Humanoid robots have been everywhere lately.
They’re running half-marathons in Beijing. They’re chasing wild boars off the streets of Warsaw. They’re getting put to work as airport baggage handlers, waste sorters, and traffic cops. They’re walking the red carpet with first lady Melania Trump at the White House. They’re even being ordained as Buddhist monks.
Humanoid robots have been hyped as the future of everything, from completing household chores to caring for elders to doing the dirty work on the factory floor, while Elon Musk is pivoting Tesla from cars to humanoid robots, claiming they’ll soon outnumber humans.
Today, Explained host Sean Rameswaram talked to tech writer and journalist James Vincent — who wrote a Harper’s Magazine cover story titled “Kicking Robots” — about the humanoid robot hype and how much of its promise can actually be realized.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
James, you’ve had the distinct privilege of doing something most of us still haven’t done — you got to meet a bunch of robots. How many robots did you meet?
I lost count after the first few, I’ll be honest. I met a few from two of the leading companies in the US. One is called Apptronik and another is called Agility Robotics. They make two very different styles of robot. They’re both humanoids in that they resemble a human — arms, legs, etc. — but Agility is very much focused on the warehouse and their robots look a little bit more inhuman. They have those backward-facing knees. Apptronik makes a more general purpose robot that looks much more like a human in terms of normal body proportion, it stands upright, and you look it eye to eye — or eye to unblinking robot eye, whatever that might be.
I got to meet them, shake hands. I played ick-ack-ock, as rock paper scissors is sometimes called in the UK. And I also — this was my heart’s content, I so wanted to do this — I wanted to kick a robot. I have that burning urge inside me that I want to get my own back before they obviously take over the world.
So the robots were nice to you, but you weren’t that nice to them.
Oh, I was horrible. I was terrible. They’re going to be coming for me in the future. I have no doubt about that at all.
They didn’t actually let me kick a robot, I’m very sad to say. They said it might be a bit of a safety hazard, so I got to poke one very hard with a big stick instead. And that was the next best thing.
No, it didn’t. This was the creepy thing about it. They gave me this very high-tech stick, which was I think a broom handle with a bit of safety foam taped on the end of it. And they said, “Give it a shove, give it a punt. See how hard you can push it.” And I was very nervous about this because they told me that this was one of the prototype humanoids. It was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. And if I knock it down and it breaks, that’s great copy, but it’s also the end of my access to this company. They’re not going to be pleased.
I gave it a shove and it wobbled, and they were like, “No, you can do it harder than that.” I gave it as hard as I could. It staggered backwards and threw its arms up in the air as it regained its equilibrium. It was just such an uncanny moment to see a robot mimic so perfectly, to my eyes, the movements of a human. I remember doing this and having it stagger backwards and then trot back up to me, look me right in the face, and I was like, “Oh gosh, these things are real.”
What are humanoid robots meant to do, James?
If you believe the pitch decks and the hype men, they’re meant to do anything that an able-bodied human can do. They’re meant to slot right into the workplace, sort packages, bolt on car doors, anything and everything. This is the pitch. This is why they are built like humans. They want them to do anything that a human laborer can do. And that’s a big ask.
Who’s asking the robots to do it all right now?
A lot of companies in the US and in China, mainly. These are the two leaders in the robotics space. It used to be mainly startups, but now we’re seeing more of the big tech companies move into this space as well.
Meta recently bought a robotic startup. Google has been doing stuff with robots for ages. It’s been testing its AI out on them. And Tesla — it’s Elon Musk’s obsession, alongside colonizing Mars. He thinks that Optimus, which is the name of Tesla’s robot, is going to be the most productive, the most profitable product ever invented. I think this is typical Muskian hyperbole. But his interest is something that has moved the market hugely. And when he got involved, a lot of companies followed suit.
Why is it that we’re seeing more of this stuff? Is it just because there are more robots now?
The big reason for why we’re having this moment for humanoids at the moment is AI. The ChatGPT boom and deep learning have enabled large language models or chatbots. A lot of people have thought that this is a transferable technology that we can plug into humanoid machines and other machines and it can learn in the same way that chatbots have been able to learn and to reproduce human speech.
The big thing that they’re depending on is that robots in the past had to be programmed manually. You had to say, “Move your arm here, down this many degrees, across like this, and apply this much pressure.” What you have with the new form of AI is that it learns these lessons by itself. You plug in a lot of data, you give it an output that you want, and it learns how to connect those pieces together.
These companies hope that if we get enough data, we will “solve the problem of physical robotics” and we will have these machines that are multidexterous and capable of all these different tasks.
The big criticism of that is that robots are not in the same world as chatbots. Chatbots are dealing with text. You talk to a chatbot even today and it will still make mistakes every now and again. When those mistakes are transferred to the physical world, they suddenly become a lot more potentially dangerous.
A big thing that a lot of companies are doing at the moment is they’re saying, “We’re going to put these robots in the home. They are going to be the perfect robot butler and they will take care of your dishes and your laundry and all the rest of it.”
If a chatbot gets something wrong when you’re asking it to do some research, then it’s not the biggest deal in the world. You may spot the error and correct it. If a robot gets something wrong when it is cleaning away your plates and dishes, if it breaks one in every 10 cups, are you going to be happy with that quality? No, I don’t think so.
Is the way China’s developing these machines different from the way we are?
I would say that the main difference is that China’s doing it faster and better. I think there is more of a focus in the US on home products as a marketing tool to the rich and saying, “Look, we can take care of all these chores for you.”
In China, you have what is one of the fastest aging populations in the world. People over 60 are predicted to be 30 percent of the population by 2040. So you have a loss of manufacturing labor and you have an increased burden on social care. I think for Chinese state planners, humanoid robotics could very much plug into both of those gaps at the same time.
There is a slightly different focus, but it is one that is organic in terms of the advantages of the Chinese economy. The big thing that the Chinese economy has that the US doesn’t is scale. It has a massive ability to manufacture these units. It can make thousands at a time. This is why China is pulling ahead.
You spent a lot of time in your piece trying to suss out the hype versus the reality. Where do you land? Is this going to be our reality within a few years or is this more like flying cars?
I think it’s nearer to flying cars than it is to the chatbot side of things. We’ve seen really rapid advances. There has been a legitimate leap forward in terms of capabilities. However, that does not mean that we are matching the hype that is being pushed out by people like Elon Musk and other leading companies who are saying, “We’re going to have one of these robots in your house next year and it’s going to be doing all the chores you need and it’ll never make a mistake and it certainly won’t fall over and kill your cat.”
I think those promises are just not true. I can see humanoid robots becoming a more common presence within both the work and the home over the next 10-plus years. But in the next five years, in the next three years, I really doubt it.
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