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Always important to remember that a lot of these robots are "faking" the humanlike motions -- its a property of how they're trained not an inherent property of the hardware. They're actually capable of way weirder stuff and way faster motions.
this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2025
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Love putting all this effort into designing a simulacrum of a human just to make it spider run
Being able to make a mechanical body literally any way you want, and then being so vain that you have to make it look like a person
knowing nothing about anything (except that I'm built different, so, sorry mao but I DO have a right to comment without investigation) I'm just gonna say making robots look like people is 100% "we're doing this to get investor money" shit, like, it's just to get the public and rich idiots to soyface and dump money into their company, because yeah, there isn't really a reason to ever have a robot look like a human unless it's in some sort of "customer" facing role where it's dealing with people and the simulation of being human might ease anxiety or tension, or if you were like, idk, trying to build replacement bodies for people (but lol at the rate we're going I doubt that'll ever happen, but I do expect something like "you die and they just put a chatGPT "copy" in a robot and say it's you now, welcome to a new level of hell, society" to happen)
if a robot is made for something it's gotta have some sort of shape that is going to be better suited to its purpose than being humanoid. You could argue being humanoid makes it sized for humanoid spaces and tools, but like, you could just make it a different shape and still figure out a way to give it hands if you need to have it use interchangeable human tools
I think the human body is the way it is for a reason. It's good at a lot of different tasks, so if you want to make a robot that can be used for a lot of different tasks (especially in a world where a lot of shit is designed around the human body) an anthropomorphic robot seems like a good idea. Like sure, a billion different hyper-specialized robot designs would be better, but are they enough better to justify the extra design time over just using the human shape we already know works?
Booty, buddy, if you had my body idk if you'd be saying the human body works
We've built the world so humans can do things, for obvious reasons, doesn't really mean that's particularly efficient. You're much better off investing the money into changing the built world so a few specialized robots can do it at like 3000x the efficiency.
The fancy thing about those humanoid things is they can walk / balance. Which is impressive, but where do you need this? I can come up with: SAR and Disaster Relief and that would be sick as fuck, but even for latter pretty sure something like a spiderbot would fare better (jurys out on the psychological issues around being rescued by the spiderbot).
I feel like a humanoid shape is overall inferior to a monkey (monkeyoid?) shape because a monkey robot is just a humanoid plus a tail. And the tail can not only be used to grab things, so functioning like a fifth limb, but also be used for balance. You could even put visual sensors on the tail so it functions like a third eye that is capable of 360 vision since the monkey-bot can just spin the tail.
Robot Goku
4 legs is better than 2.
8 legs is better than 4
really? 6 gets you dual tripod gaits, which is simpler to always be stable assuming no climbing. What does 8 get you?
Fear.
That's not very helpful
Yeah this is my thought about it too. As someone that also knows nothing and anything, I don’t think the human body or the way we move is particularly efficient. So having robots that look and move like humans seems purely like a vanity thing.
i'd only argue that the customer service bit isn't really just vanity since I feel like it's perfectly valid to expect people to feel wary towards something that looks like a biblically accurate angel speaking to them, versus something like an andoid like Data (although making Data look human was probably a vanity thing since Starfleet was filled with aliens and he coulda looked more different without shocking anyone)
There's better body plans for pretty much any specific task, but a lot of these companies are trying to make mass market robots for domestic chores. And a human body plan is the only one that everyone's house is designed to work with.
(PS - Holy shit don't buy in on the domestic chore robots, rule 1 of robotics is that any robot strong enough to do something useful is strong enough to maim you.)
I took an interview with Tesla a while back (not because I had any intention of working there, just to hear about it). Recruiter mentioned how the company is basically all in on their humanoid robot.
I asked - why humanoid? Why not better forms or purpose-built for specific/subsets of tasks? The answer was basically Elon wants his factories operated by humanoid robots. That's it. No greater degree of thought from one of the most "valuable" companies in the world in designing what is intended to be a flagship product.