The robots in my building are multiplying. It started with one about the size of a doghouse that cleans the floors, and not very well: a commercial-grade Roomba that talks to you if you get in its way. Somehow, I’m always in his way.
My landlord was clearly excited about the new technical marvel of an addition to the building, which occupies half the size of a New York City block. There are many floors to clean and human hours of work to save. Then my landlord told me that the robot, which had been confined to the lobby, could now connect wirelessly to the elevator and control it. The robot now goes up and down all day and leaves the elevator to clean the hallway on each floor. The owner, satisfied with this new complexity, obtained two more, larger robots to complete the fleet. In spring, he told me with a serious face, there would be drones to clean the windows. I hope to see you as soon as daylight saving time enters.
If you believe the press releases, we’re about to start seeing more robots everywhere, and not just doghouse-sized Roombas. Humanoid robots are on track to become a $200 billion industry by 2035 “under the most optimistic scenarios,” according to a new report from Barclays Research. The cost of the hardware needed to give robots powerful arms and legs has plummeted over the past decade, and the rise of AI is giving investors hope that powerful brains will soon follow. That’s why you now hear about consumer humanoids like the 1X Neo and Figure 03, which are designed to be robotic butlers.
However, the full picture of what humanoids can do is more complicated. As James Vincent explained in Harper’s Magazine last month, the promises robotics startups make often don’t align with the reality of the technology. I’ve been learning this firsthand while working on a feature of my own on embedded AI, which recently took me to several labs at MIT. (Stay tuned for that in the coming weeks.)
One of the robots I saw there was the 4-foot-tall Unitree G1, which can dance and do backflips. It’s like a mini Atlas, the humanoid robot built by Boston Dynamics that you’ve probably seen on YouTube, but made in China for a fraction of the price. Will Knight recently profiled Unitree for Wired and argued that China, not the United States, is poised to lead the robot revolution thanks to its cheap hardware and ability to iterate new designs. Still, a dancing robot is not necessarily intelligent.
The geopolitical pieces of the puzzle
If you haven’t heard of a “biography of things,” you’ve definitely come across one of the books. Mauve: how one man invented a color that changed the world by Simon Garfield is sometimes credited as being the accidental original example of the genre. Cod: a biography of the fish that changed the world is the book that got me interested in it, when it became a bestseller almost 30 years ago. Now you can read biographies of things, also known as microhistories, about bananas, wood, ropes; In reality, anything has a fascinating story that you can find on a shelf in an airport bookstore. (Blackboards decoder ring The podcast has a great episode that explains the phenomenon).
What makes these books especially fun is that they are not about the things themselves at all. It’s about us. The story of cod is really about what the fish tells us about exploration and human ingenuity. One of my favorites of the genre is The world in a grain: the history of sand and how it transformed civilization. It’s almost 300 pages about sand, which is what everything important is made of, from concrete to microchips. And we are running out of it.
AI is inherently physical because it needs hardware to exist. And I’m not just talking about the actuators, motors and sensors that make machines move. The powerful Nvidia chips that promise to provide the processing power needed to give dumb backflipping robots a brain that can turn them into general-purpose gadgets? They are made of sand. It’s really good sand, of course: sand that has been purified and processed in some of the most advanced manufacturing facilities ever built by humanity. But as the conversation about advanced hardware powered by even more advanced software is changing our relationship with technology, I find it grounded to know that we’re dealing with familiar ingredients.
If you think sitting around reading books about sand is too escapist, let me offer a compromise. For a dose of reality, you should check out Chip war: the fight for the world’s most critical technology by Chris Miller. It’s also about sand, but it’s specifically about the history of semiconductors in the United States and the arms race that ultimately began with China. As the Trump administration moves closer to trying to seize Greenland, many fear that China’s Xi Jinping will invade Taiwan and take control of its advanced chip manufacturing facilities. If China excludes Taiwan, which produces 90 percent of the advanced chips needed for artificial intelligence applications, the digital economy would grind to a halt, according to my Vox colleague Joshua Keating. China would not limit itself to leading the robot revolution. He would be the owner.
I guess the robots in my building weigh about 120 pounds each. It’s an educated guess, because I had to pick them up to get them out of my way. If you move too fast or intimidate them too much (not that I did that on purpose), they freeze. As a security feature, this is great. But the other day, I was getting on the elevator, I scared a robot and the elevator wasn’t moving. I went up the stairs.
However, in a sense, these failures are essential. Every two weeks I see a technician come to work on the robots. They might be replacing a part, updating your software, or just giving you a pep talk. It’s a reminder that looking toward a future where embodied AI, likely robots, helps us unlock humanity’s greatest potential is a process, and likely a long one.
Many people credit Elon Musk for starting the race to build a general-purpose humanoid, when he announced Tesla’s effort to do so in 2021. Musk has shown off several prototypes of Tesla’s humanoid, Optimus, in the years since. Many of them are just puppets, operated by employees behind the scenes. This week, Musk admitted that manufacturing humanoids would be “distressingly slow” before hopefully getting faster. I really wonder, what’s the rush?
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