How NEO Humanoid Robots As Robot Butler Are Reshaping Our Future

Updated: April 19 2025 06:46
In a world where energy has become abundant through technological innovation, we're now standing at the threshold of a similar revolution in labor. At the TED conference in April, Bernt Børnich, who has dedicated a decade to building humanoid robots, presented NEO, a revolutionary humanoid robot that could fundamentally change how we think about work, time, and what it means to be human.



Just as our ancestors couldn't imagine the ease with which we access energy today—flipping a switch for instant light—we might soon struggle to remember a time when intelligent labor wasn't readily available at our fingertips. NEO represents the beginning of this new era, a humanoid robot designed to handle virtually any task a human can perform.


"We are standing at the gates of a future where the work needed to build the products we use, the services we rely on, and even the chores in our homes will be as effortlessly accessible as energy is today," explained NEO during its introduction, "enabling you to explore new frontiers and focus on what makes you truly human."

While humanoid robots have captivated our imagination since Leonardo da Vinci sketched "The Mechanical Man" around 1400, they've remained largely in the realm of science fiction—until now. According to Børnich, these robots aren't just appearing in promotional videos; they're becoming part of daily life in real homes.


"NEO is now part of my daily routine," Børnich shared. "It does some of the chores around the house... I treat it kind of like a butler, like a companion. It's part of the family."


What makes this particularly fascinating is not just the practical applications but the emerging social dynamics between humans and these physical AI entities. As these machines become integrated into our homes and lives, they're creating entirely new types of relationships that blur the boundaries between tool and companion.


Perhaps the most surprising revelation from Børnich's presentation was his team's discovery about how robots actually develop intelligence. The conventional wisdom suggested that robots would first master repetitive tasks in factories before graduating to the complexity of home environments. However, 1X's experience proved this approach fundamentally flawed.


"This is actually categorically wrong," Børnich explained. "Back in 2022, we took our previous generation wheeled humanoid, Eve, and we put it in industry... And after about 20 to 50 hours, the robots, they just stopped learning." The reason is surprisingly intuitive in retrospect:

• Factory environments are designed to reduce diversity and variance
• Factory workers need minimal information to produce consistent results
• Repetitive tasks provide limited new information after mastery

What robots need to develop true intelligence is exactly the opposite: diversity, challenges, and new tasks that push their capabilities daily.


Drawing a parallel to the development of large language models, Børnich explained that early attempts to create specialized AI for specific tasks like poetry writing failed because they were trained on narrow datasets. Success only came when these models were exposed to the entire internet—the full spectrum of human knowledge and expression.


For robots, the equivalent of this diverse training environment isn't the factory floor but the home. The seemingly mundane domestic environment contains extraordinary complexity and variability.

"The home is this beautiful, chaotic thing. It's kind of like the messiness that is being human," Børnich noted.
Consider a simple cup. In a home environment, a cup can be:

• Clean, dirty, or somewhere in between
• Located on a table, in a cabinet, or on the floor
• Empty or filled with various contents
• Part of a social context (someone using it, waiting for it, etc.)

This complexity, multiplied across thousands of objects and scenarios in a home, creates the rich, diverse training environment robots need to develop genuine intelligence.



Traditional industrial robots are stiff, high-energy machines designed for precision but not human interaction. Creating robots safe enough to live alongside humans required a fundamental rethinking of robotic design. These engineering choices make NEO suitable for learning and working in human environments, where safety cannot be compromised.

NEO's approach uses tendon-like mechanisms inspired by human muscles, resulting in a robot that is:

• Quiet instead of noisy
• Soft and compliant rather than rigid
• Lightweight and safe for human interaction

As more robots spend time in diverse home environments, the knowledge they gain is shared across the network, gradually increasing the percentage of tasks that can be performed autonomously.

"As we have an increasing number of these robots throughout homes, living among us and learning, more and more of this becomes autonomous until hopefully, one day, all of this will be fully autonomous," Børnich explained.



While the immediate applications of robots like NEO focus on household tasks, Børnich's vision extends far beyond convenience. He sees humanoid robots as potentially transformative for society in ways we're only beginning to imagine:

1. Robots building robots, creating an accelerating cycle of production
2. Robots constructing data centers to advance AI capabilities
3. Robots building chip fabrication facilities to speed technological adoption
4. Millions of robots conducting high-quality scientific experiments in labs worldwide

"We will have millions of robots around in the world doing high-quality, repetitive experiments in labs and helping us progress science at a pace that we have never seen before," he predicted.



Perhaps the most profound potential impact of robots like NEO isn't technological but philosophical. By providing an abundance of labor, these machines could free humanity from constraints that have defined our existence for millennia.

"This journey is about a lot more than just you not having to do your laundry," Børnich emphasized. "It's about creating a future where we actually have time to focus on what matters to us as humans."

In this vision, the partnership between humans and machines enables us to direct more of our collective energy toward answering fundamental questions about the universe and our place in it. Rather than diminishing humanity, this symbiosis could elevate what it means to be human by expanding our capacity for discovery, creativity, and meaning.