Rosie, C-3PO, HAL, WALL-E, Bender, Optimus, Asimo. We have envisioned building humanoid machines with the ability to walk, talk and think like us—or better than us-since long before the creation of the microchip.
But here’s the thing—humanoid robots are never going to happen. To understand why, you have to understand the shape of the technical problems and compare them to market forces.
First, the mechanics of the human body are spectacularly complex. Sure, we have built machines with arms and legs, but we are a long way from having a unified platform that can walk the Earth with the dexterity and reliability of a human.
Second, we need major advancements in input/output software. Anyone who’s gotten into an argument with his smartphone can well understand how far we are from having a dependable conversation with a machine. It’s amusing, if frustrating, to ask one’s phone to “Send Jenn a text” and hear it reply, “What song would you like me to play?” Speaker independent, open-ended speech recognition with better than 99 percent reliability isn’t part of our near future.
Third, artificial intelligence is the biggest software challenge in the universe. The human brain’s ability to process information and learn and make decisions is something we can barely understand, let alone reproduce. Reproducing human thought in a controlled situation—like the game of chess-is barely within our grasp. Software that enables machines to act like us, which requires them to think like us, isn’t something we’ll be able to develop for generations, if ever.
So all we have to do to build a humanoid robot is build a machine to replicate the human form. Then solve the input/output problem so we always understand each other. And finally, replicate the thought process of the human brain. Any one of those three tasks is nearly impossible. The combination of all three represents one of the greatest technical challenges known to man.
However, it’s not just the scale of the technical challenge that makes a humanoid robotic future impossible; it’s the intersection of those three challenges with simple economics.
A humanoid robot would be a multipurpose platform that could do almost anything. It could do things like get a drink from the fridge or a newspaper from the front door. But those are sub-$20 problems–meaning realistically you wouldn’t pay $20 for someone to solve those problems for you. That same humanoid robot could do more useful things like vacuum your house or soothe your baby or drive your car. Those things are worth more than $20 and we already use robots to solve those problems–they just aren’t humanoid.
You can pay $400 for a robot that vacuums your house. For around $250 you can buy an infant seat to rock your baby. When buying a new car you can select robotic options on the fringe of self-driving technology, like lane departure warning and collision avoidance and dynamic cruise control.
The point is, we don’t need to build a humanoid robot to do these things. We can build the robots into the things themselves.
The idea that we’ll have robots in the future to assist in daily tasks isn’t wrong. The idea that we need a multipurpose humanoid robot is. As costs continue to decline and technology continues to advance, we’ll be able to make lots of special-purpose robots to solve real consumer problems. There’s just no need to make them humanoid.
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