Why Humanoid Robots Aren't Quite Ready (And What We Should Build Instead)

Every Friday at 10 AM, my boyfriend's $1,000 robot vacuum springs to life with an optimistic little beep. By 10:15 AM, it's usually stuck under the couch with a charging chord wrapped around its wheel.

Goldman Sachs Research projects the humanoid robot market will reach $38 billion by 2035, and everyone's talking about how these machines are the future. But all I could think about is that robot vacuum (designed for literally one job), whirring helplessly under the couch before getting tangled in its own brushes and giving up entirely.

And we think we’re ready for robots that look and act like humans?

The Spectacle vs. Reality

Don't get me wrong; the demos are genuinely impressive. China just held the world's first humanoid robot fight night, with 4-foot-tall robots throwing jabs and uppercuts in a boxing ring. Twenty-one humanoid robots completed a half-marathon in Beijing, with the winner finishing in 2 hours and 40 minutes. These are real technical achievements.

But here's what the headlines don't mention: the marathon robots needed human operators running alongside them, battery swaps every few miles, and a separate fenced lane to keep them from crashing into each other. The fight night? Those robots were remote-controlled by humans with joysticks.

As one robotics expert pointed out, "Chinese companies have really focused on showing off walking, running, dancing, and other feats of agility. Generally, these are interesting demonstrations, but they don't demonstrate much regarding the utility of useful work."

The Economics Don't Add Up

There's a gap between what we imagine robots can do vs. what they actually can do. The hard part isn't the walking or the talking. It's handling thousands of unexpected things that happen in real life.

And then there's the economics of it all. Human labor is incredibly cheap. A person can fold laundry, clean a bathroom, and watch your kids for $15 an hour. Meanwhile, Tesla's Optimus is projected to cost $20,000-$30,000, and companies like Figure AI are valued at $39.5 billion. Yet these robots break down regularly and need continuous software updates. The math doesn't really work for most of the tasks we imagine them doing.

The Real Future: Specialists, Not Generalists

Every time I have to rescue the vacuum from under the couch, I can't help thinking we might be solving the wrong problems first. Instead, we should focus on building robots that are incredibly good at one specific thing rather than mediocre at everything. We already have this with surgical robots: machines that can perform operations with precision no human hand could match. They're not trying to be human. They're trying to be better than human at one particular task.

Instead of building a robot butler that can sort of fold laundry, sort of cook dinner, and sort of clean the house, maybe we build robots that are extraordinary at surgery, at assembling electronics, or at deep-sea exploration.

The future probably does include humanoid robots. But maybe we should master getting simple machines to work reliably and figure out what they're actually better at than hiring a human.