The Robots Are Coming (And They’re Just as Dumb as Siri)

If they're anything like my Roomba, we're fucking doomed.

November 9th, 2025
Lower Manhattan, NY

New York has a new species of billboard. You’ve probably seen it: Some sleek humanoid robot standing in a white, minimalist living room that looks like a crime scene after the blood’s been scrubbed. “Meet NEO,” it says. Others just say “NEO Home Robot” next to a bored-looking blonde model for no particular reason.

Every time I see one, I can’t help thinking: We’ve been here before.

It’s been sixteen years since Apple gave us Siri, the original “intelligent assistant.” Remember the hype? We were promised a digital butler, a voice-activated genius who’d schedule meetings, send texts, and answer life’s great questions. Then came Apple Intelligence: “We got it right this time” they said. Instead, we got a confused roommate with a hearing problem. Ask her to “remind me to take out the bins,” and she’ll say, “Playing Bin Laden: The Final Days on Apple Music.” This is the richest consumer tech company in the world, with bottomless resources at its disposal. They still can’t produce anything other than an unforgivably bad AI assistant that barely deciphers the Australian accent. (To be fair, we can be pretty hard to understand at the best of times. But still, mate.)

Even now, after a decade and a half of “updates,” she still can’t tell the difference between “call Mum” and “text Murray.” There’s an entire subreddit, r/Siri, dedicated to her idiocy: people begging her to set a timer and getting a Wikipedia entry about the metric system instead. And this—THIS—is the AI benchmark we’re building actual robots on??

So when I see a $20,000 humanoid robot promising to fold laundry and take over a minute to fetch a bottle of water 5 feet away, my first thought is: “Sure, if I’ve got all the time in the world to spare!” The reality is, NEO isn’t autonomous; it’s tele-operated, meaning somewhere out there a human pilot is watching through your living room cameras, guiding it around your coffee table. That’s not AI. That’s a long-distance relationship.

Take a look at this report Ronny did on the Daily Show earlier this month.

It’s the same Silicon Valley delusion we’ve been buying since the first Roomba bumped into a chair leg over and over. The idea that technology is just about to save us from the most human part of being human: doing stuff badly.

The truth is, our robots will inherit the same problems as Siri: confusion, overconfidence, and an uncanny ability to misunderstand the simplest request. The difference is, now they can walk around your apartment while they do it. That’s utterly terrifying to me.

Published in MAD, 2018 (By Jason Chatfield & Ian Hunt)

In another sixteen years, when NEO 7.0 is fetching your mail while accidentally setting the oven to 400 degrees, we’ll look back fondly on Siri; that sweet, harmless idiot who never had the upper body strength to strangle us in our sleep.

At least for now, these robots can’t do stand-up comedy. (They hate beer). But I give it three years before they start showing up at open mics and start scratching the back of their synthetic necks muttering “Ahh, what else did I wanna say?”