What It's Like to Get an AI-Robot Massage

I tested out the new artificial intelligence bodywork at Remedy Place in Soho. Plus: sleep gummies without the morning grogginess.

As far as election nights go, this was one of the lonelier ones for me. I was on a reporting trip, in a too-warm hotel room with a busted thermostat in Minneapolis with a view overlooking an empty parking lot. The intensity of the lights creeping through the curtains—on top of a few other factors—made it hard to sleep that night, but I had a 7 a.m. flight home to catch.

It was already 2:30. I wasn’t even doomscrolling; I just had an awful feeling that the center wasn’t going to hold. Then I blinked, woke up at four, and checked my phone to learn that we would soon have a new 47th president of the United States. (I wish I could say I was surprised. But the Democrats’ inability to articulate a coherent message on the climate or humane immigration reform; their insistence on delusional starf*cking; the continued razing of Gaza; and their abandonment of the working class pretty much guaranteed that they were going to fumble this. I’d argue that Democrats should have been going on Rogan regularly after Bernie pretty much sold Joe on socialism four years ago, but alas.)

Nevertheless, your boy persisted… in the name of content. When I touched down at JFK around 11, I booked it up to Soho, hit the gym, and went to my appointment at Remedy Place, a new wellness club that just opened on Canal Street. You walk in and the place smells amazing, clean and a little woody, like what I would imagine Kris Jenner’s home in Calabasas to smell like. (I was told the Remedy scent was custom.) They got bone broths swirling around in margarita machines out in the front.

Remedy offers a host of luxe services—contrast therapy, IV drips, hyperbaric oxygen chambers—but I was there to try their AI-assisted bodywork. As HEAVIES readers know, massages are kind of the skeleton key to better overall health, and I was curious what kinds of advantages and disadvantages a massage robot might pose vs. my guy Big Kevin a few blocks down at Grand Nature. 

After I was guided down into the basement to the massage room, I was told to change into a tight, form-fitting uniform—kind of like a thin wetsuit. Squeezing into it made me feel like a hot dog. A fleshy, vulnerable meatsack that was soon to be at the mercy of strange machinery.

I lay down on the table and toggled through a few settings on a touchscreen in front of my face—like how hard I wanted the massage to be (“firm”) and what kind of ambient music I wanted to listen to (“outer space”)—while four cameras hanging overhead scanned my body. The lovely attendant then gently placed a little remote button next to my right hand, and told me to press it in case anything should go wrong. 

And… I can’t lie. It was a little freaky at first turning your back to two whirring Terminator arms. Only the “hands” were rounded, soft and a little squishy, kind of like earbud tips. They were warm to the touch and gently vibrated, which was one point for the robots. 

Once the massage started, I was surprised by how accurate the hands were. First they warmed up my upper back with long, elegant strides before moving to more targeted work around my scapulas. On the touchscreen in front of my face, there were little circles showing me what exactly they were targeting, as well as a little heart icon I could tap whenever the robot did something I enjoyed, like this was Azealia Banks going Live on IG or something. Apparently, this data is then all saved to your profile; the software learns your preferences and is said to get better over time, more attuned to you.

This all continued for 30 minutes: warm-up, mid-back; warm-up, lower-back; warm-up, a little glute action. At one point I fell asleep—whether it was purely from relaxation or the fact that I was running on fumes was unclear—but I had to wipe a little drool spot off the touchscreen. 

I’m not as big an AI doomer as other folks: I’ve found most of the applications to be clunky, imprecise, and kind of goofy. ChatGPT is pretty good for writing mean letters to your landlord threatening to withhold rent until the hot water’s fixed, and not much else. But AI does have a few compelling use cases, especially for machine learning in the medical field (I’ve written about one such scenario for National Geographic in the field of tumor identification). 

For massages, though? I think it’s just going to come down to preference. A human who can intuit why your hamstrings are tight and how that’s connected to your trapezius is going to be better for most people 98% of the time. But if you’re someone who gets a little weirded out by a stranger digging their elbows into your butt cheeks, I can understand why you’d maybe seek something like this out.

Overall, the massage robot is pretty good. But it’s closer to the big ugly brown massage chair sitting in the living room of my in-laws’ house in Rowland Heights than an actual therapist; I think their jobs are safe. I can envision a scenario where the technology gets a lot better in a few years, using different modalities—heat, cold, different vibration intensities and interchangeable hand shapes—to zap fascia. I’d want one in my living room.

The AI-assisted bodywork massage at Remedy Place starts at $90 for 30 minutes. Learn more about it here.

Other updates:

• I started a new job at SSENSE as their interim managing editor. I’ll be there for a few months to help edit stories. Hit me with all your fashion ideas: chris.gayomali@ssense.com.

• Meanwhile, I have a podcast with Mixed Feelings going up this week on what it means to “glow up” as a young man—an addendum to this essay I wrote for them—which is somehow even more pertinent to our current moment. Be on the lookout for that.

• I’ve been taking these sleep gummies from Noon and they’re pretty magical: no melatonin, no weird dreams, no morning grogginess. Plus they taste amazing. Not too sweet.