In the 18th century, the court of Marie Theresa of Austria was wowed by an extraordinary invention. The Mechanical Turk was presented as a chess playing machine.
It would go on to tour around Europe for decades, winning most of its matches before eventually being destroyed in 1854.
That it was created decades before Ada Lovelace was born, let alone conceived what a computer would be alongside Charles Babbage, was irrelevant.
So too was the small matter that the first computer programme that could beat a grandmaster in chess was still more than two centuries away.
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It mattered not because it was an illusion. Some clever trickery enabled a hidden real player to hide within the Mechanical Turk and actually play the game. The contraption was, for all intents and purposes, a convoluted puppet.
The Hapsburg Empire may be long past but the efforts to wow people with glorified puppets are back in fashion.
The internet has been ablaze with reactions to Neo, the robot butler being developed by 1X Technologies, a California-based company. The launch video, aimed at getting early adopters to pre-order, was impressive on the surface.
Neo, weighing 30kg (4.7 stone) and standing about 5ft 6in (1.7m), is a bipedal robot designed to do household tasks.
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This can range from cleaning to loading the dishwasher to even greeting guests. 1X is taking pre-orders now for either $20,000 (€17,400) to own outright or $499 on a subscription basis, with delivery promised next year.
The launch video showed its most obvious market to benefit, retirees or the elderly, who might need more help around the house. There’s obviously a broader appeal here as the great complaint of the AI revolution has been that it seems to be focused on higher value labour when most of the world really wants it to take away monotonous tasks.
Here is a robot that promises to do the latter. Well, rather, it promises to do so eventually. At least 1X thinks it can.
That launch video was carefully put together. There were two clips in the nine-minute reel where Neo was shown to be actually acting autonomously. One was letting someone in a door. The other was collecting a cup from someone.
Readers with an affinity for gaming will be familiar with the caption “not actual gameplay” in ads. Those are designed to make the game look better than it is. Neo and 1X have taken the concept to another level.
A video with Joanna Stern of the Wall Street Journal rather bluntly unveiled the limitations of Neo. Stern, who was invited by 1X to see a demonstration, didn’t see the robot conduct any operation autonomously.
Instead, Neo was operated the entire time in what 1X calls “expert mode”. In reality, this meant that every action it conducted, including speaking, was done by a real human using a virtual reality headset and controls.
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Even then, with a human guiding its every action, Neo showed the dexterity of Bosco. Getting a bottle of water from a fridge and carrying it three metres took a minute. Loading a mere three items into a dishwasher took close to five minutes.
Yet, despite 1X not showing any autonomous action by Neo in its own test environment to Stern, the business expects to ship devices next year. The premise is that these early adopters will use it enough that the robot’s AI learns how to do more chores and is eventually able to do these autonomously.
There are so many questions that could be asked when examining that rationale. What safeguards are in place? How will it impact privacy? Can Neo be hacked? How does it impact home insurance?
These, however, can all be put aside for now because there’s one more pertinent issue: 1X wants people to pay to help them develop their product.
A fool and their money is easily parted but this feels egregious, especially considering the data challenge involved. Getting bipedal robots to operate safely and amply nimble is already a challenge. Adding on the AI challenge, the brain essentially, is doubling the problem.
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No two dwellings are identical.
If where you live is anything like my place, even then the layout can change daily due to personal laziness as sometimes it’s easier to store things in a corner for a while. Getting Neo or any autonomous helper robot to adapt to all of this requires a ferocious amount of data.
Yet for all of these obvious issues, 1X wants people to pay for the privilege of helping the company use their homes for research.
The Mechanical Turk was created by Wolfgang von Kempelen because he was determined to impress Maria Theresa. In much the same way, companies in the AI space are rushing to find a new way to wow us.
With Neo, 1X has shown what happens when the urge to be first takes over from the need to be good. The business is selling a vision that, right now, is illusory.
All it has to show for it is an expensive puppet.
