One of the closest to make this dream a reality is 1x, a Norwegian company with ties to OpenAi (creators of Chatgpt) and Nvidia, which recently presented Neo Gamma, a assistant robot dressed in a kind of beige pajamas with capabilities to walk without assistance, as well as do simple tasks such as aspiring flats and water plants.
A performance that has caused confidence in the company, with its CEO, Bernt Børnich, recently announcing that Neo Gamma will carry out tests “in a hundred or some thousands” of houses at the end of 2025, some essays that will allow the artificial intelligence of the android to familiarize themselves with the humans that are designed to serve.
Commerce He had the opportunity to talk with Brando Vasquez, a Peruvian who works in the Neo Gamma design team, as well as, coincidentally, one of the actors in the advertising that introduced this model from the robot to the world.
A work that came in an indirect way, since Vasquez first studied architecture in Germany, before falling in love with the creative freedom of the design, the item that first allowed to work in Startups in Europe before taking a leap to Silicon Valley and reaching 1x.
“It is a very small team, all generalists, where we give our opinion about the robot design”, He said.“ For example, the sound on the robot that appears in the video was my creation. We were looking for that it was not dissonant with the sound that surrounds it, so the neo gamma will hear the sound around him and create a note that sounds harmonious when he turned on ”
A job that also allows you to be at the forefront of some social trends that can still happen to us unnoticed, such as the growing attachment that youth has to chatbots empowered by artificial intelligence.
“One of the most interesting cases that I discovered about the use of robots is that There is a very large community of children and adolescents whose best friends are that they write letters asking if you could upload these digital friends to the physical bodies of robots that we are developing to go out to play with them and present them to their parents. We are surprised.
-Will it be possible?
It is something we are developing, but eventually it will be possible.
-How is the work of a robot designer?
Start thinking about the world in which we will exist from here to 10 years. That is, if we are going to have these robots as part of our daily lives: what qualities should they have and which are not? This allowed us to define some rules time. First we said they have to be 100% safe and soft, because we want to be able to touch them, hug them. That are not an industrial machine.
Many competition robots are machines that are seen as dangerous, they seem Terminators, instead we prefer to inspire Baymax or Wall-E, which led us to think about round and simpler shapes, as well as costumes that are very soft to the touch. In the case of the neo gamma, the suit is made with a Japanese 3D fabric machine so that the body can cover without danger of being descious.
-How has the neo gamma changed from its predecessor, the Neo Beta?
Neo Beta A Neo Gamma’s advance was quite radical. With Neo Beta, we first saw what are the essential basics that are needed so that the robot can work safely: a suit that does not show its gears, a head where you can protect the cameras that give it your vision.
With the design of Neo Gamma we realized that a feedback was missing by the robot. That is, if I spoke to Neo Beta, I had to trust that I was listening to me and there was no visible sign on his side to know what he was feeling or if his battery was low. Among the mechanisms that were to solve this problem, the ears seemed to us the most ideal and now they change color if the battery is low, listening to you, it is doing a specific task or needs help. Then the ears became their first expressive element that is not human itself. That is, we adapt our human anatomy to a robot to improve its expression.
-Why not design a robot with human appearance as friendly?
In that exercise of developing the future, we asked ourselves a question that seems very important to every person who develops this type of technology: if at any time the robots will be more legitimate than humans. For us the answer is totally no, that there is a large difference between a humanoid and a human robot.
A humanoid robot has the unique mission to make our human qualities expand and develop more efficiently, that is, they make our life better, but it is in service to humans. But we believe that there are other companies that have a philosophy that confuses a little the hierarchy of what we consider to be a better future, which is one where humanity prosper without having to compete with humanoid robots. Then it is very useful in service of us, but it is not a human or is going to be a human.
-A Roomba is a more efficient robotic vacuum in his task than any humanoid. Why choose to imitate the human body with all its limitations?
A Roomba is very good aspiring, but imagine that you need one to aspire, another to clean the windows and another to bend your clothes. What we saw is that, for a simpler and more simple life, it is easier to build a humanoid robot that helps you do everything you would do, if you had an assistant like that super perfect and collaborative and that had the energy of doing things. And the factor of Humanoid robot shape is very useful, because our world has been created for humans, for beings with this two -arms factor, two legs and a head with certain proportions.
-Why focus the neo gamma on domestic tasks instead of industrial works such as other competitors?
When we began to analyze what was happening in the industry, we realized that there was a logical consequence of having a lot of specialized robots for industrial work, apart from replacing people in factories. And it is that the way in which these robots learn is like an artificial intelligence model called ‘Machine Learning’ and if we have an army of automatons only working in factories, their way of reason will focus only on the maximization of efficiency and nothing else, without thinking at all about the needs of humans as security or comfort.
On the other hand, if we first put them in the houses, they will learn how humans live and will accommodate our customs, our way of thinking, in our way of living, to which we consider comfortable, normal, homely and useful. Once they understand how we humans are, we can put them in the factories.
-Of course in your opinion, what do you think are the biggest challenges facing robotics today?
In our case, beyond the technological challenges of making the robot walk or feel, it is to understand well what the role of long -term robots will be with respect to humanity and what is the responsibility, both social and public, to bring such a technology to the world.
An example of a possibly equally disruptive technology is cars, which when they just came out the ‘black devils’ because they were giant and fast machines that caused fear in the public. Similarly, we have to understand all the imaginations and fears that people have around robots and present a future that is better for everyone.
And we really think that we are the only ones who are giving a much more positive answer to this question, since in the rest of the robotic companies I have not seen anything that feels very human, nothing that feels very warm with respect to our own existence as a society.
-What do you think of Isaac Asimov’s appointment: “It will be easier to be a friend of human -shaped robots than of specialized machines unrecognibly. And sometimes I think that, in the desperate current situation of humanity, we would appreciate having non -human friends, even if they were only the friends we build ourselves.”
It is precisely what we are talking about at the beginning, that there are already children who prefer to have a robot as a friend and modify their personality to their liking. For us this is not a good future, one lacking a human connection, where one has more friends than other humans. That is why, if you see the advertising of the neo gamma, the robot there is both the protagonist and a secondary character and our emphasis is how people live in those spaces.
-A future complemented, not dominated by robots
Exact. A future that is more prosperous for robots. We can talk about the negative effects of computers and cell phones, but undoubtedly have also helped a lot to facilitate our lives and now the robots will be the new medium. We are talking to artists who want to do great facilities with robots, create music and other types of things. Activities that could not normally do without millions of dollars of funds to hire human help. Human creativity will expand exponentially, because the world of computers, the Internet, can finally touch the physical world. But first the robots have to understand our mind and our spirit before executing.
-But we would not be replacing human work with that of robots
Partly yes. Because of the same way in which in the time of Disney, one needed hundreds of people to make an animated film, a badly paid job but with a high operational cost, which was then replaced by the animation of computer computer such as Pixar, with graphic improvements, more realism and the opportunity to expand more the medium. But that does not mean that traditional animation has disappeared and the public still loves Ghibli’s films. So I believe that the power to create things will be a little more democratized, but that will not mean that the value of the artisanal, what is done by humans, disappears.
-When humanoid robots will arrive at our homes?
I can’t give you a date, but our prototypes are already going. So the only thing I can tell you, and the reason why I am talking to you, is that we need people to begin to get an idea that robots are real, that this technology is working and that, not decades in the future but soon sooner than they imagine, they will be close to everyone.