Two Robots
"Issue": 141
As a known lover of hardware, I’ve been thinking about consumer robotics a little bit more these past few months. Primarily driven by two events.
1 - The love I have for my Matic robotic vacuum.
2 - The continued attention given before and after the launch of 1X’s NEO humanoid.
The following is just going to be a set of probes I’m trying to work through, and if you have opinions, please reach out.
Humanoids as a “Last Mile” solution
As I look at my apartment, I see a lot of smart electronics that make my life significantly easier. Loading and unloading the dishwasher frees me from the burden of my sink. My washing machine keeps my hands from soaking in a detergent filled tub as I press my clothing across a washboard. My dryer similarly takes care of anything that doesn’t need to hang dry. And my prize possession, maybe one of the best gifts my parents ever gave me, my Ninja air fryer. All I have to do is season my ingredients, and the air fryer takes care of everything else.
Sure, all of loading/unloading/folding of laundry is hell. Yes, I would like if all I had to do was order groceries and meals whipped themselves into something delicious cheaper than ordering UberEats. And of course, dishes remain the discouraging factor of cooking all together!
But in reality, most of these tasks are automated through compelling electronic and mechanical design. For the most part I put chicken in the air fryer, and then get right back to watching Dwarkesh on Youtube. Until it’s time to turn the chicken over at the half way point. WHAT A BURDEN!!!
It’s in this way that humanoid robots represent a sort of last mile solution. If maybe “last mile” is a new term for you, let me share where it comes from.
In supply chain management and transportation planning, the last mile or last kilometer is the last leg of a journey comprises the movement of passengers and goods from a transportation hub to a final destination. The concept of “last mile” was adopted from the telecommunications industry, which faced difficulty connecting individual homes to the main telecommunications network. Similarly, in supply chain management, the last mile describes the logistical challenges at the last phase of transportation getting people and packages from hubs to their final destinations.
— Wikipedia
I think of humanoids representing a general purpose model to solve for the final bits of human effort (last leg of a journey), in an otherwise decently automated home.
We can see the potential effect as two sides of an interesting coin. On one hand, the thing should free up is time while also increasing cleanliness. Cleanliness was actually a very big concern to architects during the modernist period, and during my last trip to Tokyo there was a fantastic exhibit on the themes of modern architecture and the designs created to address them. Cleanliness being a large one, which has immense impact on our daily health.
On the other side of the coin, we increase our potential for slothliness. There are few people that would say they use their time well 100% of the time. Most of us are playing some form of catchup between tasks we know we ought to get done. And what’s stopping us? Generally speaking, the distractions of our connected age combined with a broader sense of burnout. We are entertaining ourselves to death, or at least to numb some of the pain of contemporary life.
The humanoid robot feels like quite a relief in this sense. More time to rest. To not worry about the little things of my home. We could write an entire book extolling the virtues of minding the little things of our homes, but let’s just leave it at that recognition for today. And to double down on a relief to contemporary woes, the NEO seems equipped with the full capability of an onboard LLM — allowing it to act as a companion as well, perhaps a Friend can be hugged and not just worn.
Form Factor Wars
One thing I keep coming back to, is this war on form factor.
I’m not an expert on this, but it seems to me that the human body enjoys tool making because there’s simply things our body doesn’t do that well. But because we are fantastic tool makers, we can augment ourselves into these extensions to do incredible things.
Which then begs the question → is a humanoid the best form factor.
What the humanoid 100% is, is viral. I’ve been workshopping this phrase “that which can be broadcasted, will get prioritized”. I think it’s a good rule of thumb regarding incentives in an every growing scarcity of attention environment. And the NEO forces a conversation like none other. Your eyes simply cannot look away. You want to fully sense how real and capable it is, because of how much it resembles you! Even the mimetic value we’ve seen explode online across all different types of subcultures to add their commentary — has a sort of meta reflection about ourselves and our point and the scope of our activity. One of my favorites is people meme’ing about sending their NEO to a friend’s event in their place. It has the perfect level of joke + sadness of viewing our peers as a burden that makes tech commentary truly worth our time and ultimately quite human.
But back to the functional nature of form factor. NEO is seen in some videos using a vacuum. Which I thought was funny because I turned to look at my Matic robot, which is literally a automatic vacuum & mop packed into a small cube on wheels.
I would say Matic handles about 90%+ of my vacuuming and mopping needs. And that last 10% (under my dining table and in weird narrow corners) has become a less frequent task throughout the week. This frees up plenty of time for my wife and myself. Today, as we left the apartment to head to the gym, I set the Matic to clean the entire apartment. As we walked back, it was just finishing up and docking itself. A special burst of joy occurs when you walk back into your home and see it freshly cleaned.
Assuming that NEO accomplishes maybe 5% more of a thorough job than my Matic, is it worth it?
This allowed me to think of the other last mile problems in my home, such as loading the dishwasher or seasoning chicken for the air fryer.
At Physical Intelligence, the general purpose intelligence company for the physical world, Lachy Groom gifted me the pleasure of seeing some of their models in action. A lot of their demos involve a pair of robotic arms doing some set of tasks. This feels like a form factor that can go much further than people give it credit for. Image a pair of arms suspended from your ceiling, that has enough track run rate to maneuver around your kitchen space freely. It not only would move more nimbly than relying on a humanoid to take steps here and there, but the model would be managing less moving parts to accomplish it’s task.
I’d be really interested in seeing, essentially, “arm stations” in key parts of my home that could solve 9% of that 10% last mile problem. This is obviously an over simplification of the nature of bringing these solutions into the home, but I hope my point is clear.
A Butler For Every American
“Master Wayne?”
Robots in the home, no matter the form factor, simply make us feel richer. And of course they do! They’re taking away a piece of labor that you no longer have to think about. It’s the same way DoorDash and TaskRabbit make us feel richer. We genuinely live the lives of small feudal lords with the amount of services we have at the tap of an app.
And so in Mamdani’s New York I fully believe that a humanoid should be assigned to every apartment by penalty of law.
That’s enough for the comedic relief section. One more small section before I let you go.
Infinite TAM
Robotics, particularly paired with the race to AGI, comes across as this sort of infinite progress glitch threshold that feels weirdly close.
It’s going to take a lot more capital. A lot more AI development. A lot more sensor development. A lot more improvements with actuators and end-effectors and the likes. And I’m sure we’ll have a few labs implode in the process… it’s all part of the technocapital machine’s march forward.
Now personally, I don’t believe in any utopia scenario. For plenty of reasons but if you’re a long time reader I’m sure you can deduce why.
However, I do believe in markets that are ripe for exponential expansion. According to a quick search the robotics market last year was around $75B. With the amount of capital moving into this field, the continued gains we will receive from underlying models, and expanding consumer + business use cases → why not 10x over the next 10 years?
What could dampen all of this, is a loss of political will. The same thing we see slowing down the adoption of miracle technology like Waymo.
Although I don’t know the current state of legislation around it — last December Trump vocally supported protecting dockworkers against port automation technology (link). I would have to do more research on the consequences of this particular issue, but to me it represents how a market can stagnate not due to lack of engineering effort, but political risk.
Final Clarifications
Just so that the record is absolutely clear. I love 1X’s NEO. I think it is incredibly exciting. Anything that reads as casting doubt, is me trying to fully think through it.
Similarly, although probably more obvious, I love my matic robot.
I do not care about the NYC mayoral race that much. It is clear to me Mamdani is going to win, so I took that joke at his expense. If it were up to me Mayor Adams would be getting his eyebrows threaded during interviews until he gave up his thrown to NYC Kingship (another joke).
Finally, what NEO really crushed it on is approachability. It is easily the cutest and softest humanoid I’ve ever seen designed. I feel like I can actually look at it in the face. And I believe that that will go a long way, and a lot of other companies should take a lesson on approachability and style from the European founders down in Palo Alto.
Finally finally, I’m generally bullish on any European that chooses to leave the comfortable lifestyle of EU socialism for building hardcore technology in Palo Alto.
I don’t do edits really, so excuse typos and things that don’t make sense.
Thanks so much for giving me your attention. I hope it was worth it, if not… unsubscribing will not hurt my feelings, and will give you back time you literally cannot have back.
Much love.
Live in the light