A leading roboticist has issued a stark warning to investors pouring billions into humanoid robot startups, saying their money is likely wasted. Rodney Brooks, co-founder of iRobot and a longtime expert at a major technology institute, criticizes companies such as Tesla and the AI robotics firm Figure for trying to teach robots human-like dexterity by showing them videos of people performing tasks. He calls this method “pure fantasy thinking.”
Brooks explains that human hands are incredibly complex, with around 17,000 specialized touch receptors that no robot can match. While machine learning has made great progress in areas like speech recognition and image processing, those advances built on decades of work collecting the right data. “We don’t have such a tradition for touch data,” Brooks says.
Safety is another major concern. Full-sized walking humanoid robots use a lot of energy to stay upright, and if they fall, they can be dangerous. Physics means a robot twice the current size would have eight times the energy when falling, increasing the risk of harm.
Brooks predicts that within 15 years, successful robots will likely abandon the human form, instead using wheels, multiple arms, and specialized sensors. He is convinced that the billions being spent now are funding expensive experiments that will never scale to mass production.
This is not the first time Brooks has challenged high expectations from entrepreneurs and investors. Last year, he spoke about how generative AI, while promising, can sometimes create more work instead of less. For example, a research group recruited top software developers to test AI tools on real coding tasks. Surprisingly, those using AI took 19 percent longer to finish their work, even though they felt 20 percent faster.
Brooks also argues that AI is not the existential threat some have claimed, including high-profile figures like Elon Musk. He shared these views back in 2017 when robotics and AI looked very different.
Despite Brooks’s warnings, major robotics startups continue to receive huge investments. Apptronik, which has raised nearly $450 million, counts a tech giant as a backer and partnered with its AI research team last year. Figure, supported partly by Microsoft and an AI startup fund, joined with a leading AI company in early 2024 but parted ways a year later after a claimed “major breakthrough” in its own AI for robotics. This month, Figure announced over $1 billion in new funding and a valuation of $39 billion.
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