Meet NEO, your robot butler in training | Bernt Børnich

Summary

TED Talks Daily: Meet NEO, Your Robot Butler in Training | Bernt Børnich

Episode Overview Title: Meet NEO, your robot butler in training
Host/Author: TED
Release Date: April 11, 2025
Speaker: Bernd Bornick, Roboticist

In this enlightening episode of TED Talks Daily, roboticist Bernd Bornick introduces Neo, a humanoid robot designed to revolutionize household assistance. Bornick delves into the development, capabilities, and future aspirations of Neo, providing a comprehensive look at how humanoid robots are poised to transform daily living and broader societal functions.

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Introduction to Neo and Its Significance

Bernd Bornick opens his talk by presenting Neo, a humanoid robot that has recently joined him on the TED stage. Neo is not just a technological marvel but also symbolizes the tangible realization of ideas once confined to science fiction. Bornick emphasizes the seamless human-like appearance and behavior of Neo, highlighting its potential to integrate into everyday life.

Bernd Bornick [02:32]: "Neo introduced itself to a rapt audience. And it's fascinating because Neo is standing like a person and talking like a person, but isn't human at all."

Vision Behind Neo: Redefining Labor and Abundance

Bornick draws a parallel between the historical mastery of energy and the impending mastery of labor through robotics. He envisions a future where robotic labor is as abundant and accessible as energy, fundamentally altering how society addresses labor shortages and an aging population.

Bernd Bornick [03:10]: "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."

Development Journey: From Concept to Household Integration

Over the past decade, Bornick and his team have dedicated themselves to developing humanoid robots capable of performing a wide array of household tasks. Neo's introduction into Bornick's own home serves as a live demonstration of its capabilities, ranging from mundane chores like vacuuming and watering plants to more interactive roles such as serving tea during social gatherings.

Bernd Bornick [04:05]: "Neo is now part of my daily routine. So it does some of the chores around the house. Some of this is autonomous, some of this is done through remote operation."

Overcoming Challenges: Safety and Intelligence in Robotics

A significant portion of Bornick's discussion addresses the challenges faced in making robots safe and intelligent enough to coexist with humans. Unlike traditional robots, Neo is designed with soft, compliant hardware inspired by human musculature, ensuring safety and adaptability in a household environment. Bornick underscores that true intelligence in robots requires diverse and dynamic interactions, something that factory settings fail to provide.

Bernd Bornick [06:30]: "Robots are traditionally these stiff machines that are high energy and dangerous. And this is very different from how NEO works. NEO actually has tendons that get pulled very loosely, inspired by human muscle."

The Home as the Training Ground for Intelligent Robots

Challenging the conventional wisdom that factories are the primary environments for robotic learning, Bornick posits that homes offer the necessary diversity and complexity for robots to develop true intelligence. The unpredictable and varied nature of household tasks provides a rich data environment akin to the vast information available on the Internet for large language models.

Bernd Bornick [09:45]: "The home is this beautiful, chaotic thing. It's kind of like the messiness that is being human. And this is just the cup. Now think about expanding this out into everything and every object and everything going on in your home."

Future Aspirations: Beyond Household Chores

Looking ahead, Bornick envisions a symbiotic relationship between humans and robots, where robots not only assist with daily tasks but also contribute to significant scientific and industrial advancements. He dreams of robots building other robots, constructing complex infrastructures like data centers, and conducting high-quality experiments in laboratories, thereby accelerating progress in various fields.

Bernd Bornick [14:50]: "Through this kind of symbiosis between man and machine, we can start trying to answer some of the remaining big unanswered questions about the universe and our role here."

Conclusion: Redefining Humanity Through Robotics

Bornick concludes by reflecting on the profound impact that robots like Neo could have on human society. By alleviating the burdens of labor, robots can free humans to pursue more meaningful endeavors, ultimately redefining what it means to be human in an age of advanced artificial intelligence and robotics.

Bernd Bornick [16:00]: "This journey is about a lot more than just you not having to do your laundry. It's about creating a future where we actually have time to focus on what matters to us as humans and getting rid of these constraints."

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Key Takeaways:

• Integration of Robots in Daily Life: Neo exemplifies the practical application of humanoid robots in household settings, performing tasks autonomously and through human guidance.
• Robust Development Process: The creation of Neo involved overcoming significant challenges related to safety, compliance, and intelligence to ensure seamless human-robot interaction.
• Redefining Labor and Intelligence: By situating robots in diverse home environments, developers aim to cultivate a level of intelligence that allows robots to adapt and learn continuously, moving beyond repetitive factory tasks.
• Future Implications: The successful integration of robots like Neo could lead to major advancements in various sectors, facilitating a synergistic relationship between humans and machines that enhances scientific discovery and improves quality of life.

Bernd Bornick's presentation offers a visionary glimpse into a future where humanoid robots are not just tools but companions and collaborators, reshaping human experiences and capabilities.

Transcript

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[Elise Hu]

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[Elise Hu]

You're listening to TED Talks Daily where we bring you new ideas and conversations to spark your curiosity every day. Hi, I'm your host Elise Hume. It wouldn't be a TED conference without a surprise and this year definitely delivered with a special guest named Neo walking on the TED stage.

[Ted Talks Daily Host]

Neo introduced itself to a rapt audience.

[Elise Hu]

And it's fascinating because Neo is standing like a person and talking like a person, but isn't human at all. Neo is a humanoid robot designed by roboticist Bernd Bornick. Bernd's vision is to create a helper that performs household chores like vacuuming and watering plants. And after joining Neo on stage and exchanging a fist bump with his creation, Berndt shares the story of Neo's development and how the once futuristic notion of a humanoid robot in your house is already here.

[Bernd Bornick]

As a species, humans have mastered energy to the level where it is, for all practical purposes, completely abundant. 200 years ago, no one could have imagined a world where energy was so accessible that most people would take it for granted. If you had asked the smartest person on Earth whether we could one day summon light with the flip of a switch, they would have said it was impossible, even if the brightest minds worked on it together for an eternity. But today, it's just that easy. Energy is everywhere, all around us, all of the time. Now, what if I told you that the same is about to happen with labor? 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, enabling you to explore new frontiers and focus on what makes you truly human. Thank you.

Thank you, Neo. So I spent the last decade of my life working on building humanoid robots like Neo. Robots that will hopefully soon be able to do almost anything that we could imagine. Now, whether this is helping you with the dishes, helping you do your laundry, or whether this is helping your aging grandma, there's never really been a time better for robots. We have an aging population in need of help, and we have a large labor shortage across most of the global economy. And there's much, much more. But even more importantly to me, these robots, they promise something greater than just the ability to solve the problems of today. They can solve things that we cannot do today. They can give us back things like time. And as These systems and AIs now become both physical and and agentic, we can start to work towards a future where we actually have an abundance of labor. We can start towards lifting humanity out of this constant battle over scarcity of resources and create a world where everyone has what they need. And I think that will, to some extent, actually redefine what it means to be human. But since I'd say around year 1400, when Leonardo da Vinci made the mechanical man, that to me, is kind of like the first example of a humanoid robot. These things have been mainly a thing of science fiction, not reality. But this is changing the robots. They're actually here. And when I say here, I don't necessarily mean in videos. They're actually here in our homes. At least if you work at 1X, where I work, where we now have them in. In quite a few homes throughout the company. And already later this year, I hope some of you guys will have it in your home and join us on this journey. So that means Neo is now part of my daily routine. So it does some of the chores around the house. Some of this is autonomous, some of this is done through remote operation. As it's learning and I talk to it, I treat it kind of like a butler, like a companion. It's part of the family. And I think it's actually incredibly interesting to also see how this social dynamic develops, because it's, of course, incredibly useful and fun to have it do stuff I don't want to do around my home. But it's also really fun to see the beginning of, like, what will this relationship be between man and machine as these AIs become physical? Like I said, the hardware, it's actually here. It took us about a decade of very hard work, but also many people that came before us a lot of time to do the foundational research for us to now finally be able to build a machine that can do almost anything that a human can do. But it begs the big question, of course, when will they be fully autonomous? When will they actually become truly intelligent? And what is the path that will actually take us there? And I think this will be very obvious in retrospective. They need to live and learn among us. We actually need to take these machines and we need to adopt them. We need to put them into our society and let them learn just as we do. So the general convention has been, or general wisdom, that robots, they're going to first happen in factories. So we're going to put these robots into factories, they're going to do the dull, repetitive, dangerous tasks that they're good at. And as they do these repetitive tasks, they get better and better, right? They get more intelligent. And after some time we can put them into our home, they will be able to do our laundry, they will build our skyscrapers. But this is actually categorically wrong. And we know because we actually tried that. So back in 2022, we took our previous generation, wheeled humanoid Eve, and we put it into the industry and it actually went really well. We solved a lot of kind of narrow, specific tasks and it got really good at them really fast. And then after about 20 to 50 hours, the robots, they just stopped learning. And if you think about it, it's not really rocket science, because if you're doing the same task over and over every day, and it's the only thing you're doing, you're not going to get very intelligent, there's no information there. And also you're going to generally become very narrow minded. Right? We don't like being narrow minded. And if you think about what is a factory, it is essentially a process that we design to reduce diversity and variance. You want your factory worker to need as little information as possible to be able to do the job and get a high quality, repeatable product out. And this is kind of the opposite of what you need for intelligence. You need diversity, you need to challenge yourself, you need to do new tasks every day that you don't know how to do. And there's a great parallel here to the early days of large language models. So when we use these models today and they're getting really good, we kind of forget where they started. They started with a lot of people trying to make very narrow models. So if I take an example, if you wanted to make a very good writing assistant to write poetry, then you would of course train on all of the best poetry in the world. Makes sense. And then it wouldn't really work. And when we started training these models on all of the Internet, the complete diversity of all human knowledge, they started working, they became kind of smart, they started being able to a certain extent to reason and I'd say, like, understand to a certain extent. What is the question you're asking and how should I answer? And this is also how we humans learn. We need a large amount of diversity for us to be able to develop into intelligent beings. So why should it be different for robots? And it really begs the question then, what is the equivalent of the Internet? How do we find this kind of like Internet level diversity of information for our robots? Well, we come to the conclusion that this is probably the home. Now, the home is this beautiful, chaotic thing. It's kind of like the messiness that is being human. And I want to take a small example here. So think about a cup. Now of course there's many cups in the world and you want to be able to figure out how all of them work. But even if you look at one specific cup, it can be so many things. Is it dirty? Is it clean? It's kind of in the middle. Is it on the table, in the cabinet, on the floor? It can even have a social context. Someone's using the cup, someone's waiting for the cup. Like, why is the cup even there? And this is just the cup. Now think about expanding this out into everything and every object and everything going on in your home. That's the kind of diversity that we're talking about to get to proper machine intelligence. So, like any good scientist, right, we had this hypothesis, and now we have to test it. So in 2023, we brought our robots home, and I had Eve in my house for quite a while. And it was, of course, doing the standard things like emptying the dishwasher, but also bringing me a cup of tea when I was enjoying playing board games with my friends or serving cupcakes at my daughter's birthday party. And pretty quickly, it actually became quite clear that this hypothesis actually was the ground truth. The home is this incredible diverse source of data that lets us continue to progress intelligence. And let me show you guys now how this actually works in practice. Thank you, Neo. You're doing a good job. It's a bit noisy, but hopefully you can still hear me. So what you see here now, of course, is just a subset of tasks that Neo can do. And this is a mix of autonomy for things the robot is good at and some remote operation where someone's guiding the robot to basically do expert demonstrations on how to do these tasks. And 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. And if you kind of follow along in the field, a natural question to ask at this point would be, why doesn't everyone do this if it's so obvious? Well, it actually turns out it's incredibly hard to make a robot that is safe among people. So robots are traditionally these stiff machines that are high energy and dangerous. And this is very different from how NEO works. NEO actually has tendons that gets pulled very loosely, inspired by human muscle. And this makes Neo into a robot that is quiet, soft, compliant, lightweight, safe, and really able to live among us and learn among us. So this is still, of course, incredibly early. We're all the way in the beginning of this journey. But I do hope that in not so long, just like we take energy for granted around us, we will be able to take labor around us for granted. And we might soon not even remember the day where there wasn't always a helping hand available for anything we wanted to do. But as these machines go around in our society and learn, to me, this journey is about a lot more than just you not having to do your laundry. It's about creating a future where we actually have time to focus on what matters to us as humans and getting rid of these constraints. But also it's an opportunity to really have these machines help us solve some of the outstanding questions that we still have, like can we have robots build robots? Can we have robots build data centers to progress AI? Can we have robots that build chip fabs to help us accelerate adoption of AI? And I think it's getting pretty clear that we can have all of these things, but it goes even further than that. I hope we can get a future where we have humanoid robots like NEO that is actually building particle accelerators, that is building labs. 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. And I hope that in the future, through this kind of like a symbiosis between man and machine, we can start trying to answer some of the remaining big unanswered questions about the universe and our role here. And I think if we can do that, that will to some extent redefine what it means to be human. Thank you.

[Elise Hu]

That was bernd bornick@ted 2025. To see Neo in action, head to ted.com to watch the video. If you're curious about Ted's curation, find out [e-mail] curationguidelines and that's it for today's show. Ted Talks Daily is part of the Ted Audio Collective. This episode was produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Greene, Lucy Little, Alejandra Salazar and Tonsika Sarmarnivon. It was mixed by Christopher Faizy Bogan. Additional support from Emma Tobner and Daniela Ballarezzo. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.

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