Mimicry Isn’t Progress
Humanoid robots are the flapping-wing fallacy of AI robotics: an expensive detour into theatrics. Every dollar poured into making a machine waddle upright is money that could be spent building robots that actually work. We already know how to design planes for flight, not imitation. You don’t strap wings to our arms and flap across the Atlantic. So why would we create a robot butler to totter around like a drunk biped?
A humanoid robot is one deliberately designed to mimic the human body—two legs, two arms, a torso, sometimes even a face. The goal isn’t efficiency but resemblance, as if passing for human were the gold standard of engineering. That conceit is what keeps Silicon Valley chasing humanoids while ignoring the robots that already rule our factories, warehouses, and homes.
Walk into a car plant or an Amazon distribution center and you’ll see the future. It doesn’t have legs. It doesn’t smile. It doesn’t do TikTok dances onstage. Robots weld, lift, sort, and vacuum. They’re ugly, specialized, and brutally effective. That’s why they’re everywhere. Function beats form. The humanoid fixation isn’t about progress—it’s about selling a story.
Elon Musk’s Mime Show
Enter Elon Musk, pitchman of Optimus, his so-called humanoid worker bot. He unveiled it at Tesla’s 2021 AI Day with one of the most shameless cons Silicon Valley has ever staged: Optimus, the “Tesla Bot,” was—I kid you not—a guy in a spandex suit lurching around the stage, pantomiming a robot like a mall mime on ketamine. Nobody thought it was real, least of all Musk, who apparently presented it, I dunno, a wink and a smile. Reality? That wasn’t the point. The point was aspirational: get the headlines, pump the stock, feed the cult.
Optimus belongs in the same bucket as the Cybertruck’s “unbreakable glass” that shattered on cue, or the Boring Company’s “tunnel of the future” that turned out to be a Tesla traffic jam in a hole. Add in the Hyperloop, Mars colonies by 2024, robo-taxis that never arrived, and you’ve got Musk’s true résumé: avatar of every half-baked, wrong-track, bad idea of the future, created by a guy with more money than sense. His genius isn’t engineering—it’s spectacle. He takes underdeveloped boondoggles, sprinkles them with sci-fi fairy dust, and dares the world not to buy in.
Optimus is supposed to take out your trash and fold your laundry. In reality, it can barely shuffle without looking like your drunk uncle at a wedding reception. Musk keeps promising tomorrow, but what he delivers are punchlines. The punchline is that Wall Street keeps writing checks, and the media keeps singing from his hymnal.
Want more proof? In your mind’s eye, imagine the two iconic robots of the Star Wars universe. Which one was a joke, and which one was the real hero? Case closed.
Asimov’s Lesson, Ignored
Isaac Asimov, writing in the 1940s, understood something Silicon Valley still hasn’t learned: robots don’t have to look like us to matter. In I, Robot and beyond, his creations range from blocky boxes to towering giants, streamlined runners to strange, curious thinkers. Some were vaguely human-shaped, while others were not at all. What unified them wasn’t their appearance but their brains—the positronic kind, a fictional device that let Asimov imagine reasoning, curiosity, even existential dread.
He gave us Robbie, the gentle nursemaid built like a metal refrigerator; the hulking giants of Runaround; the sleek SPD models loping across rough ground; and Cutie, the first robot to wonder about his own existence. None of them needed a face that looked like yours. They needed capability, purpose, and intelligence.
Asimov’s vision was more expansive, more imaginative, and more honest. He showed us robots as a spectrum of possibilities, not a parade of knockoff humans. His fiction got closer to the future than Musk’s theater ever will.
The $5 Trillion Distraction
Supporters of humanoids argue that they make sense in human-centric spaces, such as kitchens, elder-care facilities, and disaster zones. But do you really want a $5 trillion humanoid industry just so a robot can fumble with your dishwasher? A specialized care bot with wheels and arms performs the job more effectively, efficiently, and safely. Making a robot “fit the space” is backwards. We adapt spaces for machines all the time—look at modern warehouses, airports, and hospitals.
Yet Morgan Stanley projects the humanoids industry as a $5 trillion market by 2050. That number doesn’t measure feasibility; it measures hype. Wall Street isn’t buying robots; it’s buying a dream. And the dream has legs because legs look like progress. The humanoid boom is the perfect example of financial speculation colliding with bad engineering judgment. It’s a distraction, an expensive pantomime of human form that delays the robots we actually need.
Asimov’s world imagined robots with curiosity and reason. Musk’s world delivers robots that can barely shuffle across a stage. One is speculative fiction with moral imagination. The other is a trillionaire mime act convincing us that stumbling upright is the same thing as soaring forward.
I agree with you that humanoid robots are largely a stupid endeavor. But then there’s human nature. And people have been fantasizing about androids for hundreds of years, if not longer. I think eventually we will have them, whether they make sense or not.