Humanoid robots have been everywhere lately.
They’re running half marathons in Beijing. They are chasing wild boars in the streets of Warsaw. They are being put to work as airport baggage handlers, waste sorters and traffic police. They are walking the red carpet with first lady Melania Trump at the White House. Even Buddhist monks are being ordained.
Humanoid robots have been touted as the future of everything from completing household chores to taking care of other places and doing dirty work in the factory, while Elon Musk is moving Tesla from cars to humanoid robots, claiming they will soon outnumber humans.
Today, explained Host Sean Rameswaram spoke with technology writer and journalist James Vincent, who wrote a Harper’s Magazine cover story titled “Kicking Robots,” about the hype of humanoid robots and how much of their promise can actually be realized.
Below is an excerpt from their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s a lot more in the full podcast, so give it a listen 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 haven’t done yet: you got to meet a group of robots. How many robots have you met?
I lost count after the first few, I’ll be honest. I met some 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 robots. They are both humanoid in the sense that they look like a human (arms, legs, etc.), but Agility focuses a lot on the warehouse and their robots seem a little more inhuman. They have those knees facing backwards. Apptronik makes a more general purpose robot that looks much more like a human in terms of normal body proportions, it stands upright and you look at it face to face, or eye to eye of the robot without blinking, whatever it is.
I was able to meet them, shake their hands. I played ick-ack-ock, as it is sometimes called rock, paper, scissors in the UK. And I also (this was what I liked the most, I wanted to do this so much) wanted to kick a robot. I have this burning need inside of me to want to recover before they obviously take over the world.
So the robots were nice to you, but you weren’t so nice to them.
Oh, I was horrible. I was terrible. They will come for me in the future. I have no doubt about it.
They didn’t actually let me kick a robot, I’m really sorry to say. They said it could be a safety hazard, so I had to hit one really hard with a big stick. And that was the best option.
No, it wasn’t like that. This was the creepy thing. They gave me this very high-tech stick, which was, I think, a broom handle with some safety foam attached to the end. And they said, “Give him a push, give him a point. See how hard you can push him.” And I was very nervous about this because I was told that this was one of the humanoid prototypes. It was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. And if I knock it down and it breaks, it will be a great copy, but it will also be the end of my access to this company. They won’t be happy.
I gave him a push and he wobbled, and they said, “No, you can do it harder.” I gave it as hard as I could. He stumbled back and raised his arms in the air as he regained his balance. It was such a strange moment to see a robot so perfectly imitate, to my eyes, the movements of a human. I remember doing this and having him stagger back and then trot up to me and look me right in the face and I thought, “Oh, God, these things are real.”
What are humanoid robots supposed to do, James?
If you believe in presentations and hype men, they are meant to do anything a healthy human being can do. They’re meant to fit right into the workplace, sorting packages, screwing on car doors, anything. This is the tone. That’s why they are built like humans. They want them to do anything a human worker can do. And that’s a great question.
Who asks robots to do everything now?
Many companies in the United States and China, mainly. These are the two leaders in the robotics space. It used to be mostly startups, but now we’re seeing more big tech companies entering this space as well.
Meta recently bought a robotics startup. Google has been doing things with robots for years. He’s been testing his AI on them. And Tesla is Elon Musk’s obsession, in addition to colonizing Mars. He thinks that Optimus, which is the name of Tesla’s robot, will be the most productive and profitable product ever invented. I think this is typical Muskian hyperbole. But their interest is something that has moved the market enormously. And when he got involved, many companies followed suit.
Why are we seeing more of these things? Is it just because there are more robots now?
The big reason we’re having this moment for humanoids right now is AI. The rise of ChatGPT and deep learning have enabled large language models or chatbots. Many people have thought that this is a transferable technology that we can connect to humanoid machines and other machines and that can learn in the same way that chatbots have been able to learn and reproduce human speech.
The most important thing they depend on is that in the past robots had to be programmed manually. You had to say, “Move your arm here, down so many degrees, forward like this, and apply so much pressure.” The thing about the new form of AI is that it learns these lessons on its own. You connect a lot of data, give it the output you want, and learn how to connect those pieces.
These companies hope that if we get enough data, we will “solve the physical robotics problem” and have these machines that are multi-skilled and capable of doing all these different tasks.
The big criticism of this is that robots are not in the same world as chatbots. Chatbots deal with text. You talk to a chatbot even today and it will still make mistakes from time to time. When those errors are transferred to the physical world, they suddenly become much more potentially dangerous.
A great thing that a lot of companies are doing right now is saying, “We’re going to put these robots in the home. They’re going to be the perfect butler robot and they’re going to take care of your dishes, your laundry, and everything else.”
If a chatbot makes a mistake when you ask it to do some research, then it’s not the greatest deal in the world. You can detect the error and correct it. If a robot makes a mistake when cleaning your plates and dishes, if it breaks one in 10 cups, will you be happy with that quality? No, I don’t think so.
Is the way China develops these machines different from ours?
I would say the main difference is that China is doing it faster and better. I think in America there’s more focus on household products as a marketing tool for the wealthy and saying, “Look, we can take care of all these tasks for you.”
In China we have one of the fastest aging populations in the world. People over 60 years of age are expected to represent 30 percent of the population in 2040. Therefore, there will be a loss of manufacturing workforce and an increased burden on social assistance. I think for Chinese state planners, humanoid robotics could fill both gaps at the same time.
There is a slightly different approach, but it is organic in terms of the advantages of the Chinese economy. The most important thing about the Chinese economy is that the United States is not growing. It has enormous capacity to manufacture these units. It can produce thousands at a time. That’s why China is taking the lead.
You spent a lot of time in your article trying to distinguish hype from reality. Where do you land? Will this be our reality in a few years or is it more like flying cars?
I think it’s closer to the flying cars than the chatbot side. We’ve seen really rapid progress. There has been a legitimate leap forward in terms of capabilities. However, that doesn’t mean we’re matching the hype that’s being generated by people like Elon Musk and other leading companies saying, “We’re going to have one of these robots in your house next year and it’ll do all the tasks you need it to do and it’ll never make a mistake and it certainly won’t fall and kill your cat.”
I think those promises are simply not true. I can see humanoid robots becoming a more common presence at both work and home over the next 10 years. But in the next five years, in the next three years, I really doubt it.