{"id":455166,"date":"2025-09-27T10:46:10","date_gmt":"2025-09-27T10:46:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/455166\/"},"modified":"2025-09-27T10:46:10","modified_gmt":"2025-09-27T10:46:10","slug":"famed-roboticist-says-humanoid-robot-bubble-is-doomed-to-burst","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/455166\/","title":{"rendered":"Famed roboticist says humanoid robot bubble is doomed to burst"},"content":{"rendered":"<p id=\"speakable-summary\" class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Renowned roboticist Rodney Brooks has a wake-up call for investors pouring <a href=\"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2025\/09\/16\/figure-reaches-39b-valuation-in-latest-funding-round\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">billions<\/a> into humanoid robot startups: you\u2019re wasting your money.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Brooks, who co-founded iRobot and spent decades at MIT, is particularly skeptical of companies like Tesla and Figure trying to teach robots dexterity by showing them videos of humans doing tasks. <a rel=\"nofollow noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/rodneybrooks.com\/why-todays-humanoids-wont-learn-dexterity\/\" target=\"_blank\">In a new essay<\/a>, he calls this approach \u201cpure fantasy thinking.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The problem? Human hands are incredibly sophisticated, packed with about 17,000 specialized touch receptors that no robot comes close to matching. While machine learning transformed speech recognition and image processing, those breakthroughs built on decades of existing technology for capturing the right data. \u201cWe don\u2019t have such a tradition for touch data,\u201d Brooks points out.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Then there\u2019s safety. Full-sized walking humanoid robots pump massive amounts of energy into staying upright. When they fall, they\u2019re dangerous. Physics means a robot twice the size of today\u2019s models would pack eight times the harmful energy.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Brooks predicts that in 15 years, successful \u201chumanoid\u201d robots will actually have wheels, multiple arms, and specialized sensors and abandon the human form. Meanwhile, he\u2019s thoroughly convinced that today\u2019s billions are funding expensive training experiments that will never scale to mass production.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Renowned roboticist Rodney Brooks has a wake-up call for investors pouring billions into humanoid robot startups: you\u2019re wasting&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":455167,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3163],"tags":[323,1942,152864,6197,152865,53,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-455166","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-humanoid","11":"tag-robots","12":"tag-rodney-brooks","13":"tag-technology","14":"tag-uk","15":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115275863353994906","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/455166","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=455166"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/455166\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/455167"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=455166"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=455166"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=455166"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}