{"id":216427,"date":"2025-12-29T14:48:08","date_gmt":"2025-12-29T14:48:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/216427\/"},"modified":"2025-12-29T14:48:08","modified_gmt":"2025-12-29T14:48:08","slug":"something-is-making-humanoid-robot-makers-worry-the-robots-suck","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/216427\/","title":{"rendered":"Something Is Making Humanoid Robot Makers Worry: The Robots Suck"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Wall Street Journal\u2019s Sean McLain reported Sunday<\/a> on the recent Humanoids Summit in Mountain View, California held earlier this month<\/a>. McLain seems to have come away with the impression that makers of robots are worried they\u2019ve oversold a technology that, well, sucks. So far anyway.<\/p>\n

Sure, Elon Musk is promising a robot army<\/a>, and there\u2019s now some kind of robot butler being preordered by rich people who are expected to pay $20,000 essentially just to help train it<\/a>. What the optimists perhaps haven\u2019t considered is something the\u00a0Chinese government has already spoken on<\/a>: there\u2019s a danger that if this hype produces actual retail products, the creators of those products are on the verge of creating millions of unsatisfied customers, and will have accomplished nothing other than filling landfills with mountains of human-shaped e-waste. <\/p>\n

One cautious robot executive Kaan Dogrusoz, CEO of Weave Robotics, told the Journal, \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of great technological work happening, a lot of great talent working on these, but they are not yet well defined products.\u201d Then Dogrusoz invoked a piece of consumer tech history that should have robot optimists rethinking their lives: \u201cFull bipedal humanoids are the Newtons of our times,\u201d Dogrusoz told the Journal.<\/p>\n

The Apple Newton MessagePad was a portable computer product marketed in the mid-90s at a time when Steve Jobs didn\u2019t control the company. It was buggy, and became a huge public joke. When Steve Jobs assumed control of Apple again, he discontinued it. As Wired wrote in 2013<\/a>, \u201cThe Newton wasn\u2019t just killed, it was violently murdered, dragged into a closet by its hair and kicked to death in its youth by one of technology\u2019s great men.\u201d <\/p>\n

Releasing a bunch of worthless Newton-level bipedal robot duds into the world is a possibility that should have tech company CEOs worried. A good metaphor for such a corporate disaster might be someone teleoperating a humanoid robot such that it delivers a groin kick to its operator. If only there were a freshly viral video in my feeds that could help me illustrate this\u2026\u00a0<\/p>\n

Here are some other choice quotes the Journal took down at the summit: <\/p>\n

Ani Kelkar, a McKinsey partner told the Journal that when a company spends $100 on robot deployment in a workplace, $20 goes to the robot, and the other $80 goes toward stopping the robot from injuring people. \u201cWe\u2019re doing a big extrapolation from watching videos of robots doing laundry to a butler in my house that can do everything,\u201d Kelkar warned in the Journal\u2019s article.<\/p>\n

Isaac Qureshi, the CEO of a company called Gatlin Robotics, whose flagship product at the Summit was able to scrub a brick wall if it was teleoperated by a person in a VR headset said, \u201cSlowly, we\u2019re going to teach the Gatlin robot more things, like starting with dusting, surface cleaning, trash bins and then the toilet.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pras Velagapudi, the CTO of Agility Robotics said, \u201cWe\u2019ve been trying to figure out how do we not just make a humanoid robot, but also make a humanoid robot that does useful work.\u201d He might be onto something.<\/p>\n

Robot executives have spoken. Don\u2019t buy a humanoid robot, folks. It cannot do anything useful for you, but it can clobber your groin.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Wall Street Journal\u2019s Sean McLain reported Sunday on the recent Humanoids Summit in Mountain View, California held…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":216428,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,42499,15502,61,60,112440,80],"class_list":{"0":"post-216427","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-consumer-protection","12":"tag-humanoid-robots","13":"tag-ie","14":"tag-ireland","15":"tag-tech-executives","16":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216427","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=216427"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216427\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/216428"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=216427"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=216427"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=216427"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}