Technical

Srinivasa Reddy Kandi: Robotics pioneer warns humanoid robot boom is bound to collapse

October, 01, 2025-04:15

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Robotics pioneer warns humanoid robot boom is bound to collapse

Rodney Brooks — the famed roboticist behind iRobot and a longtime MIT professor — has a blunt message for investors pouring billions into humanoid robot startups: you’re throwing money away.

In a recent essay, Brooks singles out companies such as Tesla and Figure, which are betting on teaching robots dexterity by showing them videos of humans performing everyday tasks. He dismisses the idea as “pure fantasy thinking.”

The core problem, Brooks argues, lies in the human hand. With around 17,000 specialized touch receptors, its sensory and motor capabilities remain far beyond anything robotic systems can replicate. While speech and vision AI have advanced rapidly thanks to decades of progress in capturing and processing relevant data, there’s no equivalent foundation for tactile data. “We don’t have such a tradition for touch,” Brooks notes.

Safety is another hurdle. Full-size humanoid robots burn enormous energy simply staying upright, and when they fall, they’re dangerous. Physics makes matters worse: doubling their size multiplies the impact energy by a factor of eight.

Brooks envisions a very different future. In the next 15 years, he predicts the most successful “humanoid” robots won’t look human at all. Instead, they’ll likely use wheels for stability, multiple arms for efficiency, and specialized sensors for tasks, abandoning attempts to mimic the human body. For now, though, he believes current efforts are just “expensive training experiments” with no path to mass production.

This isn’t the first time Brooks has pushed back against hype cycles. Last year, he criticized inflated expectations around generative AI, warning it can actually create more work in practice. His skepticism echoes findings from the nonprofit METR, which this summer studied how AI tools affect software developers. Across nearly 250 real-world coding tasks, 16 top-rated open-source developers actually took 19% longer to finish their work when using AI — even though they felt the tools made them 20% faster.

Author: Kandi Srinivasa Reddy, Srinivasa Reddy Kandi, #KandiSrinivasaReddy, #SrinivasaReddyKandi