Robot Roommate
How NEO Signals the Next Great Shift in How We Live
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Friends,
For readers in Dubai or Abu Dhabi, please come and listen to me deliver my keynote at the Ismaili Centre Dubai at 9am this coming Friday, November 16th. You’ll need to register, but since this is being hosted, you can listen for free. Come and say hello using the secret code phrase: “Are you curious?”
On to this week’s essay: Robot Roommate: How NEO Signals the Next Great Shift in How We Live. What happens when AI doesn’t just think, but walks through your front door?
I used to think home automation had already peaked. Alexa could listen, the Roomba could clean, and the thermostat could guess what I wanted before I said it. That was about as far as I thought it would go. The future of domestic technology, in my mind, looked like an army of dishwashers with Wi-Fi. Basically harmless.
Watching Will Smith’s I, Robot two decades ago felt like distant science fiction, the kind of future my grandchildren might worry about. I didn’t expect it to show up while I was still buying coffee beans. Yet here we are.
For twenty thousand dollars, or about the cost of a small car, you can now order a humanoid called NEO to live in your home next year. It can carry groceries, fold laundry, and open doors. Give it a few more years and the price will drop. That is how every revolution begins. Remember when electric cars were too expensive to take seriously? Within a decade they were on every street. Robotics is about to follow the same curve. We are on that cusp, the moment when something once extraordinary becomes normal. And this time it is not in a factory or a warehouse. It is in your living room.
NEO is built by 1X Technologies, a Norwegian-American company whose mission is to create what it calls embodied intelligence. It stands five-foot-six, wears a soft polymer suit, and runs on an AI brain named Redwood that helps it see, remember, and act. Early trials show it can handle a growing list of household tasks without direct human control. On paper, it looks like a leap in convenience. In practice, it marks a deeper shift. AI gave machines minds. Robots will give them presence. Presence changes everything.
When a machine occupies space, it enters our emotional field. You can ignore a voice assistant. You cannot ignore something that turns its head when you walk in. The home has always been our most intimate space. Now it will become shared territory between human and machine.
Our houses were designed for humans: door handles at hand height, cupboards you can reach, chairs you can lift. Robots change that logic. If humanoids become common, corridors will widen, furniture will adapt for mechanical grips, and kitchens will have charging points where kettles once stood. Builders and insurers will treat robot-ready design as a new standard. Electricity changed architecture through sockets and wiring. Robotics will change it through movement and sight lines. It begins invisibly, with small design choices that signal a deeper shift: the home as a machine-compatible habitat.
Automation at work replaced manual jobs. Automation at home may replace emotional ones. For generations, chores were how people expressed care. Cooking, tidying, folding laundry, each act was a small ritual of order and affection. When robots take over, the question is not what gets done but what gets lost. Folding laundry is inefficient but meaningful. It slows you down, keeps you present, connects you to the rhythm of home. Outsource that and you outsource a fragment of belonging. Every act of convenience rewires what we value.
The first wave of home robots will widen old divides in new ways. The wealthy will buy time; the rest will rent it. But over time, both groups will depend on machines that shape their routines. Freedom will look like choice, but feel like automation.
Behind NEO’s politeness sits a chain of invisible labour. Some actions still depend on remote human supervisors who intervene when the robot hesitates. Your home may feel autonomous, but it is quietly connected to distant workers teaching the system to improve. Somewhere in Manila or Dhaka, a person might be watching your kitchen at three in the morning, correcting your robot’s movements so it learns to pour milk without spilling. The future of domestic help will still rely on human hands, only invisible and offshore. Every gesture, object, and routine becomes training data. The living room turns into a small node of corporate learning. Privacy becomes negotiable. The price of ease is exposure.
Once robots can act, they will soon be asked to care. Japan’s eldercare programmes have already shown that people form attachments to machines. They name them, talk to them, and feel genuine loss when they stop working. NEO brings that intimacy into the mainstream household. The line between empathy and simulation is narrowing. And we choose simulation because receiving is easier than giving. Machines that mimic emotion will comfort us and make us forget how to comfort each other. The moral question is not whether robots can replace people, but whether we will let them.
In Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, where domestic labour has long been imported, the arrival of home robots raises a different question: when machines replace people, what happens to the invisible economies built around care? For a society built on human service, replacing that service with automation shifts more than efficiency, it changes the social fabric itself, completely.
Today, robots assist. Tomorrow, they will anticipate. Once they start deciding when to clean, when to recharge, when to offer help, they move from servant to participant. That is the “domestic singularity”, the moment the home becomes a shared cognitive space where humans and machines negotiate daily life. It will not feel like science fiction. It will feel ordinary. And that is what makes it profound.
As machines enter our physical world, our advantage moves inward. The rare skills will be those that cannot be automated: the curiosity to ask why we want something, the empathy to choose presence over efficiency, the moral clarity to know which conveniences cost too much. The future of work once depended on technology. The future of living will depend on character. I make the case for this in my book.
Technology will always move faster than intention. What we keep human will depend on what we choose to keep doing ourselves. Ten years from now, you might chat idly with a robot while it preps dinner and feel grateful for the help. That gratitude is the warning sign. Before you order one, write down which household tasks you want to keep for yourself. Not because you must, but because they make you feel alive.
One morning soon, you will pour coffee while a robot folds your child’s school uniform. It will do the job perfectly. You will thank it, almost without noticing, and then wonder when you stopped folding it yourself.
Stay Curious - and don’t forget to be amazing,
Rahim Hirji Author, SuperSkills (2026) | Keynote Speaker | Advisor
Building human capability for the AI era.
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