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this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2026
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I don’t understand the business case for humanoid robots other than “cool toy for a show room floor”.
Surely anything an AI humanoid can do could be better done by a specialized regular robot.
A huge part of the Industrial Revolution was standardizing how everything got done, every car panel the same size and all that, enabling Henry Ford style factory floors.
What is the benefit of having robots who can do more or less anything (just like a human) but in varying and non-standard ways each time (just like a human) compared to Car-Panel-Bot-2000 which is going to make car panel after car panel for 20 years, each one microscopically the same?
Like, the pitch seems to be “this robot is versatile and so you can ask it to do more or less anything”, which sounds suspiciously similar to saying “there is no specific use case for this robot, no niche that it fills.”
the one benefit is as you say, the versatility. We already have a world built for humans, so a human shape means generalized compatibility with most objects
the best argument for humanoid robots i've heard is that you don't need to change the environment that they will be working in, they can just be slotted in where a human once was and take over the work
Yeah, if they execute that idea successfully they could massively massively reduce the infrastructural costs of rolling these out.
If. But I don't think it's impossible.
Or you can just hire a housekeeper to fold your towels rather than spend $800,000 on a robot every 5 years to do it
the one thing that immediately comes to mind for humanoid robots is that they excel at navigating elevation changes made for humans. while it is exceedingly hard to do right, bipedal motion is very good at navigating discrete elevation changes like stairs. this would make them ideal household task robots in multi-story houses, i think.
this is off the top of my stupid ass head so take it w a grain of salt.
I'm gonna quote what I already said elsewere on this issue:
I'd like to add on top of that: the framing of a binary choice between either specialized robots or generalist humanoid robots is wrong. Humanoids will without a doubt work alongside specialized robots, just like human workers currently do.
You are making the strongest argument for generalization, I agree with the logic of your argument. There is benefit in being able to rapidly reconfigure production.
Like, the power of a 3D printer or CNC machine to customize its output to be essentially whatever the fuck you want every single time is important.
But I still disagree with humanoid robots with general purpose AI being the solution to that.
For example, I saw one Chinese robot which was a painting robot, and you could wear a sleeve and paint a thing and the robot would replicate those motions precisely. So there you have a general purpose painting-bot that can be reprogrammed for any painting-purpose within minutes.
I agree that’s powerful, and I can see how the same would be true for, like, the screw-driver-bot or the welding-bot. And each of these generalized use cases could benefit from AI (“does it need another coat of paint? Did I miss a spot?”).
So a factory composed of general purpose robots makes a lot of sense and wouldn’t even be more expensive than a factory of custom-made purpose-specific robots.
But the “does absolutely anything bot, with general purpose AI that can reason about how to solve the problem” this I absolutely don’t buy into.
In part, because I genuinely don’t see AGI ever being that good. But that’s a criticism of AI rather than these robots.
So ok assume AGI is or becomes that good, I still don’t see the “does everything” robot being useful compared to a team composed of painter-bot, welder-bot, sorter-bot, etc.
I also don’t see the real utility in the humanoid form.
The argument is that since they’re humanoid they can use any tool designed for humans.
But surely redesigning those tools for the robot itself has already been proven more effective given decades of factory automation.
And sure bipedal motion is more versatile than wheels, but a factory floor is an artificial space so you can make the factory floor compatible with wheels and have a robot with less moving parts, less moving parts being almost axiomatically the better choice.
Hell, we even redesigned our cities and planet to be suited to cars and trains. So the idea that bipedal motion is more versatile, while absolutely true, is still not very strong to me.
I agree that there are surely some use-cases for bipedal or quadruped robots. I can think of some for sure but I have to really think to discover a purpose where it’s not simply easier and more reliable to redesign the space for wheels instead.
Each capability an AI humanoid robot has seems suitable for edge-cases basically. That’s why I don’t see it. Sure, probably there will be enough of those edge-cases to make them a profitable industry but its niche.
Your argument could be applied to ASICs and FPGAs/microcontrollers, and look at the market share of the latter two
Isn’t that the exact opposite though?
ASICs are specialized chips. They are highly use-case targeted. Microcontrollers are extremely specific, often single-task specific.
The robot that has been designed for the task of cutting metal panels exactly the same over and over seems like the equivalent of an ASIC or microcontroller here. Something designed for a specific purpose or small subset of purposes and capable of doing that purpose in an extremely optimized manner.
The AI humanoid seems more like a CPU here… capable of solving any problem but due to its general purpose nature, not optimized for any particular problem.
To continue pushing the analogy, to me humanoid AI robots seem the equivalent of trying to sell CPUs to mine bitcoin. The world already has a better solution.