The future is here — or very nearly. As of this week, you can order a robot servant for your home. According to the manufacturer, 1X Technologies, the delivery timetable is 2026 for customers in the US and 2027 elsewhere.

This 1X device is called NEO Gamma. It is tastefully humanoid in form — standing at a modest 5’5”. The aesthetics are deliberately reassuring, with the aluminium skeleton encased in a flexible polymer matrix and clothed in a sleek knitted garment (you can have any colour as long as it’s beige, grey or black). If Ikea made robots, this is what they would look like.

NEO’s movements convey gentleness, an impression reinforced by the lightweight design: the whole thing weighs just 66 pounds. Its “face” is minimalistic — there are two camera lenses for eyes and that’s about it. Any expression is conveyed via LED-illuminated circular tracks on either side of its head. And like all shiny new tech, it talks and listens too.

Opinions will differ as to whether the overall effect is cute or creepy, and there will be a wide range of reactions to the price tag as well. US customers can pre-order one for $20,000, while 1X is also planning a subscription plan allowing users to rent a NEO Gamma for $499 a month.

It ceases to be just an expensive toy when considering what customers would have to pay a full-time human equivalent. The question is whether the robot is half as capable. And this is where the lines become blurred. The promotional videos show NEO tidying up, serving drinks, loading a washing machine, climbing the stairs and performing other uncannily human actions. However, 1X is upfront about the fact that there are limits to what the robot can do on its own. At least some of the time, a human is required to operate the device remotely.

So is this just a 21st-century version of the Mechanical Turk — the 18th-century automaton that could apparently play chess, but actually had a human player hidden inside the machinery?

There are two things to consider. Firstly, artificial intelligence gets better by learning. Remote control by human operators will generate relevant training data. Secondly, unlike the Mechanical Turk, there’s no one inside. The fact that a device of that sophistication — i.e. one capable of seeing, hearing, walking around and manipulating objects with human-like hands — can be operated from anywhere on the planet is itself impressive.

But it’s also somewhat disturbing. There’s nothing wrong with using skilled operators to develop the technology in its infancy, but imagine a future in which there are millions of robots in our homes whose half-baked intelligence is supplemented by a vast army of cheap labour in Third-World service centres. Don’t forget that telepresence technology already allows workers in one country to operate reception desks or unmanned supermarkets in another — only this would be your living room or bathroom or bedroom.

In that sense, domestic robots could make the future look strikingly similar to the past. At the start of the 20th century, there were 1.5 million domestic servants in the UK alone — most of them working in fairly ordinary homes. Even some servants had servants. In the following decades, that whole world was swept away by the development of labour-saving devices and the availability of better employment options. It would be an irony if technological progress were to bring domestic servitude back into our lives — albeit in a weirdly distanced, depersonalised form. That’s why I hope that the AI systems which power NEO Gamma and rival products such as Tesla’s Optimus become fully capable. The purpose of our machines should be to save human beings from drudgery, not to shift it from one person to another.

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Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.

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