• 02 Nov, 2025 *

The new neo robot premiered this week, showcasing the $500 a month subscription that sees customers gain access to a general purpose home robot. The thrust of the proposition is that the hardware is attached to a smart AI that can both carry out autonomous problem-solving tasks such as cleaning up the house, loading the dishwasher, and folding clothes. You have access to an app that allows you to schedule certain tasks, and the bot even has a ‘companion’ mode so that isolated but monied old folks have access to an embodied computation process to differentiate between cayenne and paprika.

Watch the video for some context on the presentation of the thing - I think there’s something so interesting about the approach taken for this. It’s quite a nostalgia driven advert that positions the main speaker as explaining the robot to his grandma - effectively placing the robot in the established present as something to be caught up with, rather than a new proposition to be thought over or weighed up. It was an impressive pitch.

New hardware for an old enemy

The issue of course is that this is yet another massive smash and grab attempt on digital privacy in the global north, coupled with exploitation of the global south. First and foremost, all the popular media circulating of the bot shows the robot moving around home spaces inoffensively, inhuman in affect, but human in effect. The robot is however being teleoperated by someone using a virtual reality headset and controllers in almost all of the demonstrative media. While certain tasks (that are traditionally very easy for a human being to complete, but hard for a robot) can be given over to a problem solving AI, a lot of the activity that requires critical thinking and planning - such as cleaning an entire house, identifying and then taking out trash is actually intended to be handed over to a remote operator in India.

The clear and obvious definition of a fixed rate for unlimited human labour.

This means you have access to unlimited human labour for $500 a month. This economy is deliverable only by providing a physical actuator for human labour in another country. Of course it would be illegal to ship over these workers and pay them their local domestic salaries in the global north to complete unlimited labour in the home day and night. Here then is one of the brazen value propositions of the Neo bot: We will make your domestic workers as fungible in form as you treat them to be in your mind’s eye. Interchangeable, dismissible, and inhuman. Abstraction of relational and eye-to-eye accountability is a key part of economies of scale in complex systems reliant on human labour, and this is no different.

In addition to presenting a complex challenge to labour law, this open approach is an evolution on the history of AI-centred organisations; historically, we have many examples of modern ‘mechanical Turks’ - that is, dressing up human labour as an AI application (Like Amazon’s ‘just walk out’ store which was actually staffed remotely by hundreds of Indian workers). Neo does away with the cloak and dagger, the system is open and indeed proud of its value proposition to the customer. Having produced a mechanism where instead of utilising the sustained efforts of one person, you instead tap into a managed pool of labour that can access the same physical actuation in your living room - Neo intends to sell wage slavery by the back door, abstracting your enjoyment of domestic bliss from the fleet of workers who provide it to you.

Generally, when people become wealthy enough that they own a space they cannot possibly maintain by themselves, they employ domestic workers. This is a complicated affair because domestic workers are people with souls and material needs, and likely exist in material conditions very different to that of the person wealthy enough to pay someone to tend to their home. This means that the wealthy are inherently suspicious and distrusting of their domestic workers, they think they will steal from them or live in resentment of their employer. The wealthy have to witness the worker, and worse than this - they have to witness the worker witness them. Neo is a sanitising solution; finally, we have access to the effects of domestic workers, without the human inputs or considerations.

Best of all for the rich and suspicious: the sense organs afforded to the domestic worker to carry out their daily labour is a surveillance mechanism of their effectiveness and honesty. No more discretion, no more relationship, no more trust.

Data nightmare on legs

The box-tee baseball-cap surfer-dude tech-bro who runs the wage labourer laundering company identifies a gender essentialising data model he calls ‘big sister’, which is where you admit that you’re a ‘big brother’ company but promise that you’re using the data to do good. It seems like the company has made it to a working teleoperational robot that can do a few things well, and aims to capture data from it’s first commercial user base to train it’s model over time.

In addition to training off the manual labourers who perform domestic work via teleoperation (and building an incredibly valuable model most likely), this also means that your Neo bot is a data ingestion point, sucking up thousands of images of your home each day. The mind boggles at a future where law enforcement can get a floor plan of your house, or be let in at 2am by issuing a warrant to your domestic robot.

Conclusion

AI has a central thrust of trading obscene amounts of compute that have clear and irreversible impacts on the climate - disproportionately effecting the global south. We have a rich and long standing tradition of exploiting the economic positioning of the people who live in poorer countries, which was leveraged as society digitalised to conduct labour at a distance - Indian call centres became a meme out of this frequency.

The last 10 years of efforts in the AI space have built a vehicle for ramping up efforts to sell consumer conveniences in the global north that are thinly veiled and mechanically abstracted outsourcing of thinking and doing to people in other countries - largely the global south. All of this incarnate and refreshed in Neo: The robot that proves that the venn diagram of people who like to brush wage slavery under the rug and think that doing the dishes is below them is a circle.