The word \u201crobot\u201d is 105 years old, and it meant something unpleasant from the very beginning. Karel \u010capek borrowed it from the Czech “robota”, meaning forced labor, and put it into his 1920 play R.U.R. His robots aren\u2019t metal machines but artificial people, mass-produced to do our work for us. The play ends wonderfully: rebellion, slaughter, the extinction of humanity. The moral was clear. Sooner or later, the servant class will refuse to obey.<\/p>
A century later, the servant really is rolling off the production line, and at a price \u010capek could hardly have imagined. The basic version of Unitree\u2019s G1 costs about $13,000, less than a decent small car. 1X has put its Neo humanoid up for preorder: $20,000 to own or $499 a month by subscription, with deliveries scheduled to begin this year. Musk is promising Optimus for $20,000\u2013$30,000, although for now Tesla only assembles it in its own factory and the actual production cost is many times higher. And, as is often the case with Musk\u2019s promises, we\u2019ll probably be waiting quite a while before we see anything that even partly resembles what was promised. Figure has gone after industry instead, renting its humanoids for work on BMW assembly lines and charging by the hour. Of the four, only Unitree and Neo are really targeting private homes, and both come with an asterisk: the G1 is a research platform that won\u2019t make your coffee on its own, while Neo is only just entering the market. The expected arrival of humanoids in our homes is no longer measured in decades, but in delivery windows.<\/p>
This is where we get to the part you won\u2019t find in the brochures. Neo isn\u2019t fully autonomous. More difficult tasks, such as folding laundry or tidying the kitchen, are performed via teleoperation: somewhere, a human operator sits watching your home through the robot\u2019s cameras and controlling its hands. You invited a machine into your home so you wouldn\u2019t have to ask another person for help. What you got was a person hidden inside a machine. One who can also see the mess in your bedroom. And with the subscription model, you don\u2019t even buy this servant. You rent it. It can be updated remotely or disconnected if you fall behind on payments. Against that backdrop, \u010capek\u2019s fear of a robot rebellion sounds almost quaint. The real power doesn\u2019t lie with the robot but with the company holding its leash from the other end of the network.<\/p>
The loss of manual jobs is an old and thoroughly explored story. Far more interesting is what humanoids might do to relationships between people. Dividing household chores can become a quiet battleground, but it\u2019s also one of the few areas where couples genuinely have to negotiate something together. Who takes out the trash? Whose turn is it to do the dishes? Put a $499-a-month robot in the middle of that and the friction disappears, along with one of the last bits of everyday ritual reciprocity that quietly holds a shared household together. Who exactly will you thank for the coffee?<\/p>
Then there\u2019s loneliness. A humanoid in the living room is the perfect device for cultivating it: always there, always polite, never offended or tired. Why knock on your neighbor\u2019s door for a cup of sugar when the robot can go to the store? Why teach a child to clean up after themselves when cleaning is no longer anyone\u2019s responsibility? Children raised with a housemate like this will learn something else as well: that there\u2019s someone you can give orders to who never says no. It\u2019s hard to imagine a worse model for future relationships with people, who are, after all, perfectly capable of refusing.<\/p>
In The Invincible, Stanis\u0142aw Lem showed that machine evolution doesn\u2019t necessarily have to move in our direction. Regis III is ruled by swarms of lifeless microcrystals, indifferent and utterly inhuman. We, meanwhile, stubbornly keep building machines in our own image: a pair of arms, a face at the same height as ours. Not because that\u2019s the optimal engineering solution\u2014wheels would work better than legs on stairs. We do it because we want someone in our homes, not something.<\/p>
Jacek Dukaj takes this a step further in Perfect Imperfection. In his world, posthuman beings have moved so far beyond the old form that an ordinary human is little more than a protected relic, and the boundary between the one serving and the one being served has long since blurred. At the end of this road lies Iain M. Banks\u2019s Culture in Excession: a civilization where superintelligent Minds take care of everything and humans become a pampered leisure class, freed from effort and decision-making. It sounds like paradise, and it probably is\u2014until we forget how to do anything ourselves. The only question is who, in a house like that, is the master and who\u2014just as in \u010capek\u2014is the servant who has already quietly taken control.<\/p>
A robot will bring you coffee. Just make sure you know who you\u2019re going to drink it with, because drinking alone, as we all know, isn\u2019t good for you.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A robot will bring you coffee. Just make sure you know who you\u2019re going to drink it with, because drinking alone, as we all know, isn\u2019t good for you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":247,"featured_media":20021,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"rank_math_lock_modified_date":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[796,803],"tags":[],"popular":[],"difficulty-level":[38],"ppma_author":[614],"class_list":["post-20289","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-hai-premium-2","category-it-and-technology","difficulty-level-medium"],"acf":[],"authors":[{"term_id":614,"user_id":247,"is_guest":0,"slug":"prof-dr-hab-dariusz-jemielniak","display_name":"prof. dr hab. Dariusz Jemielniak","avatar_url":{"url":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/maxresdefault-1-e1742292469999.jpg","url2x":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/maxresdefault-1-e1742292469999.jpg"},"first_name":"Dariusz","last_name":"Jemielniak","user_url":"","job_title":"","description":"Profesor zarz\u0105dzania Akademii Leona Ko\u017ami\u0144skiego, gdzie kieruje katedr\u0105 MINDS (Management in Networked and Digital Societies). Pracuje te\u017c jako faculty associate w Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society na Harvardzie. Wiceprezes Polskiej Akademii Nauk. Cz\u0142onek Rady Programowej CampusAI."}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20289","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/247"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20289"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20289\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20290,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20289\/revisions\/20290"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20021"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20289"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20289"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20289"},{"taxonomy":"popular","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/popular?post=20289"},{"taxonomy":"difficulty-level","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/difficulty-level?post=20289"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=20289"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}