Kicking Robots

Image summary: A photograph of three humanoid robotic exoskeletons standing in a row against a white wall in an indoor setting. Each exoskeleton is constructed from metallic frames and mechanical joints, featuring supports for the torso, legs, and arms, and is mounted on a wheeled base for stability.

Kicking Robots

You can learn a surprising amount by kicking things. It's an epistemological method you often see deployed by small children, who target furniture, pets, and their peers in the hope of answering important questions about the world. Questions like "How solid is this thing?" and "Can I knock it over?" and "If I kick it, will it kick me back?"

Kicking robots is something of a pastime among roboticists. Although the activity generates anxiety for lay observers prone to worrying about the prospect of future retribution, it also happens to be an efficient method of testing a machine's balance. In recent years, as robots have become

Applying the book to help separate what's real from what's not.

All of this is going through my head in April, when I find myself face-to-face with a robot named Apollo. Apollo is a humanoid: a robot with two arms and two legs, standing five feet eight inches tall, with exposed wires, whirring motors, and a smooth plastic head resembling a mannequin's. Like so many humanoids, Apollo exemplifies the uncanny, hyperreal nature of modern robotics, simultaneously an image from science fiction and a real, tangible machine.

Chinese bots running half marathons, ominous videos of muscled noids twitching on gantries, clips of robot fight clubs. Sometimes you descend into chaos. Bank of America forecasts that there will be at least a million humanoid robots shipped annually by 2035, while Morgan Stanley predicts that more than a billion will be in use by 2050. If all goes according to plan, robotics could constitute the largest industry in the world, generating annual revenue upwards of $5 trillion. Elon Musk, that sage of understatement, claims that Tesla's own Optimus robot will one day "be more productive than the entire global economy."

Image summary: A portrait photograph of a humanoid robot named Apptronik. The robot features a white, rounded head with two small circular black eyes and a white torso with the word APPTRONIK printed in capital letters across the chest. Its arms and joints are constructed from a mix of silver metal and black components, with visible wiring and mechanical actuators.

As I square up to Apollo in a plexiglass arena, my first instinct is, naturally, to raise a foot. But the kick test is too dangerous for visiting journalists, I'm told. Instead, someone hands me a wooden pole with a piece of foam taped around one end and mimes poking the machine in its chest. Ah, I think, the scientific method. In front of me, as various motors rev up to speed, the robot shuffles in place, looking like an arthritic boxer readying for a fight. On the other side of the plexiglass, a group of engineers chat casually with one another and glance over at a bank of monitors. One of them gives me a thumbs-up. Have at it.

frenetic, seemingly improvised dance as dubstep blared from nearby speakers. After the dancer exited to scattered applause, Musk shuffled back onstage. "Obviously that was not real," he said.

Musk's showcase captured perfectly the power of spectacle to mask technological shortcomings and bridge the gap between expectation and reality. But for those who'd been toiling away on humanoid robots for decades, Musk's announcement was something more than a publicity stunt. "After Tesla Bot, the whole world sort of woke up to humanoids," Jeff Cardenas, Apptronik's co-founder and C.E.O, told me. The number of people

After my bout with Apollo, Cardenas and T headed to Apptornik's conference room. Cardenas is tall and handsome, one of those men who manages to straddle the jock-nerd divide, and whose behavior can be read as either supremely confident or socially oblivious. When he holds my gaze—which seems like all the time—I can't decide whether he's trying to intimidate me or win me over. I get the feeling it's a bit of both.

In my decade of reporting on tech, the posture of executives has shifted from one of assumed friendliness to one of wariness and even antagonism. This is in part a result of tech's embrace of alpha-male culture, but it's also a defensive response to public disappointment with and mockery of the

To get a better idea of where Cardenas stands, I ask him what he thinks of Musk. He admits that the Tesla C.E.O doesn't necessarily have “a consistent track record on timelines” (at the time of writing, reports suggest Tesla has slashed its production targets from five thousand to two thousand units for this year) but says that Musk has an instinct for knowing when technologies and markets align, proving himself with electric vehicles, reusable rockets, and satellite internet. “I thought Elon was a really good person to be an initial major evangelist,” Cardenas tells me. “If he was jumping into humanoids, certainly there had to be some reason why.”

of data for patterns—that has powered the development of large language models like ChatGPT, and that roboticists hope will push their own machines into the next stage of development.

Instead of decoding the rules of human language from niles of text these models like ChatGPT, and that roboticists hope will push their own machines into the next stage of development.

Instead of decoding the rules of human language from piles of text, these engineers are trying to emulate human dexterity by analyzing stores of video and sensor data. This training data is either generated by humans who control robots like puppets (a practice known as “teleoperation,” or “teleop”) or taken from virtual training environments, where tasks can be attempted using robot models over and over, at accelerating rates. The resulting systems go by a few different names but are most commonly known as vision-language

A.I, a humanoid-robotics startup, released a sixty-minute video of its prototype humanoid nimbly sorting variously sized parcels, the kind of work that's easy for humans but challenging for machines. Figure A.I's C.E.O, Brett Adcock, told Bloomberg that the robot's operations were running on a single A.I neural network. "It's taking camera frames in; it's outputting the actions," he said. This is a major change from robot control systems that resemble a set of step-by-step instructions: Go to X position and close grabber.

Move to Y position and release grabber. Instead, Adcock and his peers are creating systems that generalize rules from data, just like chatbots do. Thanks to demos like Figure A.I's, advocates claim that robotics is headed toward its own "ChatGPT moment," a technical breakthrough that attracts investment and accelerates adoption. For others in the industry, though, the very phrase is anathema. It committed to virtual reality that it rebranded itself as Meta, a pivot that failed utterly after the company's augmented-and virtual-reality division lost more than $45 billion in a matter of years? Or are they more like self-driving cars, which were a similarly flashy locus for investment and criticism but now seem to be transforming into viable businesses? It took Waymo, a subsidiary of Alphabet, about six years for its cars to rack up their first million miles of autonomous driving, but as of this summer its fleet drives two million miles every week.

In my conversation with Cardenas, we discussed the different ways robots already work alongside us. When I was catching my flight to Texas, for instance, I watched a floor cleaning machine the size of a carbone bin since

T here is a basic challenge in robotic design that I've come across time and time again. I refer to it as the dishwasher problem. It's like this: Imagine you're designing a robot to clean and dry dishes the way a human does.

Think of all the difficulties you need to overcome: Your robot needs hands and arms that can manipulate items of different shapes and sizes, and a vision system to identify muck and grime. It needs to be strong enough to grasp slippery things, sensitive enough to handle breakables, and dexterous enough to clean the insides of items like mugs and graters. Alternatively, you could build a waterproof box, fill it with jets and sprays, and stuff everything make things harder for ourselves?

The answers engineers have given me very from the spiritual to the pragmatic. The more philosophical among them point out that humans have been making simulacra of our bodies for millennia. There are four-thousand-year-old “living statues” from ancient Egypt that operate by string, for example, while in the Renaissance, humanoid automatons were a novelty for the rich: courtiers made with wooden gears posed for audiences and played the flute.

Such history implies that building humanoids is a cultural imperative, an instinct that parallels biological reproduction. But most engineers tend to be designing a machine to handle human labor, he says, you would still end up re-creating the Homo sapiens blueprint simply as a matter of convergent evolution. Form must follow function, and if that function is to replace humans, it helps to be human-shaped.

Image summary: A photograph of Mindar, a humanoid robot developed by Osaka University, positioned at the Kodaiji Temple in Kyoto, Japan, in 2019. The robot has a realistic human-like face and skin on its head and hands, which are held together in a prayer position, while its shoulders, arms, and torso are constructed from exposed silver metallic robotic components and wiring.

Take, for example, warehouse work, which is usually seen as the beachhead for humanoids owing to its relative simplicity and recruitment challenges. Unless you want to completely redesign your warehouse, you need to build machines that are able to navigate between tightly packed shelves while also lifting and grabbing objects, and that can maintain their balance while their addition of a robot "head" makes sense, as you need to put cameras and sensors somewhere high to oversee the work. As Hurst puts it: "We're not copying a person. We're doing it for actual reasons."

As I walk around Apptronik's factory, I watch engineers fit together the pieces of this human puzzle. There are racks of arms and shelves of legs, metal gears hanging from hooks, and trays of actuators ready to be assembled. At one table it looks as though an anatomy lesson is taking place. The limbs, head, and chest of an Apollo unit have been deconstructed and laid flat, with its wires and cables teased apart like muscle and nerves. As I watch, an engineer the sheer ambition of the work transcends simple engineering.

Though Cardenas acknowledges the practical reasons for building humanoids, his own motivation goes further. It's not just about making machines fit our environment, he said, but radically transforming the type of work they can perform. It's about changing what a robot is. Traditional industrial machines, he explained, are static, expensive, and dangerous.

These are the sorts of robots you see assembling cars in B-roll footage on the news: huge mechanical arms administering spot welds and paint jobs with unimpeachable rigor and precision. But the robot of the future, Cardenas

Later, as we sip coffee and talk more about Apptronik's plans in the conference room, Cardenas begins to shift into a mode of utopian reasoning that you often hear in the tech world. Until then, he'd been practical, explaining actuators and motors, but now he was navigating a realm where numbers multiply frictionlessly and progress is inevitable. "Let's say, on the whole, for every average person, fifty years from now, robots give you five years of improved quality of life," he says. "Five years of improved life per person is forty billion years of collective energy that you could pour back into the sum total of the human experience. What do we do with a billion years, let alone motivates Cardenas, instilling in him a sense of fervor and urgency. As our meeting wraps up and his P.R team tries to drag him to his next appointment, he can't stop talking—he's halfway out the door before he sticks his head back in the room to make one last point, to try and make me see. “As humans, we have conceived of humanoids longer than we've conceived of computers,” he says. “To me, the story is: Wow, all this time we've been thinking about this. Now here we are at the front end of it.” He stops, hand on the doorframe, then asks aloud the questions that plainly occupy him: “Where does it go? What does that look like?” He stares past me as if into some unknowable future, then smiles, shrugs, and walks back into the factory.

creation story, they'll also wait on us, following a cultural tradition of robot butlers from Rosey the Robot in The Jetsons to Robin Williams's noble robo-servant Andrew in Bicentennial Man. Even today, the robot butler is shorthand for the elusive Good Timeline, emblem of a future in which the luxury of household staff is made accessible and ethical thanks to the wonders of technology.

No humanoid startup draws more heavily on this vision than d startup draws more heavily on this vision than gies, a Palo Alto-based company founded by the Norwegian ent Børnich (who, according to Cardenas, is one of the industry's s"). Last year, 1.X unveiled neo, a “humanoid robot for the is shown performing household chores in minimalist homes, carrying laundry and pushing a vacuum cleaner while its owners do something inscrutable with an iPad. The overall mood is cozy, serene, and neutered: a weighted blanket for the robot world.

Børnich's decision to build humanoids for the home hinges on the technical premise of the ChatGPT moment. If data is key to creating A.I control systems, and if robot butlers are the end goal of the industry, then, Børnich says, they need to begin testing in these environments as soon as possible. This in itself is not crazy. Boston Dynamics, perhaps the most established and played by humans, their uses this information to create its own strategies and moves. As Scott Kuindersma, a vice president of robotics research at Boston Dynamics, told me, “If you have a robot and a teleop system that you can use to repeatedly produce a behavior on the robot, then we basically have the technology to turn the crank and turn that into an autonomous policy.” But, he added, that doesn't mean the robot will perform its task with perfect accuracy or reliability, and it certainly doesn't mean robots are ready to be placed in the home.

In the form of chatbots, plausible mistruths and inaccuracies usually limited scope for harm, but with a domestic robot, mistakes could be ophic. Imagine you tell your machine butler, “Pour me a cup of tea,” an alluring target for hackers, while the robots themselves would need to be accessed remotely for troubleshooting, potentially giving attackers physical access to your house. For these and other safety reasons, skeptics in the industry allege that companies promising to deliver domestic robots in a prediction for me," Kuindersma tells me. His colleague, Marc Theermann, the company's chief strategy officer, says: "I'm not sure if we even believe that humanoids in the home is a thing in the foreseeable future."

particularly keen to see neo for myself. But the firm was frustratingly elusive. Communication was fragmented, my requests to visit the company's headquarters were rejected, and a scheduled interview with Børnich himself was canceled at the last minute while I waited on the line.

Such behavior tends to make a journalist only more determined, but when I traveled to San Francisco to visit 1.X's competitors and told the company's representatives I was in the area, ready to chat anywhere, anytime, I was rebuffed for good. "Thanks again for the dialogue," said the head of communications. "After

In my experience, when companies promising transformational new technology decline to show it to the press, it's not a great sign. Thankfully, 1.X does talk to some favored sources, mostly YouTubers and podcasters who focus on our bright technological future, so I can tell you that Børnich comes across as warm and friendly, with a goofy smile. He looks like a retired skateboarder, with long blond hair and a wardrobe of baggy T-shirts, and he makes big promises. "The future where you have humanoids at home folding your laundry is a lot closer than you think, and the price will also be a lot lower than most people imagine," he says in one video from last August, promising that 1.X "can manufacture robots at the cost of a relatively affordable car." In another interview from 2024, he speculates about a world in which 1.X builds "thousands of neo's in 2025, tens of thousands in 2026, hundreds of thousands in 2027, millions in 2028."

To stoke belief in the promise of humanoid butlers, 1.X has relied heavily on carefully orchestrated promotional content. In a YouTube video by the San

Francisco filmmaker Jason Carman, 1.X brings a neo unit to Carman's

48 Hours," has nearly half a million views and shows the neo making coffee for Carman. This might be impressive, but it's unclear whether the robot is operating autonomously or being controlled by an engineer. The only task the machine performs on camera is pouring boiling water over coffee grounds. A 1.X employee then takes the brewer, pours the coffee into a mug, and hands it to Carman. "neo made it," he says. "I swear."

Pointing out that the robot didn't actually make the coffee but merely poured even more difficult to discern the truth of such demos. For example, many humanoids can now perform cartwheels or other impressive feats of acrobatics, but these may be one-off stunts rather than samples of a larger repertoire. Jim Fan, director of A.I at Nvidia, has compared these performances to those of a “blind gymnast,” lacking awareness of the environment. If you were to introduce an obstacle in a backflipping robot's path, it would crash right into it. Being able to copy one aspect of human mobility doesn't mean we've mastered all of the underlying principles.

Just as many people ascribe human-level intelligence to ChatGPT because it can generate fluent speech, a capability we'd previously encountered only in conversations with conscious beings, we often imagine that humanoid robots are as physically capable as we are just because they possess similar bodies and can accomplish some of the same tasks. In both cases, though, the familiarity of appearances masks hidden limitations. "You see a robot making coffee, and people can make coffee, and the robot looks like a person, and you can easily extrapolate to all the other kitchenlike things the robot might be able to do," I n a back room at Stanford University, engineers have mocked up a bare- bones grocery store, complete with shelves, baskets, and a scattering of unlabeled cans. It reminds me of my nieces' kitchen play set, where the fine details of reality have been smoothed away so as not to confuse developing minds. I watch a wobbly figure stamping around the shelves and filling up a basket of goods. It looks more stable than my nieces do, but not by a whole lot.

Melonee Wise, Agility's chief product officer at the time, is similarly restrained. She's quiet and calm, with a neat bob of hair and unfussy glasses. She's been in the industry for nearly two decades, having worked at the famed robotics incubator Willow Garage before co-founding Fetch Robotics, a startup that made autonomous mobile robots, or A.M.R's: small robots resembling coffee tables on wheels. Before humanoids, A.M.R's were the Next Big Thing, and after the usual cycle of hype and consolidation, they've actually proven themselves to be useful. In 2022, Amazon had more than half alongside) its overtaxed human employees. As a result of her work with A.M.R's, Wise avoids framing humanoids as some sort of industrial panacea for every economic ill, from labor shortages to manufacturing bottlenecks. Instead, she presents them as what they are: a piece of hardware with its own drawbacks and affordances, like any other tool. “One of the biggest lessons I learned about commercializing technology is the technology part is easy,” Wise says. The hard part? “Making the technology usable.”

wanted to use robots in the production of ball bearings. “So we're watching this gentleman do the task,” she says. “The bearings go through a grinder and come out the other side. You're supposed to pick them up and put them into the container. Then all of a sudden, I watch the gentleman who's operating the machine go to a drawer, grab a rag, and wipe down the entire surface of the machine.” Wise asked if this was necessary. The worker said yes of course: the machine gets gummed up. And just like that, she tells me, the bearings without a problem, but it would be trickier to teach them wh was time to wipe down the machine, or how to do so without human assistance.

As with the deceptive home robot demos, there is a difference between the ideal version of a task and the messy reality of putting humanoids to work in commercial settings. It's a telling fact that only three U.S. robotics firms have made such deployments—Apptronik, Figure A.I, and Agility—and even then, these are only pilot programs. In March of last year, Apptronik said Mercedes Benz was “exploring potential use cases” for its machines but offered no

January, Figure A.I announced a partnership with B.M.W. Brett Adcock, the C.E.O, claimed that the company had “a fleet of robots” in operation. But a spokesperson for B.M.W later told Fortune that only a single robot was working in its plants. (Adcock threatened to sue the magazine for its reporting and did not respond to my own requests for comment.) Even Agility, despite its more realistic ambitions, has made slow progress. Last June, the company announced an agreement with warehouse operator G.X.O Logistics, but it

At Stanford, I spend some time watching Digit at work, after which I take a virtual tour of Agility's headquarters in Oregon. I watch the company's robots lift crates, grasp packages, and move loads. Agility's representatives show me the company's software, which displays a diagram of a factory or shop, with teons representing robots and workstations. Customers can then set up a working routine by clicking these pieces, like in a video game. You click to select a robot, click to pick up an object, click there to drop it off, and so on. Here, I thought, were the basic components of an automated workforce, seemingly ready to go, and yet confined to limited demonstrations or experimental settings.

Wise acknowledges the challenges that remain—cost, reliability, integration—but remains confident that the industry is on the cusp of major change. She saw this happen with A.M.R's, she says, and notes that a “big unlock” is coming, when humanoid robots are allowed to operate freely around humans (right now they're constrained to caged "work cells" because of safety fears). "We believe by the end of 2026 we will have humanoid robots free-roaming in facilities with trained adults," she says, at which point they'll be able to slot into the workplace alongside humans. I think of Digit navigating Agility's fake grocery store, and yes, there is a sense of plausibility, even of inevitability. Of course there will be robots in warehouses in a few years' time, but I wonder what impact they will actually have on working life. They could be a liberating force, yes, but also could just as easily be another prop in scenes of human drudgery, as unexceptional as forklifts or barcodes. It's likely they'll be useful and frustrating in equal measure—sharing the burden of human work without ever seeming to diminish it.

It can be hard to imagine meaningful changes to the world you know, but it's easier in unfamiliar places. Perhaps this is why, in my interviews with robotics experts, they keep on talking about the transformation that robots will create in China. It's there, I'm told, that humanoid labor will truly come into its own, a prediction that seems to scare people as much as it excites them.

with 322 machines per ten thousand employees compared with 274 in America, and the gap has only widened since. Beijing's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has made robotics a key part of its industrial strategy, and aims to increase robot installations to 500 units per ten thousand workers by the end of the year. A review of documents by Reuters in May found that the government allocated more than $20 billion to the

The pace of development feels frenetic. Videos of Chinese robots performing martial arts and acrobatics are common on social media, while the Chinese robotics industry has organized a series of spectacles to show off its advances. In April, the city of Hangzhou hosted the first-ever robot kickboxing tournament, featuring several humanoid robots made by Chinese startup Unitree outfitted with gloves and protective headgear, operated by humans with video-game controllers. (The robots were more Rock 'Em Sock 'Em than hosted the World Humanoid Robot Games, with more than 280 teams participating in twenty-six different events, including soccer, boxing, and the long jump. Again, the bots were not always gainly—one viral video showed a humanoid veering off a running track and knocking over a human spectator—but the atmosphere was one of dynamism and experimentation. Here, robots were running free, if sometimes a little too literally.

Like other Chinese industries, the country's robotics sector benefits from economies of scale and generous state investment. “China will just

A.B.I Research. The proximity of supply chains is also vital. U.S. companies looking to iterate on a new design often have to ship components back and forth to manufacturers in Asia. Chinese firms, on the other hand, can simply head to the factory next door, tweak things in person, and have new prototypes ready to test in a matter of days—the same reason China has dominated in high-tech markets like solar power, electric vehicles, and drones. “Drones and E.V's aren't easy to build—or, they weren't at the time,” Reyk

Out." Knuhtsen claims the same will be true of humanoids.

The United States, however, still retains an edge in product quality and software. According to people who deal with the technology firsthand, it produces reliable machines that are more easily integrated into the workplace. Robert Stokes, who runs a robot distributor that sells Chinese bots to U.S. customers, says that "a good twenty percent" of the robots he buys from Unitree arrive broken, requiring repairs even before they're up and running.

unable to perform the stunts you see on social media without significant modification. "You've got a lot of development you have to do personally," he says. "When a new robot is released, the software tools are initially rudimentary." And even if you can make a robot dance, it doesn't always mean you should.

Stokes gives the example of Unitree's G.1 humanoid robot, which can be seen performing backflip after backflip in promo videos. In real life, he says, all these gymnastics quickly wear out the machine's components.

he says, and demand is growing. At the start of this year, he sold fewer than ten humanoids a month, but predicts this figure will rise to a hundred units next year. He compares the market to that of smartphones. The American robotics firms are copying Apple's playbook, focusing on designing a few high-quality products, but Chinese companies are mimicking the Android ecosystem, pushing out high volumes in a range of designs. "The Apple approach is fine," says Stokes. "But there's a certain part of the market that

States apply in China as well, though these considerations are increasingly overshadowed by geopolitics. Chowdhury says that there is a growing cadre in government and industry who have bought into the hype around humanoids and believe that the world economy will be dominated by whoever cracks the problem first. “If China can print its own workforce, then you're kind of in trouble economically, right?” he says. “It becomes almost an existential thing. It's almost a cold war ramping up, I think, in the minds of some people.”

When I talk with Knuhtsen about a future in which China and the United do for $7,000 a pop, he's hesitant about the scale of his own predictions. The most extreme scenario is that robots become a $65 trillion market and replace all human labor, he says. “Coming out of my mouth, I hate that. I don't want to be the guy saying that. But effectively that's what's in store, should it go correctly.”

This would create a workforce that is not only cheap, but also pliant and obedient—an appealing notion for elites who find it challenging to deal with human workers. It's no coincidence, for example, that Musk, one of robotics' biggest boosters, frequently decries the presence of unions in his factories. If only those trouble looms, humans could be automated, it would free the

Only these troublesome humans could be automated, it would not the holders of capital from their obligations to the working class. And if workers can no longer withhold their labor as leverage, then the provision of social goods like housing and health care becomes discretionary. This would be a seismic change in the world's social dynamics, regardless of which country gets there first. Musk has said he believes "we're headed to a radically different world" with humanoids, but the extent of the change—and who it will benefit—is far from clear.

our discussions that reminds me of Pascal's wager. It's a situation where the potential consequences are so extreme—in this case, a robot takeover of the global economy—that you're compelled to take them seriously, despite their improbability. But frankly, it just doesn't seem credible to me that robots will dominate the world's economy within only a few decades. (Over a longer time frame, widespread adoption feels significantly more plausible.) Knuhtsen recognizes the unsettling scale of his forecasts. He describes his work, at times as "looking into the shroes" and it strikes me that there's something hypnotic about contemplating change of this kind. It's millenarian: a rapture for workers. You encounter these kinds of predictions from A.I doomers, who warn about the threat posed to humanity by superintelligence. Often, they're so entranced by the scale and drama of their claims that they lose sight of their implausibility. When playing God, it's hard to stay grounded.

B ack home in London after shaking hands with robot ambassadors,

I'm still uncertain about the future of humanoids. Then, one of my contacts pings me about an upcoming conference in town: a meeting of those hotels that seem to exist outside local geography and function solely as gathering places for men and women in lanyards. As I dodge demonstrations of wheeled and legged robots, I hear chatter about motors and actuators, import taxes and safety standards, and the difficulty of getting these things to do what they're supposed to.

Over the course of the conference, I dip in and out of talks from venture simply the gloom that pervades all such industry get-togethers—the hotel carpet and the low-level anxiety. But there's a reminder of history, too. In one talk, a researcher, Werner Kraus of Germany's Fraunhofer Institute, notes that the industry has been here before, with so-called “collaborative robots”—small robotic arms designed to work safely alongside humans, and once thought to be the industry's future. “We all have in mind how it went with the cobots twenty years ago,” he reminds the audience dourly, “when we said cobots would be the solutions for all our problems.” It didn't work out that way. The promised cobot revolution never materialized, with high unit costs point, in the smoking area, I chat with an entrepreneur fi he's keen to start new robotics companies, but investors wo " he says. "V.C's want to have a clearer understanding c go full risk."

livered by Aaron Prather, the director

T.M is a global standards agency, on the global economy that publish standards on everything from the

Some standards are voluntary and others become law, but all contribute to the invisible framework that keeps the global economy from jamming up (or accidentally making you radioactive). Of course, Prather says, robots will have to meet certain standards, too.

He runs through some of the hazards that will need to be managed. There are the pinch points. There's the need for "e-stops" (emergency stop buttons) and adaptations for the blind and deaf. And then there are the psychosocial impacts, too: managing the feelings we project onto these humanlike objects.

It's a reminder of the unending complexity of a technology designed in our own image, though not necessarily a dispiriting one. Discussing these bureaucratic matters is itself a sign of maturity, and it's clear from what I've seen that we've taken the next step in humanoid development. But from all my discussions, I've found that we can't understand these machines by analogy alone. Just because ChatGPT became ubiquitous in a matter of months doesn't mean that humanoids will follow a similar trajectory, and just because we're replicating human anatomy doesn't mean we've re-created human ability.

After Prather's talk, I stay in my seat in the main auditorium. The schedule tells me that next up is a mysterious "theatrical encounter," which I presume will be some sort of dramatic turn starring humans and robots, a metaphor for our harmonious future with the machines. The lights in the room dim, and the stage is illuminated, revealing a human dancer in a sequined bodysuit posed next to a humanoid no bigger than a child. As Europop blasts from the speakers, the dancer performs cartwheels and backflips in the general vicinity of the robot, which at one point drops to the floor to crank out some push-ups. The lavards and I watch impressively and I think of Musk's an on-day-old ups. The lanyards and I watch impassively, and I think of Musk's spandex-clad slideshow. After a few long minutes, the performance wraps up, and the dancer runs out through the aisles, exiting through the doors at the back of the hall. Left alone in the spotlight, the robot walks to the edge of the stage, waiting for its handlers, unable to manage the stairs.

Human(oid) Potential deceptiveness of its marketing, and just how frightened we should be of a humanoid future

From the December 2025 issue