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Why people hate humanoid robots They should be cute rather than lifelike

The ‘Neo’ robot deliberately falls short of realism. (Handout)

The ‘Neo’ robot deliberately falls short of realism. (Handout)

AndroidsAnthropicRoboticstesla

Alys Key

1 Jun 2026 - 12:01am 7 mins

At Cooper’s Brewery in Adelaide, the largest family-owned brewing business in Australia, forklifts glide around the sizeable factory floor. With ease, they shelve boxes of lagers and ales. But nobody is at the wheel. In fact, there isn’t a wheel at all. Or a seat. These forklifts are automated guided vehicles (AGVs), a pretty old form of robotics that uses lasers, floor markers or other navigation systems to follow pre-planned paths.

People had always imagined that robots would look like us, but these forklifts hint at a different future — one in which robots are made in the image of the work, not the worker.

For the question of whether robots will be the same shape as humans is not a settled one. In fact, it is a point of some debate in the robotics sector. Elon Musk promises legions of humanoid Tesla robots, poised to take over manual labour and build a colony on Mars. And his is not a particularly wacky view; other executives, including those less given to overconfident predictions, have made similar forecasts. In his lecture delivered to the Cosmos Institute last month in Oxford, the Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark predicted that, by April 2028, bipedal robots will “begin to do useful work in the real world in partnership with human tradespeople”. While being bipedal does not mean a robot is identical to a human, it certainly denotes it being closer in form to us than to a forklift.

As recently as this time last year, a wide rollout of electronic colleagues looked unlikely. Even in China, the world leader of the humanoid robotics market, the stumbling and malfunctioning first cohort of robot competitors in the Beijing half-marathon were treated as more of an entertaining sideshow than a serious sign of things to come. Clark himself appeared relatively pessimistic about the capabilities of humanoid robots at the time; in response to an Amazon research paper about the performance of a specialised robotics system for stowing items in the company’s warehouses, he noted that state-of-the art automation was coming from designing highly specific hardware and “carefully structuring your system around a few core tasks”. The experiment, he wrote, “should temper our expectations for bipedal robots leading to some massive improvement in automation — at least in the short term.”

What changed? It may simply be that this massive improvement has arrived. At this year’s Beijing half-marathon, several robots outpaced human participants, even breaking records. This feat had serious implications, demonstrating the kind of durability that might soon make the technology suitable for industrial applications.

Tesla’s Optimus Prime: sinister? (Chen Yuyu/VCG via Getty Images)<br>On that basis, Clark’s prediction — that more human-like machines will start trickling into the workforce next year — starts to sound plausible, though we can expect humans would still be on-site to correct for their defects. Manual labour will be slowly automated. Or it may be that Clark believes the underlying AI systems are becoming so powerful, so fast, that the obstacles will be swept away. The robots’ cognitive abilities will catch up with their strength and dexterity. Manual labour will be rapidly automated.

“Truly general intelligence would obviate some of the flaws,” Clark wrote in his sceptical 2025 missive. “So if bipeds arrive at the same time as a generally capable intelligence, I’ll need to eat my words.”

This is now the precipice at which we find ourselves. As AI improves, those in the field say robots will become more capable of learning for themselves, of adapting to new environments without pre-programming, and even employing reasoning. They’ll be easily able to work in an Amazon warehouse — and then some. The ultimate prize, as Clark says, would be truly general intelligence: a system that can turn its hand to any task without specific training. Many imagine that, in this scenario, the machine most suited to carrying around a general, human-like intelligence would be in the shape of a person. After all, the world is built for humans, and humans have the dexterity to adapt to a vast range of manual tasks.

Many industrial robots, by contrast, are made to complete one specific task from a set point. Or else they operate entirely inside facilities built for them: look, for example, at the fulfilment centres...