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Two decades after a Republican-controlled Congress gave gun manufacturers immunity from being sued over crimes committed with their firearms, blue state Democrats upset about gun violence think theyve found a way to penetrate that legal shield. Since 2021, 10 states have passed laws intended to make it easier to sue gunmakers and sellers. The newest such law, in Connecticut, took effect this month. It opens firearms manufacturers and retailers up to lawsuits if they don’t take steps to prevent guns from getting into the hands of people banned from owning them, or who should be suspected of intending to use them to hurt themselves or others. Other states have allowed lawsuits against companies deemed to have created a public nuisance through the sale or marketing of firearms. The legislation and flurry of lawsuits against gun companies that followed has outraged gun rights advocates, who accuse the states of trying to skirt the 2005 Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act. That law, which blocked a wave of similar lawsuits two decades ago, says gun companies operating legally cannot be held liable for violent acts committed by people misusing weapons. They know these laws are unconstitutional. They know these laws violate the PLCAA, said Lawrence G. Keane, senior vice president for government and public affairs at the National Shooting Sports Foundation. They dont care,” he said, adding that the real goal of the lawsuits was to harass the industry and drain it financially. Gun control groups say the states have simply set clearer requirements for gun companies to ensure their products arent sold or used illegally. These laws dont just open the courthouse doors to survivors. They also force the gun industry to operate more responsibly and, most importantly, can help prevent future tragedies, said Po Murray, chair of the Newtown Action Alliance, a gun-violence prevention group founded after the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. Two decades of federal immunity Congress adopted protections for the gun industry after lawsuits filed in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and elsewhere attempted to hold the firearms industry responsible for violent crime. Many of those suits argued that gun companies had knowingly oversupplied certain markets with cheap handguns and ignored signs that those weapons were being trafficked to places with strict gun controls. The firearms industry and the National Rifle Association saw the lawsuits as unfair. As long as gun companies weren’t breaking rules around sales, they shouldn’t be held responsible for violence, they said. President George W. Bush, a Republican, agreed and signed the shield law in 2005, saying it helped stem frivolous lawsuits.” Our laws should punish criminals who use guns to commit crimes, not law-abiding manufacturers of lawful products, Bush said at the time. A new approach The legal protections Congress gave the gun industry aren’t absolute. For example, a gunmaker that sells a faulty firearm can still be sued over dangerous defects. Another exception allows lawsuits against companies that knowingly violate laws regulating how firearms are sold and marketed. When Congress drafted that exception, it cited the example of a shop that knowingly sold a gun to someone banned from owning one, such as a convicted felon. The new state laws have sought to expand potential liability for gun companies by creating new rules for the industry. New York passed a law in 2021 requiring gun companies to create controls to prevent unlawful possession or use of their products. It also says they cannot knowingly or recklessly contribute to a condition that endangers public safety. Any business operating in New York must adhere to our laws and if they dont, they are held accountable, said Democratic state Sen. Zellnor Myrie, the law’s chief proponent. Several states and cities have used the new liability laws to sue Glock over the design of its pistols, saying it is too easy to convert them into automatic weapons. Many of the new laws follow legal theories from a lawsuit filed against gunmaker Remington by families of Sandy Hook victims. The suit, which was settled for $73 million in 2022, argued that Remingtons marketing violated state consumer protection law. Whats next? Its too soon to say if courts will uphold the new state laws. A panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in July that New Yorks law wasnt expressly barred by the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, but that decision is not expected to be the last word. One of the judges, Dennis Jacobs, made it clear he believes the law is vulnerable to future legal challenges, calling it nothing short of an attempt to end-run PLCAA. The U.S. Supreme Court, which is controlled 6-3 by Republican-nominated justices, hasn’t yet considered the state liability laws, but the gun industry was encouraged when the justices unanimously agreed in June to toss out a $10 billion lawsuit Mexico filed against top firearms manufacturers claiming their business practices fuel cartel violence. Justice Elena Kagan, a Democratic nominee, wrote in her opinion how Congress passed PLCAA to halt lawsuits similar to the one filed by Mexico. She said Mexico had made no plausible argument that the companies knowingly helped gun trafficking. The Court doubts Congress intended to draft such a capacious way out of PLCAA, and in fact it did not, she wrote. Susan Haigh, Associated Press Associated Press Writer Dave Collins contributed to this report.
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E-Commerce
A new internet theory about American politics and society just dropped. From anti-vaxxers to AI slop, everything can be explained by one simple idea: Everyone is twelve now. In September, Bluesky user and musician Patrick Cosmos (@veryimportant.lawyer) posted, “working on a new unified theory of american reality i’m calling ‘everyone is twelve now.'” He continued: “‘Im strong and I want to have like fifty kids and a farm’ of course you do. Youre twelve. ‘I dont want to eat vegetables I think steak and French fries is the only meal’ hell yeah homie youre twelve. ‘Maybe if theres crime we should just send the army’ bless your heart my twelve year old buddy.” Its funny, but it also feels depressingly accurate. Its already being called “the most important political thread of our time. Or as another user wrote: making a pilgrimage to a post that will one day be studied in history books. It took a few weeks for the theory to spread to X, Twitter, Reddit, TikTok, and other platforms, but once it did, it became the go-to comeback under conservative posts and government propaganda alike. You wanna do a ride-along in the backseat of a big plane and cosplay being a pilot? Of course you do, youre twelve, user @jjellisart said in response to a video of Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, in a fighter jet. You wanna dress up like a knight and play swords? Of course you do, youre twelve, he also posted to a Homeland Security propaganda post of medieval knights. The meme even made its way into the political press corps after White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt replied to a HuffPost reporters question about the location of Donald Trumps upcoming meeting with Vladimir Putin with: Your mom did. One user quote-tweeted the exchange with: The Everyone is Twelve Now theory is rapidly gaining credibility, I fear. So whats behind the apparent sudden collective regression? According to the National Literacy Institute, 54% of U.S. adults read below a sixth-grade level. That limited literacy makes it harder to understand complex and nuanced issues and easier to fall for oversimplified narratives peddled on social media. As one Reddit user suggested: an ideology specially crafted to appeal to nostalgia kinda has to be childish. the world was never perfect, so to pretend it was you have to appeal to childlike innocence. Case in point: a glass bottle of Coca Cola balanced on the hood of a red Bronco as marketing material for the Department of Homeland Security. It might also explain why government agencies like the DHS have leaned into childhood classic Pokémon references and viral TikTok trends as part of their social media strategy. In the context of the everyone is twelve theory, it suddenly makes a lot of sense And once youve seen it, youll start spotting examples everywhere you look. Unless, of course, youre twelve.
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E-Commerce
With one sweeping gesture, Dar Sleeper hoists the humanoid robot off the ground. Bracing its back with one arm and its legs with the other, he gently carries it across the room and lowers it onto a sofa, where it lies in repose as if catching a quick nap. It’s a slightly surreal scene, but it has a serious point. I am visiting the Palo Alto headquarters of 1X Technologies, and Sleeper, the company’s VP of growth, is demonstrating that Neo, its home robot, is a lightweight at a mere 66 pounds. That’s a crucial design feature, given that a weighty domestic bot could prove hazardous if it toppled over in the vicinity of a human, a pet, or just a pricey vase. Soon, Neo will take on the ultimate proving ground for a home robot: actual homes. 1X is announcing that its taking preorders and plans to ship units to its earliest customers next year. The price is $20,000, or $499 per month as a subscription service, with a six-month minimum. Like a smartphone, the robot will come in multiple color optionstan, gray, and dark brown. Wait, $20,000? There isnt much precedent for mainstream consumer products in that price range. Cars, of course. (The average price for a new one just topped $50,000.) Maybe boats? Even if you can come up with another example or two, its a short list. Then again, 1X founder and CEO Bernd Brnichs goals for his robots involve attaining a degree of utility that few inventions ever have. He wants to teach Neo to handle every household task that people perform because they need to, not because they want to. Even if the time saved came in bits and piecesfive minutes of dishwasher unloading here, 15 minutes of laundry folding thereit would add up to many hours newly available for more rewarding pursuits. [Photo: Courtesy 1X Technologies] Now multiply that by hundreds of thousands of Neos, which is the quantity Brnich talks about when outlining 1Xs long-term plans for manufacturing capacity. Potentially it’s the biggest thing ever, with respect to productivity increase across society, he tells me when I catch up with him via Zoom after my visit to the company. Brnich is hardly the only entrepreneur spinning visions of a world in which humans coexist with teeming masses of robots modeled on them. Companies such as Agility Robotics, Apptronik, and Figure AI are all building humanoid bots of their own. So is Sleepers former employer, Tesla, whose Optimus robot has seemingly diverted much of Elon Musks attention away from boring old EVs. Most of the nascent categorys focus is on environments such as factories and warehouses, where robots might take on jobs that are dangerous or repetitiveno paychecks required. (1X is presently focused on the home but says it plans to offer humanoids for the workplace at a later date.) Its not just robotics manufacturers that see a vast business in the making. Humanoid bots could fuel enormous growth in chips, foundational models, cloud services, and other elements of the AI economya wave of optimism 1X is already riding. In 2023, OpenAI led the companys $23.5 million Series A2 funding round; its Series B round the following year raised another $100 million. The company also has a strategic alliance with Nvidia, whose CEO, Jensen Huang, accepted a custom leather jacket from Neo during an onstage appearance last March. By 2050, according to a May Morgan Stanley report, there could be more than a billion humanoid robots in service, with the vast majority in commercial and industrial settings. Only 80 million would be in homes, the report speculates. Still, thats roughly 80 million more humanoid home robots than exist today. [Photo: Courtesy 1X Technologies] For all the grandeur of 1Xs plan to transform how we spend our time, the company is up front that Neo is not yet ready to handle all the drudgery you might want to offload to a home robot. Some of the things it can do are only possible under the control of remote 1X employees, who can orchestrate its actions as if it were a marionette. That human assistance might be a stopgap, but it will also provide 1X with AI training data it can use to make Neo more autonomous over time. My encounter with Neo at 1Xs office did as much to tamp down my impressions of its present form as ratchet them up. The robot gamely ambled about, with a gait that didnt closely resemble that of a human but was more limber than you might expect. It showed off its strength by hefting a restaurant-sized sack of rice. It also presented me with a chilled bottle of water, though the feat involved a mix of autonomy (walking to the refrigerator) and remote control (oening the fridge and fishing out the bottle), and took much longer than if I’d simply grabbed the water myself. A demo of Neos sweeping skills went south when it turned out the cordless vacuum it was wielding had a dead battery. (A human house cleaner would have easily diagnosed and solved the problem.) And some uses 1X is citing for its robotsuch as setting birthday reminders and managing grocery listsdo not seem to call for $20,000 of advanced machinery. For Neo to succeed, 1X wont just need to finish building out the robots skill set. It will also have to live up to expectations long steeped in cultural touchstones such as The Jetsons and Star Wars. As Sleeper puts it, “The ultimate North Star, in a lot of people’s minds, is Rosie the robot.” Brnich emphasizes that 1X isnt entirely sure how Neo will fit into homes, and the company is getting ready to sell them in part to help figure that out. I don’t think there’s any way we could be as creative as the full set of our customers, he says. That’s one of the beauties of actually developing this in public. Robots come home Originally known as Halodi Robotics and founded by Brnich in Norway in 2014, 1X didnt set out to build a home humanoid right away. Its first robot, Eve, was designed for industrial applications, had grippers instead of hands, and rolled on two wheels. It looked a little like it was riding a built-in Segway. As with anything dependent on generative AI, teaching robots to engage with the world requires vast amounts of training data. As 1X considered where to get that data, it came to see the home as rife with possibilities. That fact nudged it in the direction that eventually led to Neo. A cup has the ability to give you more data than an entire industrial task, says Sleeper. Because that cup could be full. It could be empty. It could be half full. It could be on the kitchen table full, meaning you should leave it there because somebody’s probably drinking it. It can be empty on the coffee table, which means you should take it to the sink or put it in the dishwasher. It could be in the cupboard, meaning that that’s where you go to grab it to give it to somebody when they ask it for it. Along with data, homes were also full of challenges that Eve had never been designed to overcome, such as climbing stairs to fetch a laundry basket. So when the company formally decided to pursue the home market, it realized it would need to build an all-new robot. Every lesson we’ve learned has moved us more and more in the direction of being very confident that the human form factor is the only form factor, says Sleeper. Humanoids were hardly a new field of robotics research: Brnich says he drew inspiration from examples such as Hondas Asimo, a staple of trade-show demos early in this century. But he adds that The type of hardware that we’ve designed here, which is so lightweight and safe and capable, we couldn’t have done that 20 years ago. Visiting 1Xs Palo Alto operation is certainly an evocative experience. Along with standard tech-company accoutrements such as HP 3-D printers cranking out prototype parts, its full of robotsfrom the Neo I watched in action to a row of decommissioned Eves sitting next to a staircase. One skinless Neo hangs from a hook in an area thrumming with human technicians: “It’s very Westworld in here,” says Sleeper. Much of Neos innovation lies underneath its knit turtleneck jumpsuit. 1X created its own motors, which it says have five times more torque than any other in the world and help the robot lift up to 154 pounds and carry up to 50 pounds. It equipped the robot with a tendon-drive transmission system, intended to reduce weight while increasing safety and affordability. It engineered hands with 22 degrees of freedomonly five less than human onesand attached them to longer-than-human arms, since robots have no shoulder blades. The company even custom-designed its own batteries. Neo officially runs for four hours on a charge, though it can top off its own battery as necessaryYoull never really have to think about it, promises Sleeper. [Photo: Courtesy 1X Technologies] At 5 feet 6 inches, Neo is 2.5 inches taller than the average American woman and 3 inches shorter than the average man. Its physique is intentionally neither feminine nor masculine: “It was important that nobody be sexually attracted to it,” says Sleeper, suggesting scenarios I prefer not to contemplate any further. Owners will, however, be able to choose between female and male speaking voices. (For the record, Sleeper referred to Neo as “he” during our conversation, but said that opinions on its gender, if any, vary.) Regardless of how capable Neos hardware may be, 1Xs AI platform will determine what it can actually do around a house. Its elements include machine vision, audio recognition, and an onboard LLM with memory that provides ongoing context. Melding all of them will allow the robot to listen for instructions, navigate its surroundings and the objects therein, and perform useful tasks. The LLM will also power Neos personality. That will come out as people talk to it, which 1X thinks they may do quite a lot. Rather than mimicking human companionship, the company is aiming to make the robot a lovable, pet-like sidekickHobbes to the owners Calvin, Sleeper says. All of this is where the experience that 1X plans to ship next year will be, at best, a first rough draft. The companys examples of jobs Neo will be able to perform autonomously on day one are modest: fetching items, greeting guests at the door, switching off the lights at night. It will handle these and other responsibilities by breaking them down into 10-second microtasks. At the moment, things get tricky if much more than three microtasks are involved. 1X expects its first customers to understand that theyre buying into a long-term proposition. As you continue to use your robot, you’ll get more updates, and your basic autonomy features will expand to be able to do more, says Sleeper. Your robot can always try something if you ask it to, like getting you a beer. And if it hasn’t learned how to do that yet efficiently, it will fail. Some people might hate it. But those arent the early users. (Historical footnote: Delivering beer may be home robotics most enduring example of an exciting application. Its what a bot called Androbot did for Atari cofounder Nolan Bushnell during an onstage demo at CES in 1983, to cheers from the audience.) From the beginning, Neo will be able to go beyond basic autonomy through its remote-assistance feature. Called Chores, it will enable California-based 1X employees to see through Neos eyes and steer the robot through more elaborate processes. The company has anticipated privacy concerns over its bot becoming a roaming window into its customers homes: Chores sessions are only initiated if users explicitly ask for them, and can be terminated at any time. When theyre active, the LED ring around Neos ears will change from white to blue. Remote-controlled robots made me think of the Tesla event held a year ago whose Optimus bartenders provoked amazement, at least at first. When it turned out theyd been puppeteered by off-site humans, the awe dissipated. Sleeper told me that 1X doesnt consider Chores to violate the fundamental idea of a home robot: We just think that there’s actually quite a lot of value to come from these expert operators being able to supplement and support your experience. As they do, the training data they generate may redound to the benefit of future Neo owners. To err is humanoid Brnich, who has been living with Neo at home for quite some time, professes not to be overly concerned with any flaws in the current experience, cheerfully calling them robotic slop. Maybe Neo didn’t put all of the glasses in the cabinet exactly in line, like this master Japanese butler, but it put them in there, he says by way of example. Okay, the shirt isn’t folded perfectly, but it’s folded pretty well, and I didn’t need to do it. I’m actually very happy. But he also expects that Neo will quickly prove its worth to a fairly broad audience. How soon? By 2027, the purchase will be a no-brainer, he predicts. Comparing home robots to smartphoneswhich have tended to get more powerful over time rather than much cheaperBrnich says that $20,000 may remain Neos price tag even after 1X can scale up production well beyond its current capacity of 25,000 U.S.-made robots a year. You just want to keep expanding the capabilities until you can not only do what humans can do, but you can also do a lot of things that we can’t, he explains. A lot has to go right for these ambitions to play out, including 1X having access to the necessary capital. Last month, The Informations Wayne Ma, Natasha Mascarenhas, and Valida Pau reported that the company was seeking $1 billion in additional funding at a $10 billion valuation, dwarfing its previous numbers. For now, 1X is still working on teaching Neo to tackle work that humans can literally do with their eyes closed. But when I ask Brnich if he considers the companys ultimate business model to lie in selling home robots or building services around them, he pushes back on the assumption that its a home robotics company at all. Actually, I think of 1X mainly as an AGI company, he says. We want to solve intelligence and solve artificial labor across society. Digitally and physicallythe entire substrate. And you’re not going get there without robots. Now 1X has to prove that it will get there with them.
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