Watch a humanoid robot fold laundry and you may be watching two workers. One is the robot. The other is a person in a virtual-reality headset, possibly in another country, whose hand and arm movements the machine reproduces joint by joint. When 1X, a Norwegian-American robotics firm, opened preorders for its $20,000 NEO home robot last autumn, it was unusually candid about the arrangement: chores the robot has not yet learned are handled in "Expert Mode", meaning a company teleoperator takes over and does your dishes through the machine. The robot revolution has arrived, and it is staffed.