Teleoperation is Always the Butt of the Joke

When you slap AI on everything

By Ibrahim Diallo

Published 12 hours ago ~ 5 minutes read

A few years back, the term "AI" took an unexpected turn when it was redefined as "Actual Indian". As in, a person in India operating the machine remotely.

I first heard the term when Amazon was boasting about their cashierless grocery stores. There was a big sign in the store that said "Just Walk Out," meaning you grab your items, walk out, and get charged the correct amount automatically. How did they do it? According to Amazon, they used AI. What kind of AI exactly, nobody was quite sure.

But customers started reporting something odd. They weren't charged immediately after leaving the store. Some said it took several days for a charge to appear on their account. It eventually came out that the technology was sophisticated tracking performed by Amazon's team in India. Workers would manually review footage of each customer's visit and charge them accordingly. What's fascinating is that this operation was impressive. Coordinating thousands of store visits, matching items to customers across multiple camera angles, and doing it accurately enough that most people never noticed the delay. But because it was buried under the "AI" label, the moment the truth came out, the whole thing became a punchline.

In 2024, Tesla held their "We, Robot" event, where Optimus robots operated a bar. They were serving drinks, dancing, and mingling with guests. It was a pretty impressive display. The robots moved fluidly, held conversations, and handed off drinks without fumbling. Elon Musk claimed they were AI-driven, fully autonomous. People were genuinely impressed by the interactions, and for good reason. Fluid, bipedal locomotion in a crowded social environment is an extraordinarily hard robotics problem.

The moment it came out that the robots were teleoperated, the sentiment flipped entirely. It didn't matter how dexterous or natural the movement was. It felt like a magic trick exposed. But think about what was actually being demonstrated. Humanoid robots walking through a crowd, responding in real time to a human operator's inputs, without tripping over guests or spilling drinks. That's not nothing. Slapping "AI" on it turned an engineering achievement into a scandal.

More recently, the company 1X unveiled a friendly humanoid robot available for purchase at $20,000. The demo looks genuinely impressive. The robot can perform domestic tasks like doing laundry, folding clothes, and navigating a home environment. And if it doesn't know how to do something, it can be taught. You can authorize a remote worker to take control, demonstrate the task, and the robot learns from that demonstration, adding it to its growing repertoire. That's a legitimately interesting approach to machine learning through human guidance.

What got glossed over is how much of the current capability relies on that remote worker. Right after the unveiling, the Wall Street Journal was invited to test the robots. In their video, the robot is being operated entirely by a person sitting in the next room. To be fair, the smoothness of that teleoperation is itself a technical achievement. Real-time control of a bipedal robot performing fine motor tasks, like folding a shirt, requires low-latency communication, precise motor control, and a well-designed interface for the operator. That's years of engineering work.

But because teleoperation isn't the product being sold, AI is,that achievement gets treated as evidence of fraud rather than progress.

We've built an environment where "teleoperated" has become a slur, and anything short of full autonomy is seen as cheating. Even Waymo, whose self-driving cars have logged millions of autonomous miles, feels compelled to publicly defend themselves against accusations of secretly using remote operators. As if any human involvement would invalidate everything they've built.

I think teleoperation is pretty impressive. It's a valuable technology in its own right. Surgeons use it to operate across continents. Industrial operators use it to work in places no human could safely go. In all of these cases, having a human-in-the-loop is the point.

Every "AI" product that turns out to have a person behind the curtain makes the public more skeptical. In a parallel universe, there is a version of the tech industry that celebrates teleoperation as a stepping stone. Where we are building tools to make collaboration easier through teleoperation, and it's not viewed as an embarrassing secret.