While Tesla and Figure burn through investor cash building human-shaped robots, the guy who actually created a successful household robot thinks they’re chasing ghosts. Rodney Brooks—co-founder of iRobot and the brains behind your Roomba—just delivered a brutal reality check to the humanoid robotics bubble that’s somehow worth $39 billion.
Brooks calls the current approach “pure fantasy thinking,” and his reasoning cuts straight to the hardware problem everyone’s ignoring. Your human hand contains roughly 17,000 touch receptors feeding constant tactile data to your brain. No robot even comes close to matching that sensory input, yet companies like Figure keep promising their machines will learn dexterity by watching YouTube videos of human hands working.
The Physics Problem Nobody Talks About
Beyond the technical impossibility lies a safety nightmare. Humanoid robots need constant energy input just to stay upright, unlike your Roomba, which rolls stably on wheels. When a six-foot robot tips over, physics becomes your enemy: double the height means eight times the kinetic energy on impact. That’s like the difference between dropping a phone and dropping a bowling ball.
Brooks predicts the future of practical robotics looks nothing like the humanoid fever dreams currently attracting venture capital. Think wheeled platforms with multiple arms and sophisticated sensors—basically industrial equipment that works rather than sci-fi props that fall over. This mirrors how successful automation already functions in warehouses and factories, where workplace safety solutions outperform human-mimicking designs.
Following the Money Trail
The disconnect between investment and reality feels familiar to anyone who lived through the dot-com bubble or crypto’s peak moments. Figure’s $39 billion valuation exists despite producing no mass-market robots. Meanwhile, Brooks points to studies showing software engineers actually work 19% slower with cutting-edge AI tools, even while feeling 20% faster—a perfect metaphor for the entire humanoid robotics space.
Other experts in the field acknowledge Brooks’ technical concerns, though many continue pursuing humanoid designs with backing from AI giants like OpenAI and Google DeepMind. The persistence of this approach despite practical limitations suggests the investment cycle may continue until reality forces a correction. Your next decade of automation will likely come from purpose-built machines that abandon the human form entirely, focusing on specific tasks rather than general-purpose mimicry. Sometimes the best technology doesn’t look like us at all.
