The US is one big grift these days: the Trump Administration, traditional and social media, corporations, crypto, financial markets are all selling some kind of spurious promise. It’s hard to pick the most egregious example. But for me, it’s hard to go past Tesla. Having lost its dominant position in the electric car market, the company ought to be on the edge of delisting. Instead, its current market capitalisation is $US1.33 trillion ($A 2 trillion). Shareholders have just agreed on an incentive deal with Elon Musk, premised on the claim that he can take that number to $8.5 trillion.
Having failed with the Cybertruck and robotaxis, Tesla’s value depends almost entirely on the projected success of the Optimus humanoid robot. There’s a strong case that Optimus will be outperformed by rivals like Unitree But the bigger question is: why build a humanoid robot at all?
The choice of a humanoid form factor reveals more about the sloppy thinking of our tech elite than about engineering logic. The design represents a triumph of anthropomorphic fantasy over functional optimization, producing machines that excel primarily at generating media buzz rather than performing useful work.
In promoting Optimus, Tesla offers a long list of functions such as robot might perform: lifting and stacking goods in warehouses, operating in dangerous situations with ground too uneven for wheels and tracks, and performing various kinds of domestic labour.
In each of these cases, there is a better alternative available. Modern warehouses are designed around automated systems that exploit the advantages of robotics —conveyor networks, sorting systems, and wheeled or tracked robots specifically designed for lifting and moving tasks.
Industrial robots—fixed-position systems with multiple articulated arms—have dominated automotive and electronics assembly for decades precisely because they abandon human form constraints in favour of functional optimisation.
Mobile warehouse robots can navigate autonomously while carrying loads that would topple any humanoid robot. Meanwhile, human workers remain more cost-effective for complex picking tasks, combining visual recognition, fine motor control, and problem-solving capabilities that no current robot approaches.
In less controlled environments, with uneven ground surfaces, quadruped robots (commonly presented as dog-like) are more stable than bipeds. They can be equipped with a wide range of grasping appendages including, but not limited to, the mechanical hands of a humanoid robot. Examples are already in use for tasks like bomb disposal and disaster response.
In domestic applications, Musk’s presentations envision Optimus folding laundry, preparing meals, and performing general housework—tasks that supposedly justify the human form factor because homes are designed for human occupancy.
This argument doesn’t stand up to even minimal scrutiny. Specialized appliances consistently outperform generalist approaches in domestic environments—robotic vacuum cleaners navigate more efficiently than any humanoid could, dishwashers clean more thoroughly than human hands, and washing machines handle laundry with greater consistency than any robot attempting to mimic human movements. Where genuine flexibility is required, the combination of purpose-built tools and human intelligence remains unmatched. The complexity of truly autonomous domestic robots would require artificial intelligence capabilities that remain decades away, if achievable at all.
A final idea is that of robots as companions for lonely humans. This seems likely to fall into the “uncanny valley” – too human-like to be viewed as a machine, but too mechanical to be seen as human. But, if there is any market for Optimus, this will probably be it.
The humanoid form factor serves primarily to create an illusory impression of human-like intelligence. By mimicking human appearance and movement, these robots suggest cognitive capabilities they fundamentally lack. The fact that humans are more intelligent than dogs encourages the fallacious (implicit) inference that robot resambling must be more intelligent than one resembling a dog.
The humanoid form factor consistently proves inferior to specialized alternatives across every proposed application domain. I persists because it generates the kind of media attention and investor enthusiasm that Tesla requires for its business model. Effective robotics emerges from careful analysis of specific problems and optimisation for particular environments, not from attempts to recreate human form and movement. Until the technology sector abandons its anthropomorphic fantasies in favour of functional engineering, robotic development will remain trapped between impressive demonstrations and practical irrelevance.
Meanwhile, Tesla’s share price keeps going up, along with (until very recently), crypto, AI stocks, and the fortunes of the Trump family. By this time, the remaining sceptics have given up short-selling and retired to the sidelines to wait for the crash. That’s about the best advice I could give (bearing in mind that I Am Not a Financial Advisor).
But I’d be interested to read any contrary views on why humanoid robots are The Next Big Thing, or why bubbles like this can last forever.
John Quiggin 
Yes indeed. There is a reason why drones can hover like dragonflies and hummingbirds, but don’t look like them at all. The same goes for submarines and fish, solar panels and leaves, or an eagle’s eyes and space cameras. Engineers have a lot to learn from nature, starting from the fact that she often proves that a problem is soluble, but simple copying rarely works. Early attempts at flying with artificial wings, as in the legend of Daedalus, failed. Montgolfier’s balloon and the Wrights’ biplane were like nothing in nature. Nature does reciprocating motion with muscle fibres in articulated bone or chitin cages, but not rotary bearings and motors.
I am sorry, I cannot provide any contrary views here. I agree 1,000% with every word of this post. The US is one big grift. Humanoid robots will remain a niche product. Bubbles can’t last forever. The crash will be horrific.
Anon is me. I agree with Iko.
James W.,
It’s good when we can agree on something. The trouble, as I mentioned in my reply to your CSIRO post, is that I see Australia and the UK as being already dangerously close to the USA trajectory. I don’t see anything being rectified while the oligarchs of neoliberal capital have almost all the power. I don’t see that power being broken up except by a major global crisis and revolutionary change. I don’t see any survivability for civilization, as opposed to barbarism and warlordism, without the abolition of capitalism in all its forms, as a necessary but not sufficient condition.
Not to argue, exactly, but … why would 1%-y people allow these crooks to crash the economy? I mean, do they *not* run the world? Or is there some fact that I am missing?
What could be the motive? They will get hurt too won’t they? Or, their kids.
I don’t get it.
I don’t put my faith in shareholder democracies. I still have sommmme in the actual democracies.
It’s not over. Also, pray more – I think it helps.
N,
It’s not even the 1%. It’s more like the 0.0002% of the population who constitute the truly rich and powerful. This would be about 800 people in the US. These are the billionaires. In the current US system, they hold the true reins of power. Via donations and SuperPACs this group is the inside circle which mainly funds political campaigns in the US. They essentially buy the politicians and buy the policies they want.
It’s worth looking at the paper “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens”
“Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 September 2014
Authors Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page.
This link gives the abstract or short summary:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/abs/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B
It does not paint as simplistic a picture as I paint above of the 800 billionaires but it shows that the ultra-rich, super-rich and very-rich (my terms) who might amount to say 8,000 with ultra-rich still having influence out of proportion to their numbers, are the ones who essentially rule the USA by getting the laws and regulations they want and which greatly favour them. The majority of the people get little or nothing of what they want in laws, legislation and governance.
The 800 billionaires to take them as a group do not, in the main, care what happens to the majority of people in their country and they often do not care, being internationalists, what even happens to their nation. Or they believe they can plunder the world and their nation blind and everything will still be okay. If any place turns to sh**, city, state or nation, they can move somewhere else. They already have dozens of places they can live in anyway. Many probably also have palatial retreats and super-bunkers ready to bugout from any collapse. They feel completely invulnerable and thus able to do whatever they like.
Some probably do want to collapse the world, population etc., in line with particular theories they have about AI, drones and robots being able to replace the majority of human workers. In this view poor people, peasants and any others but highly skilled professionals, programmers and security personnel all become redundant (and even a threat) and the best thing, as some of these particular billionaires and their theorists see it, is for all these people to die off. We are irrelevant to the rich and powerful. Their nation is even irrelevant to them, in their thinking, though I think they may have mis-assessed this. In the long run, a bad enough collapse would hurt them too. They just don’t believe that it could ever be that bad or that they could ever be touched, by anything.
Warren Buffett once mused that Trump had so much debt and his collateral was so inflated and his business model was so inefficient that his lenders had no incentive to foreclose. Too big to fail.
Musk is in the same category, he’s so big he just can’t fail.
On the subject of dishwashers, my OCD gets triggered by people here who just dump stuff higgledy piggledy, just how do they expect things to get properly washed?
Surprisingly, despite the random and erratic nature of operation, it all comes out clean.
Stuart Chase, The Tyranny Of Words, 1938
Emphasis added by me
I didn’t realise that the text I quoted would automatically be italicised, whether I had marked it for italicisation or not. The part I meant to emphasise was this:
stuffed with principles inside their heads that they lose sight of what is going on outside. Their maps become more inaccurate, their acts more fantastic.