Humanoid robots are a waste of $

I have a BSc. in Electrical and Computer Engineering and an MSc. in Control Systems. My O-1 Visa was obtained as an expert in automated systems. Robotics was one of the fields I studied - with projects ranging from a maze runner to a car wash station, warehouse storage optimization, and using Kuka robot arms for precision automation.

So I don’t say this lightly, especially as a techno-optimist who’s constantly excited and curious about new breakthroughs.

But: Humanoid robots are a distraction.

The innovation that matters isn’t our form - it’s our intelligence.

Our hands? A compromise.

Our bodies? A constraint.

We’ve just learned to live with them.

The magic of human capability lies in our minds, not the awkward mechanics we’ve evolved to navigate the world.

If we’re designing automation from scratch, why copy the worst part of the package?

Look at Waymo. If all you need is “take me to X”, why build a steering wheel, pedals, or even a dashboard?So why the obsession with making robots look like us?

A lot of it has nothing to do with performance - and everything to do with us.

Familiarity. Comfort.

Maybe even power.

The fantasy isn’t that a humanoid robot does chores - it’s that it lives among us, obeys us, and asks nothing back. That’s Westworld territory.

And it raises questions less about engineering, and more about ethics.

The same logic applies to home and industrial automation: the goal shouldn’t be to replicate humans. It should be to outperform them.

A humanoid robot that walks around your house to do dishes, fold laundry, and make your bed? That’s a Jack-of-all-trades, master of none - expensive, slow, and space-hogging.

Meanwhile, we could build five hyper-specialized machines, each optimized for one task, that outperform any humanoid in speed, precision, and efficiency.

And in doing so, we’d probably reinvent dishwashers, laundry machines, and home workflows entirely.

The Tesla factory doesn’t rely on humanoid robots. It relies on arms, conveyors, and tightly choreographed systems. Humans are still there, but mostly when:

• Accountability is needed for edge-case quality issues

• The task is too small or uneconomical to automate yet

• The task is ad-hoc or non-repeatable

That’s not a vote of confidence for humanlike form - it’s a sign of where automation hasn’t yet reached.

“But what if a humanoid could vacuum and mop?”

We already have robots that do that — because they’re purpose-built. Not because they need knees.

The future of automation isn’t human-shaped.

It’s task-shaped.

Context-aware.

Invisible.

General-purpose humanoid robots are a sci-fi fantasy chasing the wrong abstraction.

If you want real-world impact, stop trying to clone us - and start designing systems that reinvent jobs to be done.