{"id":240499,"date":"2026-01-16T02:33:09","date_gmt":"2026-01-16T02:33:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/240499\/"},"modified":"2026-01-16T02:33:09","modified_gmt":"2026-01-16T02:33:09","slug":"aside-from-creepy-surveillance-what-are-consumer-ready-service-robots-actually-for-samantha-floreani","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/240499\/","title":{"rendered":"Aside from creepy surveillance, what are \u2018consumer-ready\u2019 service robots actually for? | Samantha Floreani"},"content":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s something particularly dystopian about watching the mute headlines of daytime television play at the gym. It feels like a movie montage; pop bangers streaming, surrounded by sweaty hotties, I watch the latest horror unfold. News of war, the pandemic, death and destruction slide across the bottom of the screen below chatty hosts. It\u2019s here where I first see NEO<\/a>, the \u201cworld\u2019s first consumer-ready humanoid robot designed to transform life at home\u201d. I watch as the hosts gleefully introduce its creepy, soft, grey body and chilling blank face with puny camera eyes. As though exercising my corporeal form wasn\u2019t trial enough, now robots?<\/p>\n

Who in their right mind would want a walking, talking surveillance machine inside their home? The privacy invasion required for such robots to function goes far beyond your smart speaker listening into your conversations<\/a>, your automatic pet feeder capturing footage<\/a>, or your Roomba mapping the inside of your home and sharing it with Amazon<\/a>. Beyond sensors, cameras and pervasive data collection, Neo \u2013 just one example of humanoid \u201cservice\u201d robots now on the market \u2013 relies upon \u201cexpert mode<\/a>\u201d for the tasks it can\u2019t quite manage on its own. That\u2019s code for a remote employee being able to see inside your home and control the robot through a VR headset. Creepy.<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t the first time that the fantasy of automation doesn\u2019t match up with reality. Tech companies all too often (misleadingly) promote their latest product to be far more intelligent than it actually is, all the while relying upon a team of invisible workers behaving like machines to make the device appear to function. For example, \u201cself driving\u201d cars such as Amazon\u2019s robotaxi service depend on a team of human workers<\/a> to remotely drive the car when they struggle to drive themselves. If we go way back to the 18th century, the Mechanical Turk<\/a> was presented to the public as a chess-playing automaton, but in reality it was an elaborate hoax with a chessmaster controlling it from the inside. It\u2019s what Astra Taylor calls fauxtomation<\/a>: a marketing ploy to make pointless products seem cutting-edge. Or what Jathan Sadowski calls Potemkin AI<\/a>: it provides a convenient way to rationalise unseen exploitation while calling it progress.<\/p>\n

Aside from the creepy surveillance and the gaping trench between marketing and reality, there\u2019s also the question of what these robots are for. The promise of technology to alleviate the burden of housework is longstanding. Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek chart the history<\/a> of attempts to transform housework through domestic technologies. They highlight how despite revolutionary changes through domestic technologies like gas ovens, refrigeration and washing machines, they did not, overall, decrease the amount of labour in the home. This is the Cowan Paradox<\/a>: despite all these labour-saving devices, there isn\u2019t any less work being done in the home.<\/p>\n

One of the key reasons behind this is that these technologies facilitated the shift from previously collectively shared work to individualised and undervalued labour, concentrated around the figure of the lone housewife. Activities that once required coordinated efforts \u2013 such as washing clothes \u2013 could now be undertaken by a single, isolated and unpaid person in the home with a washing machine. It also shifted expectations of cleanliness, ramping up productivity expectations inside the home and in turn creating more work. This ultimately contributed to a longstanding project of devaluing the labour that goes on in the home \u2013 by and large performed by women \u2013 despite how it sustains everyday life and underpins all manner of paid work recognised by the capitalist economy<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Turning to more recent developments, we\u2019ve already seen that increased automation through generative AI does not inherently lead to less work \u2013 rather, we end up with workslop<\/a> which actually makes more work, not less. With all this history and research showing the shortcomings of so-called labour-saving technologies, we ought to hold on to a healthy dose of skepticism towards robots pitched as a way to minimise household chores.<\/p>\n

Since that day at the gym, my social media feeds have been full of videos of humanoid robots ranging from embarrassing fails<\/a> and grim attempts<\/a> to close a dishwasher, to waving<\/a> and dancing<\/a> for impressed bystanders. It makes me recall the time a robot designed for warfare performed a DJ set<\/a> as a way for the company to show that its killing machine is also \u2026 fun. Or when Boston Dynamics robot dogs were featured at the National Gallery of Victoria<\/a> in a \u201cfuturistic, yet joyful\u201d exhibition. This is funwashing<\/a> \u2013 a way to humanise and make light of these, frankly, disturbing and dangerous robots. (Though nothing could put me off a freaky robot man more than seeing one dance with Elon Musk<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

The smart home on offer today \u2013 now with humanoid robot servants \u2013 is a thoroughly capitalist product with predictable aims of profit, data harvesting and control. At around A$30k a pop, it\u2019s unlikely these robots will be gracing many people\u2019s kitchens in the immediate future. But when the time comes that they do become affordable: count me out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There\u2019s something particularly dystopian about watching the mute headlines of daytime television play at the gym. It feels…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":240500,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[345,343,344,85,46,125],"class_list":["post-240499","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240499","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=240499"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240499\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/240500"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=240499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=240499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=240499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}