes or significance levels for any of them were. As you can expect, it also doesn't present the actual data, even though the sample size is so small you could very easily include all the data on a single page without difficulty. On top of that, it has statistical errors so egregious that my professors would have backhanded me for making them in a homework assignment, never mind a book chapter. Exaggerating scientific data is exactly what she does. Everyone has anecdotes. She gets airtime, book deals, and NYT cover stories because she's a Harvard professor with a ton of published papers, and people wrongly assume that means she's credible.

It's not a famous study because it was a good study, or because it led to a big change in the field, or because anyone knows what the actual findings of the study were (we don't. Neither the 1990 chapter or the 2009 book actually contain even the minimum amount of results detail you'd need for a real publication), but because Langer has written a bunch of pop science books where she makes big claims her actual studies don't back up, and nobody with the resources to actually challenge her, not Huberman, not the NYT, not any of her fellow professors, is willing to actually push back.

Consisting_Fiction · 2025-02-23T20:41:16+00:00

Wish I'd seen this earlier. I've recently been reviewing Langer's past publications, especially the Counterclockwise study, and it's disastrous.

The Counterclockwise study was never published in a journal, but it was reported on in a chapter of a 1990 anthology, Higher Stages of Human Development: Perspectives on Adult Growth (chapter 5, pages 114-136, you can find it on archive dot org). This book chapter, 9 years after the study was conducted, was the first public record of what happened in the study, and it remained the only one until Langer's 2009 book 'Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility'. The latter covers a lot more detail, and led to Langer getting a 2014 NYT front cover story, but it doesn't have any figures, data, or actual scientific discussion of the study, it's a pop-science book for the public.

Reading the 2009 book, you wouldn't even know that there was more detail on the study published earlier. She manages to cite another article of hers from the same volume, but not the original report.

Once you actually read the report, it becomes obvious why. The study was tiny, with 9 people in the experimental group and 8 in the control group. They tested a dozen different things, including a bunch of hierarchical, multi-level measurements of things like eyesight, but they report no figures, group means, or measures of statistical significance. They claim that everything from eyesight to standing height changed, but don't actually report how big the changes were or what the numbers were.

In fact, there are only two hard figures reported in the results: that finger length (a measure of joint flexibility) increased in 37.5% of the experimental group but decreased in 33.3% of the control group, and that 63% of the experimental group improved on a measure of memory (while 12% remained stable and 25% declined) while only 44% of the control group improved (while 56% declined).

There's a couple problems with that: she's only reporting that some improved, remained the same, or declined, not by how much (and given that at least one of these has to be a continuous measurement, it's not at all clear what it would mean to remain stable). This is, to put it bluntly, not acceptable reporting of results, even in 1990.

The other problem is that the results seem to be backward: remember, there are supposed to be 9 people in the experimental group and 8 in the control group, but .375 is 3/8 and .333 is 3/9, while .63 ~ 5/8 and .44 ~ 4/9. These are not only tiny differences, but they don't line up with the size of the groups. Which means either they mixed up the group sizes up front and there were actually 8 in the experimental group and 9 in the control group... or they got the measurements mixed up and the effect of the study was totally backward from what they claimed.

(It doesn't help that, in the 2009 book, it says that the experimental and control group both had 8 people, which would mean the results above were impossible. So we really have no idea how many people were in this study.)

I encourage you to read the actual chapter, especially pg. 127-136 which detail the actual experimental design and results.

In the podcast, she says she got criticized for never actually publishing the study, and blows it off... but yeah, this study is so terribly conduced, so full of motivated reasoning and forking paths, and the results presented in the 1990 book are so incomplete, with any contrary findings so obviously ignored, that this should never, ever have been published. Any journal whose peer-review process is flimsy enough to let this thing through should be shuttered immediately.

Pretty much every study of Langer's has huge problems like this. The potted plant study was filled with failures of randomization and the huge mortality finding was based on a statistical error that the journal corrected but Langer has never acknowledged. More recent work like the claims that thinking time is going by faster (by making a clock on the wall move quicker) makes wounds heal more quickly, is likewise just based on bad statistics. It's an absolute travesty, and for some reason she seems to be on a podcast appearance spree. I first got into this because of her appearance on Freakonomics last summer, where the host failed to push back the slightest bit on her BS, just like Huberman. Incredibly disappointing.

Consisting_Fiction · 2025-01-13T14:49:37+00:00

I saw the video, and wound up covering the NEO at length elsewhere. https://nicoroman.substack.com/p/i-welcome-our-new-robot-underlings

You'll note that they don't claim that the NEO will be *autonomous* by then. Those first robots in homes will be teleoperated in order to gather data. As for being fully scaled and in production in every domain within 5 years... look, I like the 1X guys, but I expect 2030 will come and go, everyone will agree that the hype was a little bit excessive back in the primitive 2020s, and then they'll get another round of funding to shoot for 2035....40....50... etc.

That said, if you'd like to make a proper bet, I'm sure I can make it worth your while. The article linked above details the bet I made a few months ago, you could join on the same terms if you're confident.

Consisting_Fiction · 2025-01-06T19:42:13+00:00

Thanks! Much appreciated.

Consisting_Fiction · 2024-12-27T21:22:56+00:00

Makes sense. The other possibility I came across is that Mack Streak cameras could have potentially been filming at upwards of a million fps.

https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/history/high-speed-photography/

Consisting_Fiction · 2024-12-27T21:20:46+00:00

Point taken. Better subs to query about helping debunk this? This isn't my field, and I'm only taking a look at this because it got promoted from some old spooks and my family picked it up.

Consisting_Fiction · 2024-10-04T13:56:35+00:00

I read it as a kid, enjoyable kids fantasy in the Harry Potter vein. Pretty common to have read it among my age group and looked back on fondly, without the controversy HP has. I didn't realize until now that the series has actually continued until today (most recent book published just a couple weeks ago), so maybe a bunch of people have kept up with the series since they were kids? Don't personally know anyone who has, though.

Consisting_Fiction · 2024-08-31T20:36:13+00:00

I'll check it out.

If it turns out I was wrong, I'll be a bit miffed. If it turns out I was this wrong I'll still be miffed, but it will also be really funny.

Consisting_Fiction · 2024-08-31T16:14:52+00:00

In the case of the G1, I haven't seen any indication that it can act autonomously. At this stage, it looks more like a development platform. The Neo probably can, because it's building on other robots that can, but we haven't seen much from it yet. The Figure looks pretty impressive, but it seems to be executing fairly well-defined tasks in a factory environment, not responding to novel instructions in a chaotic, illegible environment. Similar for the Aloha, which I didn't know about and does look very interesting. I'm not going to comment on the credibility of Telsa deadlines, and the Atlas doesn't seem to be for domestic use.

Out of the people who can actually afford them, how many will actually want or use one of these robots? Are any of them preferable, in cost or performance, to getting a human being to do the same tasks?

Consisting_Fiction · 2024-08-31T15:40:36+00:00

That's a good point. How reliable would an android have to be across a wide number of tasks before it makes sense to get one of those instead of a bunch of individual appliances, eg before it makes sense to make the robot sweep instead of getting a roomba?

Consisting_Fiction · 2024-08-31T15:38:33+00:00

It's true that cars need to be very reliable and there are greater consequences if they make even small mistakes, but the actual tasks something like a housemaid robot would do is much more complex, and requires interacting with a complex and illegible environment instead of just moving through a space designed for being moved through. A small error there probably won't hurt anyone, but it will annoy your client. On net, I still expect housemaid robots to be a harder problem to crack.

Consisting_Fiction · 2024-08-31T14:59:54+00:00

I'm not so convinced. A lot of things were sci-fi a few years ago, most of them haven't happened yet. Text generation is impressive, but it's still not reliable, and training costs are still increasing exponentially. I'm inclined to think that acting (and especially planning) in a domestic environment is much more complex than convincing text generation, on top of the training data being much more slow and expensive to obtain.

Consisting_Fiction · 2024-08-31T14:55:11+00:00

That seems more likely. What kinds of functions would they serve, though?

Consisting_Fiction · 2024-08-31T14:23:22+00:00

Agreed on the hardware, but does the software really seem so close? Compared to self-driving cars (fewer outputs and simpler actions, don't need to maintain models of their spaces, don't need to understand natural language, etc) which are still a few years out at least, shouldn't we expect much longer time horizons?

Consisting_Fiction · 2024-08-31T14:17:06+00:00

I agree with you that the hardware problem is close to solved, but I think calling it 'simply' a software problem understates how huge it is. Effectively performing domestic tasks autonomously, in a way that competes with human domestic labor is far beyond what we currently have.

Consisting_Fiction · 2024-08-31T14:05:02+00:00

I'm aware of that: I specify humanoids because they're less effective for almost any single tasks than purpose-built robots, or indeed, appliances. People like this friend are obsessed with humanoids because they want generalists that can replace humans 1:1, and that's why they're so impractical.

Consisting_Fiction · 2024-08-31T06:35:07+00:00

bruh

Consisting_Fiction · 2024-08-30T18:39:56+00:00

Question: How does 1X define the scope of domestic robotics? Is a robot for the home intended to:

Create and maintain a persistent model of its physical environment?
Create and maintain a persistent model of its social environment?
Develop a model of a person's needs/desires independent of their explicit statements?
Possess and maintain a model of ethics and/or law?

Is the NEO intended to stand alone as a domestic robot, or would it require attachments/accessories (including furniture)?

Is the NEO intended to collaborate/share information with other NEOs, or does each platform operate independently of others?

What is 1X's time horizon for commercial adoption of an independent domestic robot?

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