Today, Explained - One billion humanoid robots

Episode Date: May 7, 2026

Tech companies are betting big on robots that look like humans and do human jobs. Why, robot? This episode was produced by Avishay Artsy, edited by Jolie Myers, fact-checked by Gabriel Dunatov, engineered by David Tatasciore, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. An Optimus humanoid robot showcased at a Tesla booth. Photo: CFOTO/Future Publishing via Getty Images. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. New Vox members get $20 off their membership right now. Transcript at ⁠vox.com/today-explained-podcast.⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Humanoid robots, robots for short, have been everywhere lately. And I'm not talking about, you know, the robot that mows your lawn or vacuums your living room. I'm talking about those ones that walk, talk, and look like they could kill you. They're running half marathons in Beijing. It starts like any other race, but this one is different. The robot came in a whole six minutes faster than the human record previously held. They're giving prostate exams in the new jackass movie. Let's let it rip, baby.

And they're now the top priority over at Tesla. As you've heard me say a few times, I think Optimus will be our biggest product. Not just Tesla's biggest product ever, but probably the biggest product ever. Humanoid robots are being hyped as the future of everything from household chores to elder care to who knows, maybe even war. So on today's Explain from Vox, we're going to try and suss out all the hype and sort out our robot reality. What's up, y'all? I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds.

Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. You're listening to Today Explained. My name is James Vincent, and I'm a... I'm a writer and a journalist based in London. And James, you've had the distinct privilege of doing something most of us still haven't yet done, which is you recently got to meet a bunch of robots. How many robots did you meet?

I lost count after the first few, I'll be honest. I met a bunch of very nice robots, and they were all very kind to me, and they treated me with, you know, great nobility and grace. No, I met a few from two of the leading companies in the US. One is called Apptronic, and another is called agility robotics. and they make two very different styles of robot. Well, I mean, they're both humanoids and that they resemble human, arms, legs, etc. But agility is very much focused on the warehouse

and their robots look a little bit more inhuman. They have those backward-facing knees. This may look like your average American warehouse, but agility robotics claims it's actually the world's first factory for humanoid robots. It's weird grasshopper-like legs allow it to crouch and pick up items off the floor and it can surprisingly handle stairs as well.

Apptronic make a more general purpose robot that looks much more like a human in terms of, you know, normal sort of body proportion stands upright. You look at eye to eye or eye to unblinking robot eye, whatever that might be. Meet Apollo, your new robot coworker. He's designed to work alongside humans in a factory and help alleviate taxing and physical labor. The goal is that he's going to start doing work here on Earth, but then long term going to the space station. From the space station to the moon, Mars, and beyond.

I got to meet them, shake hands. I played Ick-ac-Ock-Ock. Do you know this? No. Rock-paper scissors is what it is, sorry. It's called Ick-Ock-Ock-Sometimes in the UK. I did not know that. I thought we were going to talk about robots,

but that's now the most fun fact you've given us. Yeah, you go, I-A-A-Ock. Yeah, and then you throw whether it's rock paper or scissors. Anyway, they come to us for one thing. but we give them something else, you know? Exactly. And I also got, this was my heart's content. You know, I was so wanted to do this.

I wanted to kick a robot. Kicking robots happens to be an efficient method of testing a machine's balance. In recent years, as robots have become increasingly sophisticated, their makers have gone from kicking them to shoving them, tripping them, even hitting them with folding chairs. I had that burning urge inside me that I want to get my own back before they obviously take over the world.

So the robots were nice to you, but you weren't that nice to them. Oh, I was horrible. I was terrible. They're going to be coming for me in the future. I have no doubt about that at all. They didn't actually let me kick a robot. I'm very sad to say that. They said it might be a bit of a safety hazard. So I got to poke one very hard with a big stick instead,

and that was the next best thing. Did it tip over? No, it didn't. This was the creepy thing about it. Okay, so they gave me this sort of, you know, very high-tech stick. which was I think you know a broom handle with a bit of safety foam

taped on the end of it and they said give it a shove give it a punt see how hard you can push it and I was very nervous about this because they told me that this was one of their

prototype humanoid it was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars and all the rest of it and you know if I knock it down and it breaks that's great copy

but it's also the end of my access to this company they're not going to be pleased so I gave it a shove and it sort of wobbled and they were like no you can do it harder than that and I gave it as hard as I could

And it staggered backwards, and it did this amazing, I mean, like completely normal, obviously. Whenever you've pushed a human, you know what it's like. They stagger backwards, they throw their arms up in the air, and they regain their equilibrium. And it was just such an uncanny moment to see a robot mimic so perfectly to my eyes the movements of a human. And I remember doing this and having it sort of stagger backwards and then trot back up to me, look me right in the face. And I was like, oh gosh, you know, these things are real. And what are they meant to do, James?

Well, humanoid robots. I mean, if you believe the pitch decks and the hype men, they're meant to do everything. They're meant to do anything that an able-bodied human can do. They're meant to slot right into the workplace. They're meant to sort packages. They're meant to bolt on car doors, anything and everything. This is the pitch. This is why they are built like humans because they want these creatures, sorry, these machines.

Creatures! I know, I know. You know what I mean. You've been robot-pilled. I've been robot-pilled, yes. But they want them to do anything that a human labourer can do. And, you know, that's a big ask. Who's trying?

Who's asking the robots to do it all right now? A lot of companies in the US and in China mainly. These are the two leaders in the robotic space. It used to be mainly startups, I would say. But actually, now we're seeing more of the big tech companies move into this space as well. Sometimes they're just doing little bits of research. You know, Meta recently bought a robotic startup. On May 1st, Meta acquired a startup called ARI, Assured Robot Intelligence.

They build foundation models for humanoid robots designed to do physical labor in your home. Meta wants to be the Android or Qualcomm of the humanoid industry, empower the underpinnings, the software, the hardware, the artificial intelligence, the sensor stack, the compute for the whole industry. Google has been doing stuff with robots for ages. It's been, you know, testing its AI out on them. Google's DeepMind Unit announcing a partnership with Boston Dynamics, as humanoid robotics steal the show at CES.

They're really dexterous. They're doing some really intricate stuff like folding origami or like packing lunch. And Tesla, it's Elon Musk's obsession, or one of them, alongside colonizing Mars. My prediction is there'll be more robots than people. And he thinks that Optimus, which is the name of Tesla's robot, is going to be, you know, he makes all sorts of wild claims. It's going to be the most productive, the most profitable product ever invented. I think everyone on Earth is going to have one and going to want one.

One. Who wouldn't want a robot to, you know, assuming it's very safe, watch over your kids, take care of your pet? And I think this is, you know, typical muskian hyperbole. But his interest is something that has moved the market hugely. And when he got involved, a lot of companies followed suit. Even though, as you write about in your cover story from Harper's from a few months ago, when he got involved, it was sort of anticlimactic and quite boring. But even that presentation in which I think a human dressed up as a robot was like dancing to some EDM, it created perhaps the hype that we're seeing now. Yeah. So the event you're talking about was Tesla's AI day. It does these sort of annual press jamborees that shows off the new products and the roadmap to the public.

This was in 2021. And prior to this, there had been. increasing momentum and interest in humanoid robotics, helped very much by AI. But when Musk got involved, he tends to move companies or tries to move them very, very fast. And so he didn't have a fully working prototype to show the press. And instead, infamously, famously, he had an individual in a spandex robot suit. Who, yeah, as you say, came up and did a dance to EDM, to dubstep, which dates it somewhat. Thank you. And he said, we're going to build these things.

We're setting it such that it is at a mechanical level, at a physical level, you can run away from it. And most likely overpower it. So hopefully that doesn't ever happen, but you never know. And obviously, he's been working on prototypes since that came out.

They were very quick to produce a working machine prototype, but they're kind of running up against the limitations of the technology at the moment, I would say. And we're sort of waiting on the latest version of Optimus, and that has been delayed several times. And I think we're beginning to see, okay, is this actually, is it pure hype or is there something coming out of it? And I think Musk and Tesla is very much being tested by this. But we are hearing a lot more about these robots now than we were back in 2021 when Musk held that symposium or whatever. it was, right? I mean, why is it that we're seeing more of this stuff? Is it just because there are more robots now? The big reason for why we're having this moment for humanoids at the moment is AI.

The chat GPT boom and from deep learning from these technologies that have enabled, like, language models or chatbots, a lot of people have thought that this is a transferable technology that we can plug into humanoid machines and other machines, and it can learn in the same way that chatbots have been able to learn to reproduce human speech. Now, the big thing that they're depending on is essentially robots in the past, you had to program them manually. You had to say, move your arm here down this many degrees across like this and apply this much pressure.

What you have with the new form of AI is that it learns these lessons by itself, essentially. You plug in a lot of data, you give it an output that you want, and it learns how to connect those pieces together. The hope is from these companies that if we get enough data, we will quote unquote solve the problem of physical robotics. And we will have these machines that are multidextrous capable of all these different tasks. And the big criticism of that is that robots are not in the same world as chatbots. Chatbots are dealing with text. If they make mistakes, you know, you talk to a chatbot even today and it will still make mistakes every now and again.

When those mistakes are transferred to the physical world, they suddenly become a lot more potentially dangerous. You know, a big thing that a lot of companies are doing at the moment is they're saying, we're going to put these robots in the home. They are going to be the perfect robot butler, and they will take care of your dishes and your laundry and all the rest of it. If a chatbot gets something wrong when you're asking it to do some research, then it's not the biggest deal in the world. You may spot the error and correct it. If a robot gets something wrong when it is cleaning away your plates and dishes,

if it breaks one in every 10 cups, are you going to be happy with that sort of that quality? No, I don't think so. The way China's developing these machines different than the way we are, is the U.S. going for the more practical application and is China going for maybe the more industrial? I would say that the main difference is that China's doing it faster and better. I think there is more of a focus in the U.S. on home products as a sort of marketing to the rich and saying, look, we're going to take care of all these chores for you. In China, you have what is one of the fastest aging populations in the world. I think it's going to be over 60s are going to be predicted to be 30% of the population by 2040. So you have a loss of manufacturing labor and you have an increased burden on social care.

And I think for Chinese state planners, humanoid robotics could very much plug in both of those gaps at the same time. So there is a slightly different focus, but it is one that is sort of organ. organic in terms of emerging from the advantages of the Chinese economy. So the big thing that the Chinese economy has, the US doesn't, is scale. It has a massive ability to manufacture these units. You know, it can make thousands at a time. This is why China is pulling ahead. I feel like you spent a lot of time in your piece trying to suss out the hype versus the reality.

Where do you land? Is this going to be our reality within what? a few years or is this still like, you know, flying cars or something of that sort? I think it's nearer to flying cars than it is to say the chatbot side of things where we've seen really rapid advances. You know, there has been a legitimate leap forward in terms of capabilities. However, however, however, that does not mean that we are matching the hype that is being pushed out by people like Elon Musk, by other leading companies who are saying, we're going to have one of these robots in your house next year and it's going to be

doing all the chores you need and will never make a mistake and it certainly won't fall over and kill your cat or something like this. I think those promises are just, they're not true. They're simply not true. I can see humanoid robots becoming a more common presence within both the work and the home over the next 10 plus years, certainly. Absolutely I can. But in the next five years, in the next three years, I really doubt it. So we don't have to yet worry that, let's say, that robot you pushed over in Austin is going to come back and kill you in London anytime soon. No, no. I'm planning on moving to the country where there's going to be many muddy paths and sort of rivers that it has to cross over.

You know what the English countryside is like. It's full of, you know, forests and things like this. The robots, they will never find me. You could just be playing ick-ack-a-ac-ac with your friends quietly and be undisturbed. That's what we'll be too. St. James wrote kicking robots for Harper's. When we're back on today, explain, we're going to ask a guy who's been tinkering a robotics for decades,

the essential question. Why robot? Well, we haven't practiced this, but if I asked you right now in this moment, let's say, what is it? You know, spring 2026. Why is it important to support journalism right now? Well, Sean, the world is a little overwhelming at this moment. There is a lot going on.

It can be a little scary. It's also kind of beautiful. And it's worth explaining. I would argue, in addition to that, there's a lot of trash information out there. Like, people even want to rely on AI, but AI isn't being fact-checked. It's just pulling from a bunch of places. And sometimes you've seen it giving you the wrong information. We fact-check our show.

You hear at the end of the show every day who fact-checks the show. We put a lot of effort into making sure that we are bringing you the most accurate information. possible. And you can support that effort. That's right. If you believe in the journalism that we do, as much as we do, you can become a Vox member. Vox.com slash members 30% off. Can you believe it? Let's go. Your first year. Sign up now. Thank you. Support for the showday comes from NPR. Love their work. Curious about the economic forces that shape your daily life, then you can turn to the Planet Money podcast from NPR, friends of the show. It makes sense of the economy in ways you'll actually understand and enjoy. Each story on Planet Money starts with a simple question. Recent episodes ask why Pokemon cards are growing faster than your retirement count.

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They did it. Oh, I love that. I know the top of the T-shirt. You guys remember the T-shirt thing? The T-shirt thing's really good if you haven't heard it. It's the kind of show where you learn something, probably laugh, and walk away seeing the world a little differently. Simply put its Econ down to Earth. Love shows that do that.

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You're listening to Wu, to Day Explained. My name is Ken Goldberg, Professor of Engineering at UC Berkeley. And... Actually, let's do this. I actually rather be called a professor of robotics at UC Berkeley. That's a better...

Yeah, that sums it up a little better. I'm also an artist, if that matters, but yeah. It does. It does. Okay. And I'm glad you made the clarification on the robotics side, because as far as I can tell, you've been into robots since before they were... I don't want to say cool,

because something about robots has always been cool to us as humans. But at least since before they were so trendy as they aren't. now. Yeah, well, I've been interested in robots since I was a kid, but that was back in the days of the Jetsons in the 60s. Here I am, sir. Yes, sir. When, you know, I, like most kids, were just fascinated by the science fiction. What are you?

I am a robot of the class M3, programmed to provide information and support to all Jupiter personnel. My father was a tinkerer and an engineer also. He and I built a robot for, for, for, for, for, for, It never worked, but it was ahead of its time back in the 70s. And I got interested in this, and when I was in college, there was a robot lab that I discovered at used pen. And I got very excited. So I built a tactile sensor, a hand that could feel to basically have it feel around for objects

and try and determine what their shape was. I did some work on running machines, and then I started working on grasping in particular. I've been really, like I like to say, I've been studying the same problem for 45 years. which is how to pick up a glass. It turns out that's incredibly difficult to do reliably. Why is it so difficult? All right. Well, it all boils down to one word uncertainty.

Robots are uncertain. They are uncertain in the perception, so they can't see the glass very well, and they can't position where it is exactly in space. They have uncertainty in control, so they can't move their gripper exactly into a particular location in space, even if they could see it.

And then there's a third uncertainty, which I call uncertainty in physics, which is that we don't know the frictional properties, the mass properties of the object, which turned out to be very important if you're going to grasp it. And all those conspire together. So they add up at the fingertips. So that's why robots today are better, but they still often are very clumsy. And maybe you can help us understand, as someone who's been at this since you were tinkering in a garage, it sounds like, with your dad, in the 70s.

Why is it so important? that a humanoid robot learn how to pick up a glass. Because here we are people who can pick up a glass, for the most part. Yeah. No, we do it very well, very naturally. We do it so effortlessly that it doesn't seem hard to us at all. Playing Go, on the other hand, seems extremely difficult, right? There was an actual discussion whether computers could ever beat a grandmaster at chess.

They have that same discussion about Go, right? Well, Go is much more complicated than chess. Chess was solved, was cracked sort of 20 years ago. And then since then, Go has been one of the holy grails for AI research. This is more of X paradox, that the things that are easy for us are hard for robots. And that AI is very good at playing Go, that's hard for us. So it is a paradox. And yes, we do it, but we've evolved over 300 million years.

And why do you think it's so important that we help these humanoid robots figure out how to pick up a glass? Just for the sake of doing it? Or is there some greater intention here? I mean, this is your life's work. Yeah, yeah. So there's two schools of thought. There's a sort of scientific approach, which is like, how do we understand this in the same sense as why do we understand the distant nebula? It's a scientific question. But then there's the engineering question, which I'm more of an engineer. And it's like, let's get something to work. Like we want these things to help us do work that we don't want to do.

and in particular things that are drudgery, for example, delivering packages faster so that we can get the stuff we want from, you know, our favorite vendor as soon as possible. So there's a shortage of workers, and this is another misconception. People are afraid that robots are going to put all the humans out of work. I don't believe that. I actually think there's a shortage of humans, especially humans, are willing to do a lot of the drudgery work in warehouses and factories and farms and cleaning hotel rooms, etc. And so robots can be very helpful there. And to do almost any of those jobs, the first thing they want is a robot to be able to grasp things. And so that's a very fundamental task.

I mean, devil's advocate, though, I think a lot of people like their jobs at Costco stocking shelves that pay well and afford people health care. I mean, what is that person going to do when a robot replaces them in, I don't know, 10 years? Let me just say, I'm very sympathetic to that. I really do have a lot of concerns about the humans in this world and workers in particular. And I don't think robots are out to steal their jobs. By the way, I think that's an old fear that people have about immigrants and they now attach that to robots. I think that the bigger question is that we want machines to be able to do things to increase

productivity. There's a lot of reasons where that's really desirable. And many, many companies want it. Actually, what seems to happen historically is that as new to end, technologies come in, like the car. We thought it would wipe out all the blacksmiths, for example. But it turns out that actually it produced many more jobs, just new jobs, like jobs like building roads and fixing cars and selling cars, making cars. The unemployment rate has stayed relatively constant over the past century through all these inventions, the airplane, the TV, the computer,

the internet. So I'm not an economist, but I'll just say, on coming back to why we want robots, It is something that we would love to have more capabilities. And there's been some changes in the last few years that make people more excited than they were before. Help us understand why it's going to take so long. I mean, why do we have maybe self-driving cars already, but not humanoid robots that can competently pick up a glass? Okay, good. So let's talk about that. One thing is that self-driving cars, remember, it's taken 20 years to get to the point of feasibility. still may not be cost-effective yet.

Right. The reason it's a lot easier is that there you just essentially want to avoid hitting anything. That's the goal. And you have pretty good maps. You have a lot of other good information and you can simulate that pretty well.

Turns out that locomotion, which is walking, is similar. There again, you want to avoid stuff. You don't want to bump into things, but you want to do a backflip. That turns out to be pretty easy to simulate. And everybody sees that and they project ahead and it's understandable.

It's human nature. Oh, robots can do this better than me, so therefore they can do everything. better than you. And that is a fallacy because they can't stack a little group of blocks on sugar cubes on your table very reliably at all. And they can't pick up that glass. You see a lot of hands that look very human-like, right? They have very fast-moving joints, etc., and they look pretty human-like. But do they do anything interesting? I mean, how many times have you seen a robot hand tying up a sneaker? You know? You haven't. It's right. And then

sometimes you'll see them doing some tasks, maybe folding some laundry. But if you look at it, closely, as my wife says, this is not acceptable, Andre folding. So that's what I'm getting at, which is these are very subtle skills. And we know that robots could do them with very simple grippers. And the existence proof for that, Sean, is robot surgery. And I really want to make it clear. People say, well, a robot took out my daughter's appendix. Well, that was a robot operated by a human. So as a human driving that robot. Now, the robot tools were very simple, just two grippers. but they could do incredible things when there's a human behind the wheel. But if you try and take the human out of the loop, as we've tried to do in our lab,

then everything becomes much more difficult. Do you see people in this field of robotics asking often if something should be done, or is it mostly just questions if something could be done? That's a very good, very deep question. And I think most of the engineers, the world I live in, people are asking if it can be done. I do have some concerns, certainly, about robots being used as weapons. You know that that's changed the landscape of warfare all over the world right now.

And there's some very deep questions, but in the labs, in research labs, people are just trying to figure out how to get the robots to actually perform measurably better. But at the same time, it's not going to be possible. I do not believe you can say, okay, well, we should have a moratorium on research or stop the research. or anything like that because someone else will do it. But I think the question is, you know, how can we be thoughtful? And there are people working on robot safety, which, by the way, it turns out to be super important if you want to start a company

because you have to work with OSHA standards, et cetera. So that is a big issue. Let's see what happens. I'm an optimist, Sean. I really am. I think this technology is really interesting. It's moving in interesting directions, but I don't think it's going to wipe us out.

And I don't think we have to worry about, you know, the robot apocalypse. Ken Goldberg is a robotics professor at UC Berkeley and an artist Avis Hay Artsy made our show today Julie Myers edited David Tadishore mixed Gabriel Dunitov checked the facts

and Sean Rainswarem was the host for this episode of today explained