The robots we deserve |
There’s something sad about seeing a humanoid robot lying on the floor. Without any electricity, these bipedal machines can’t stand up, so if they’re powered down and not hanging from a winch, they’re sprawled out on the floor, staring up at you, helpless.
That’s how I met Atlas a couple of months ago. I’d seen the robot on YouTube a hundred times, running obstacle courses and doing backflips. Then I saw it on the floor of a lab at MIT. It was just lying there. The contrast is jarring, if only because humanoid robots have become so much more capable and ubiquitous since Atlas got famous on YouTube.
Across town at Boston Dynamics, the company that makes Atlas, a newer version of the humanoid robot had learned not only to walk but also to drop things and pick them back up instinctively, thanks to a single artificial intelligence model that controls its movement. Some of these next-generation Atlas robots will soon be working on factory floors — and may venture further. Thanks in part to AI, general-purpose humanoids of all types seem inevitable.
“In Shenzhen, you can already see them walking down the street every once in a while,” Russ Tedrake told me back at MIT. “You’ll start seeing them in your life in places that are probably dull, dirty, and dangerous.”
Tedrake runs the Robot Locomotion Group at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, also known as CSAIL, and he co-led the project that produced the latest AI-powered Atlas. Walking was once the hard thing for robots to learn, but not anymore. Tedrake’s group has shifted focus from teaching robots how to move to helping them understand and interact with the world through software, namely AI. They’re not the only ones.
In the United States, venture capital investment robotics startups grew from $42.6 million in 2020 to nearly $2.8 billion in 2025. Morgan Stanley predicts the cumulative global sales of humanoids will reach 900,000 in 2030 and explode to more than 1 billion by 2050, the vast majority of which will be for industrial and commercial purposes. Some believe these robots will ultimately replace human labor, ushering in a new global economic order. After all, we designed the world for humans, so humanoids should be able to navigate it with ease and do what we do.
They won’t all be factory workers, if certain startups get their way. A company called X1 Technologies has started taking preorders for its $20,000 home robot, Neo, which wears clothes, does dishes, and fetches snacks from the fridge. Figure AI introduced its Figure 03 humanoid robot, which also does chores. Sunday Robotics said it would have fully autonomous robots making coffee in beta testers’ homes next year.
So far, we’ve seen a lot of demos of these AI-powered home robots and promises from the industrial humanoid makers, but not much in the way of a new global economic order. Demos of home robots, like the X1 Neo, have relied on human operators, making these automatons, in practice, more like puppets. Reports suggest that Figure AI and Apptronik have only one or two robots on manufacturing floors at any given time, usually doing menial tasks. That’s a proof of concept, not a threat to the human work force.
“In order to make them better, we have to make AI better.”
You can think of all these robots as the physical embodiment of AI, or just embodied AI. This is what happens when you put AI into a physical system, enabling it to interact with the real world. Whether that’s in the form of a humanoid robot or an autonomous car, it’s the next frontier for hardware and, arguably, technological progress writ large.
Embodied AI is already transforming how farming works, how we move goods around the world, and what’s possible in surgical theaters. We might be just one or two breakthroughs away from walking, talking, thinking machines that can work alongside us, unlocking a whole new realm of possibilities. “Might” is the key word there.
“If we’re looking for robots that will work side by side with us in the next couple of years, I don’t think it will be humanoids,” Daniela Rus, director of CSAIL, told me not long after I left Tedrake’s lab. “Humanoids are really complicated, and we have to make them better. And in order to make them better, we have to make AI better.”
So to understand the gap between the hype around humanoids and the technology’s real promise, you have to know what AI can and can’t do for robots. You also, unfortunately, have to try to understand what Elon Musk has been up to at Tesla for the past five years.
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It’s still embarrassing to watch the part of the Tesla AI Day presentation in 2021 when a human........