Humanoid, a UK-based robotics company, may have just created the most hypnotically slow, mind-bendingly boring video of autonomous humanoid robots performing mundane tasks since the current era of humanoid robot hype began. And that\u2019s not a bad thing. In fact, it\u2019s a nice example of the actual capabilities and limits of these devices when they perform tasks autonomously.<\/p>\n
Yes, certain non-expert viewers might mistake this video for one of David Lynch\u2019s Y2K-era experiments in extremely slow pacing, but there\u2019s a reason the walking robots shuffle around and move objects like they\u2019re recovering from surgery: they\u2019re improvising these movements, not being teleoperated or relying on a previously programmed and rehearsed routine.<\/p>\n
In this video, just released today, Humanoid is demonstrating a conceptual system it calls KinetIQ, a combination of interlinked pieces of AI software and robot hardware, meant to, theoretically, coordinate and carry out complex tasks across home and industrial settings. \u201cEach layer treats the layer below as a set of tools, orchestrating them via prompting and tool use to achieve goals set from above,\u201d according to a descriptive statement from Humanoid.<\/p>\n
If you watch the first part of this video and all you see is a robot in a kitchen doing literally nothing, you\u2019re actually meant to be seeing the robot as one appendage in a super-entity, conveying the verbal instructions it received from its human to its counterparts, the warehouse robots with wheels.<\/p>\n
And if all you see the robots with wheels doing is taking an eternity to put one (1) package of cocoa powder and one (1) bottle of oil in a paper bag, you\u2019re sleeping on the fact that those robots are completely off-rails, figuring out\u2014millisecond by millisecond\u2014how to get that highly breakable glass bottle into that highly tear-able grocery bag.<\/p>\n
And if you see the guy grab the bag, and you say, \u201cHey, why didn\u2019t he just walk to the shelves and get the powder and oil off the shelf himself?\u201d you\u2019re missing the fact that these robots have been deemed safe enough that Humanoid\u2019s lawyers are okay with them showing a person standing next to them during a demo where they\u2019re not teleoperated.
Added up, it\u2019s not nothing. In fact, if you squint, it\u2019s a real achievement.<\/p>\n
But it should also give you some pause when it comes to big promises from tech leaders about companies like Hyundai<\/a> and\u00a0Tesla<\/a> reinventing factories by filling them with hyper-competent humanoid robots. This is unproven technology, and tech companies are increasingly worried about that<\/a>.<\/p>\n So if you\u2019re watching a video in 2026 where robots prance<\/a>, twerk<\/a>, or make cocktails<\/a>, what you\u2019re seeing is little more than a sizzle reel, designed to stimulate wonderment and little else. Or you\u2019re just missing the fine print where it says you\u2019re actually looking at a human-controlled robot<\/a>.<\/p>\n