Recognising streetlights; copying down nearly indecipherable words; doing puzzles. We've been proving we're not robots for years.
At the same time, though, we've been training them to be more like us. Early on, CAPTCHA – the technology that asks people to copy out smudged up words to prove they were human – was used to digitise books, by asking people to confirm difficult-to-read text, which in turn was used not only to train those systems to read better but also to feed text into large language models to allow them to talk to us. Later, those puzzles became about spotting items such as road signs and vehicles from Google Street View, the answers to which help train systems for image recognition and self-driving cars.
Last week, that largely invisible symbiosis became even more clear, when a company called 1x announced the launch of NEO, "the world's first consumer-ready humanoid robot designed to transform life at home". "NEO automates everyday chores and offers personalized assistance so people can spend more time on the things that matter," the company said in its announcement.
That announcement was almost entirely about AI. It has a "built-in large language model", which "gives owners instant access to knowledge and personalized assistance without relying on devices with screens". It has "Audio Intelligence", and can gain new abilities through "every software update".
But much of that isn't here yet. 1X has been very open about the fact that the AI is not there yet; for the most part, the robots are expected to be controlled by remote human beings, who will drive the machines around people's houses like long-distance housekeepers.
This provoked some controversy. YouTuber Marques Brownlee said that the lack of automation indicated that the announcement was "more of a hype reel for a thing that they're hoping to be able to make someday... which is becoming SO common with products these days". He boosted a comment from a follower who noted that he always gives the advice to "never buy a product on future promises" and instead "buy something for what it is now".
This seems to ignore the fact that presumably many of the people buying such a product are probably not all that interested in whether the labour is being done by a human or not, so long as their dishes are getting done. Companies have previously used automation as a way to keep people from having to face the actual humans that are labouring on their behalf; when it was reported that Amazon's supposedly AI-powered cashier-free shops actually rely on lots of humans, it was reported as a scandal, but in reality much of those stores' appeal was probably in the fact that you didn't have to think about the humans, rather than the fact they didn't exist at all.
And that fantasy is so exciting and so easy in part because it is the one we have always been sold about technology: that it will remove the faff from life and allow us more time to do the important stuff. Instead, however, we have other people taking on the faff without us knowing it. And all of the technology that is really working seems to be taking away the important stuff and leaving with us with the faff.
There's a quote from author Joanna Maciejewska that has captured this feeling. (Charmingly, it is often shared in the form of a slightly messy photograph of a printed page, though she said it on X/Twitter.) "I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes."
And besides, some of that faff might be the important stuff, for all we know. There's a Kurt Vonnegut passage from 1995 which has picked up currency in recent times, as people have reckoned with what AI will give us and what it will take away. At the end of it – after he has rejoiced in the glorious palaver of buying an envelope, and if you haven't already then you should read the full thing, which you can find here – he suggests that what's important about us is getting out and about.
"We're dancing animals. How beautiful it is to get up and go do something," he says, and the passage concludes with a note that says he then "Gets up and dances a jig". Almost exactly 30 years later, Vonnegut is right in ways he might not even have known: it's still only animals that can dance, and the X1 robot requires a real person in a distant workplace to do it.
And if the day comes that those computers have learnt enough from us about how to be in the world that they can move themselves around it, then there will maybe always be something missing. Even when we've taught machines to "get up and do something", they might not ever be so strange, so funny, so joyous – so fundamentally human – as to spontaneously get up and dance a little jig about it.
The internet isn't dead yet, but we're getting there; every day, less and less of it seems real. It's easy to switch off. This is self-protecting, of course – nobody wants to waste time arguing with a robot. But it becomes self-fulfilling, too: if you believe everyone on the internet is a robot, then there's little point spending any time there.
Yet still the little human quirks still show through the chrome of the robots and the LLMs. Vonnegut's story is about the value of "farting around", of going through the rigmarole of real life because of the joy that can be found even in its bothersome parts. He presents it as an anti-technology story, and his conclusion is that "Electronic communities build nothing", and that presumably is the reason for at least part of its virality.
But the story – and the vast connected web of people sharing it, in recent months – also show that he was wrong too; that yes electronic contact might not replace human contact but can certainly help with it. He talks about how the phone and the computer and even the letter can bring people together, and they were all the height of technology once, bringing their own fears. Human contact might be changing in profound and unrecognisable ways, but it is still there. For now at least, even when computers speak, they do so with our words; even when they dance, it's our jig.
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