Joanna Stern of the Wall Street Journal took a day with Neo, one of the first humanoid home robots built by 1X, and what she found should make every homeowner sit up and pay attention. The machine can shuffle to a dishwasher, wipe a counter, and fold a sweater, but those headline tricks come wrapped in awkward clumsiness and a heavy dose of human puppeteering. This isn’t some polished, independent Rosie; it’s a prototype that still needs people behind the curtain to make it look useful.
If you think this is cheap convenience, think again: 1X is asking $20,000 to pre-order Neo or $499 a month on a rental plan, with deliveries pushed to 2026 — a serious outlay for something that’s not autonomous yet. For that price you’re not buying a finished product so much as an invitation to be a lab rat in someone else’s data experiment. Early adopters coughing up five figures should demand far more than glossy marketing and futuristic demos.
Here’s the part the Silicon Valley spin won’t lead with: Neo often operates under teleoperation, meaning a human employee can, in practice, peer through the robot’s camera eyes into your living room to guide its hands. The company says there are guardrails, but the core model for improvement is watching real people live in real homes — footage that will be harvested to teach these machines how we live. That trade-off between convenience and a new form of in-home surveillance is not a theoretical privacy debate; it’s happening now.
1X’s CEO is blunt about the bargain: if the company doesn’t get data from your home, its product won’t get better. That admission should light a thousand alarm bells for anyone who cares about private property and family privacy. We’ve all seen how “data for improvement” becomes a permanent data pipeline to Big Tech, and handing over video of your kitchen and bedroom to a start-up hardly seems like a conservative proposition.
Conservatives should be the first to demand limits on this kind of creep. The home is the last private refuge our culture still has, and we shouldn’t accept technology that treats it like a training ground for machines without ironclad protections. That means clear, enforceable rules about what’s recorded, how long it’s kept, who can view it, and what happens if the company changes hands or is compelled by government request. No amount of convenience justifies outsourcing the sanctity of the household.
Make no mistake: Neo right now is more stunt than servant. Stern watched the robot nearly topple while closing a dishwasher and only succeed at tasks through a human operator in VR — hardly the autonomous domestic helper the hype promises. Shelling out $20,000 for a glorified telepresence device is a poor bargain for hardworking families who count every dollar and value their privacy.
This is a moment to be proud, skeptical citizens, not giddy tech worshipers. Demand transparency, demand audits, and demand that companies prove safety and privacy before they put cameras and mechanical arms in our homes. If we don’t push back now, we’ll wake up one day living in a world where convenience cost us the one place we used to be free.
