Humanoid robot shipments are up in 2026, there’s a multiplicity of vendors out there, and high production demo videos abound. Yet, no one’s asking the most important question: “So like, what does it actually do?”
They definitely look cool, and I’m enjoying watching the capabilities develop and some of the technology trajectories that they subsidize. But while some companies may be claiming early commercial deployments, so did Juicero. It’s going to take thinking through two dimensions for them to be able to go pro.
Ex-Kivans will know these dimensions by heart. The first is, of course, Mick Mountz’s axiom that “it’s not about the robot.” The second is Pete Wurman’s exhortation to “do one thing, and do it very very well.”
As human beings ourselves, we’re naturally in love with the human form. It’s a major factor in why humanoid robotics is literally all about the robot. Look at them walk, run, dance, make faces! See how closely our manipulator mimics a human hand! Great technology demonstrations, all of them, and on individual metrics they out-perform human beings.
But those individual, isolated metrics don’t tell us anything about how a robot works as part of its larger environment. The value of automation, be it a dishwasher or a humanoid robot, lies in whether it has been correctly matched to its task and integrated well into the megasystem embedding it. It’s not about the robot, it’s about using whatever correct tools are available to best solve a problem repeatably, reliably, and at scale.
But like Pete said, it’s to best solve a problem, not solve all the problems. Human beings are generalists, which means we’re kind of okay at all sorts of different things. To be viable enough to be worthy of sacrificing human creativity and intuition in a process, a robot (like an insect) is a specialist. When you ask a human being to do a robot’s job, our brains go to mulch and our bodies get slowly ground away. When you ask a robot to do a human being’s job, you’ll have an endless supply of unsolved or mis-solved edge cases to clean up.
The human form of humanoid robots lets us mislead ourselves that they can replace the holistic human being in a system without thinking more deeply about whether the process itself should be redesigned.
“But the world is built for humans!” And yet time after time, when we find automation that’s sufficiently useful we gladly modify our environments to incorporate it until the modification itself becomes so familiar as to be invisible. Elevators, railroads, and automobiles required far more drastic changes to how we design our worlds. If you’re afraid that your robot isn’t worth modifying its operating environment for, you’re probably not looking at the problem or your assumptions correctly and are trying to shove a robot into someplace it shouldn’t be.
So… are humanoid robots going to be the next smartphone or the next 3D TV? One found its killer use case and became infrastructure; the other solved a problem no one had and died a historical footnote. If you’re working in this area, your Prime Directive must be forgetting about the cool factor and finding the one place that humanoid robots can do a thing— regardless of how unsexy it is— better and more reliably than anybody else.