The Potential of Humanoid Robots
The hardware of humanoid robots is roughly solved, albeit at great cost. Live players are now attempting to create sufficiently intelligent software necessary to make such robots useful.
Humanoid robots are a category of robots that are bipedal i.e. two-legged and have arms and hands to manipulate objects. They mimic the human body and human movement, and are intended to complete a wide range of physical tasks similar to human laborers. While humanoid robot prototypes have existed for decades, there has been a large expansion in the number of companies developing such systems in recent years, as well as a new wave of optimism around the concept. Since 2021, the electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla has committed to building humanoid robots, with CEO Elon Musk predicting there could be more humanoid robots than humans on the planet by 2040.1 Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has argued that, along with autonomous vehicles and drones, humanoid robots can be scaled up to billions of units, because they can be deployed without the need for additional infrastructure.2 From 2022 to 2024, annual venture capital investment into humanoid robot companies quintupled from under $200 million to nearly $1 billion.3