The robot enters the house, places the shopping bag on the table, and folds a towel. Precise, almost polite movements. Then it pauses in front of a stain on the floor and seems hesitant for a few seconds. On the other side of the screen, miles away, an operator takes control: expert mode activated. The robot kneels down, cleans, and gets up again. End of procedure. X1, the first company in the world in history, has just opened pre-orders for Neo, his $20.000 (or $499 a month, if you prefer) household robot. Autonomous for basic chores, remote-controlled when things get complicated. Deliveries scheduled for 2026. I no longer wonder whether it will work or not. I just wonder: who's driving it while you're not looking?
X1 Neo, the butler that someone controls remotely
The X1 Neo is 1,68 meters tall and weighs 30 kilos. A slim body covered in soft 3D-printed polymers, hands with 22 degrees of freedom, and a locomotion system Tendon Drive which replicates the movement of human tendons. X1 Technologies He describes it as a personal assistant designed to navigate domestic environments without modifying the furniture or installing external sensors. It opens doors, turns on lights, retrieves items, and tidies rooms. In autonomous mode, it does all this on its own. In expert mode, however, a human operator takes control via visors and remote controls.
The CEO Bernt Bornich he explained to Wall Street Journal That Neo's artificial intelligence isn't yet ready to handle all household situations. To improve, it needs to collect data from users. Anyone who buys Neo accepts that a remote operator can temporarily access the view of the integrated cameras, obviously with precise limits. Users will have full control over when and how a remote operator can intervene, with people masking and restricted zones programmable from the dedicated app.
Initial independent tests have highlighted some limitations: during a demonstration, It took Neo over a minute to bring a glass of water and about five minutes to load dishes into the dishwasher. These times are far from human-level efficiency, but according to X1, they will improve as the system collects more data from the homes of the first buyers. And anyway, it takes me more than five minutes to fill the dishwasher, but don't go telling anyone or I'll get angry.
I asked Lucia if it's worth it
Last night, while we were watching yet another program on home robots, I asked my wife, Lucia, if she thought it was worth renting one. She looked at me with that familiar expression, a mix of curiosity and suspicion, and replied, "It depends. Who's going to drive it when we're not around?" Touch. Because it's true: Neo promises to free us from household chores, but the hidden price isn't in the $499 a month.It's the fact that someone, somewhere, could have visual access to your kitchen while you're preparing dinner, your living room while you're watching TV, your bedroom while you're folding clothes.
It occurred to me Me and Caterina, Alberto Sordi's 1980 film. Sordi plays an engineer who, to free himself from household chores, buys Caterina, a robot maid played by Catherine Spaak. At first, everything works perfectly: Caterina cleans, cooks, tidies up. Then things get out of hand when the protagonist discovers he can no longer fully control her. The machine takes on a life of its own, the rules change, the master becomes the servant. The difference with Neo? In Sordi's film, the robot was autonomous and went crazy on its own. Here, the robot is controlled by someone else., which adds a significant level of complexity.
X1 Neo, the “friendly enemy” we bring into our home
For years, we've worried about our cell phones listening in. Targeted ads after talking about a product, suspiciously accurate search suggestions, coincidences too frequent to be coincidental. We've discussed always-on microphones, voice assistants that record conversations, apps that sell our data. And now? Now. we bring the enemy directly into our homesA friendly enemy, of course: a robot that helps us, assists us, makes our lives easier. But a robot that, one day, will know everything about us. Really everything.
It will know what time we wake up, what we eat, how much of a mess we make, which rooms we frequent most. It will know if we argue with our partner, if we leave our clothes scattered, if we forget to water the plants. It will know how many times we open the refrigerator at night and what we take. According to a study published in Science RoboticsSocial robots that live in homes collect an unprecedented amount of behavioral data: from family interactions to consumer habits, from sleep-wake rhythms to food preferences. Neo is no exception. In fact, equipped with built-in cameras and a continuous learning system, His ability to “know us” is potentially infinite.
X1 ensures that data is protected and that teleoperators cannot act without consent. Yes, yes, of course, of course. The fact is that the home robot safety regulations, such as ISO 13482, focus primarily on physical safety (avoiding collisions, protecting against dangerous movements) rather than the privacy of the collected data. The risk isn't so much that Neo will physically harm you, but rather that it will become a walking archive of your private life.
How do you turn it off like turning off the gas?
Who knows if we'll sleep peacefully with something like this lying around the house. Or if, like today, we turn off the gas before bed, we'll develop the habit of turning off the robot. You never know. Maybe it will become automatic: close the door, check the windows, turn off the X1 Neo. And in the morning, just as we turn on the coffee machine, the mechanical butler will turn on again. It's kind of like having a roommate who doesn't pay rent but knows everything about you., and which is occasionally remote-controlled by someone you've never met.
Proponents of home robotics will say it's the price of progress. That automating household chores frees up precious time for more important things. That by 2030, 39% of time will be spent on housework Unpaid workers could be automated. That robots like the X1 Neo represent the inevitable future of an increasingly aging society, increasingly unwilling to clean bathrooms and iron shirts. And they're right. I'm no neo-Luddite. But that doesn't change the fact that we're quickly getting used to the idea of sharing our most intimate space with machines that record, learn, and communicate with the outside world. Isn't that right?
Fifth revolution or new chapter of dystopia?
We are in the midst of what some are calling the fifth industrial revolution: Virtual agents and physical agents that work for us, that assist us, that coordinate with each other. In three to five years, experts say, the world of work will be radically different. Humanoid robots like Neo, Figure 02, Tesla Optimus They will become a normal presence in homes, factories, and hospitals. This isn't a matter of making dire or dystopian predictions: something significant is simply happening. Something that forces us to rethink the meaning of intimacy, privacy, and control.
Neo will arrive in 2026. Pre-orders are open: the deposit is $200, and the first deliveries will start in the United States. X1 plans to make thousands of units in 2025, tens of thousands in 2026, hundreds of thousands in 2027, million in 2028. It's an ambitious plan, but not unrealistic, considering that the home robotics market is growing 20% annually. And considering that, let's face it, many of us would rather delegate chores to a robot than do them ourselves.
What do I do? Click? For now, still a little stunned, I'm sticking with the vacuum cleaner. Lucia seems to agree. But in three years, who knows. Maybe we'll also have our own X1 Neo, religiously turned off every night before going to bed. Just to be safe.
