Investment and interest have outpaced technology and society
By the time the humanoid robots arrived at the Humanoids Summit at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, on December 11, the registration line had already extended downstairs to the lobby.
Controlled by accompanying human handlers, the humanoids were herded into the elevator, sparing them the challenge of climbing the stairs to the mezzanine registration desk.
„No one shows you climbing stairs when it comes to these humanoids“, observed Abhinav Gupta, co-founder of Skild AI, during a presentation later that morning.
Gupta did, though, in a video demonstrating how the Skild foundation model can help a robot to climb stairs and step over unstable terrain.
Humanoids Summit chair and founder Modar Alaoui, general partner at ALM Ventures, a VC firm backing several attending companies, would later remark, „Locomotion is a solved problem.“
That’s a slight exaggeration. Humanoid robots are ready for marketing and experimentation. In promotional videos, they perform impressive, potentially useful feats. But commercial deployment at scale will take decades, even if persistent technical challenges like manual dexterity may be solved sooner.
The technology isn’t yet good enough, the cost remains too high, and organizations need to figure out how to use them. More work needs to be done on safety, and people aren’t yet ready to accept them.
Gupta followed a presentation by Ani Kelkar and Mikael Robertson, partner and senior partner respectively at McKinsey & Company, a corporate consultancy known for advocating staff cuts that itself has been trimming staff due to AI.
Speaking from a management perspective, Robertson said, „Looking at the US as an example, only about 6 percent of factories today have applied robotic automation at scale . And by comparison, China today is installing 10 times more robots each year than the US.“
Robertson said that interest and investment in humanoid robotics have surged.
Kelkar said there are about 50 companies credibly doing so – about 20 in China, 15 in North America, 7 in EMEA, and 7 in Asia (outside of China).
„With all of that talent and all of the investments that Mikael talked about, we are excited that we are finally going to get solutions that will work“, said Kelkar.
Not immediately though. Beyond the difficulty of deploying any sort of robot at scale, Kelkar suggested the viability of robots may depend on human labor management.
