Why Build Robots in Our Own Shape?
Hands, familiar environments and a very effective marketing machine: five answers to a reader’s question about humanoid robots.
Hand Over
Originally published in Skip Intro on 6 September 2026. Time references and product descriptions reflect that edition.
Or Segal asks:
"We recently watched a humanoid robot break Usain Bolt's 100 metres world record at the robotics games in Beijing. At the same time, companies such as BMW and Tesla are putting humanoids on their production lines. Is there any real logic in building human-shaped robots? Is this a practical direction that will actually serve us in a world of Physical AI, or a dead end, and would we do better to focus on functional designs built purely around the task itself?"
Excellent question, and there are several decent answers to it.
1. The human hand is a remarkable machine. Millions of years of evolution went into it. The thumb on its own is an extraordinary gripping instrument that changed everything, from branch to pliers to smartphone.
2. Attach that hand to a strong arm and a mobile body and you have a genuinely versatile machine. "Climb to the top of the hill and pick a flower" sounds trivial to a person, yet it draws on an enormous range of motor skills.
3. If we want robots doing jobs currently done by people, in a factory, a shop or a home, we will have to fit the robots to the environment rather than the other way round. For now, at least. Once robots do most of the work, rebuilding the environment around them starts to make sense. At that point you can design it for show, an open kitchen in a restaurant, or for efficiency, a dull but operationally excellent distribution centre.
4. And there are plenty of functional robots that look nothing like us. They are not as viral as a humanoid, which may make them feel less important, less advanced, less widespread. That is a mistake. Factories are full of them.
5. The humanoid is a superb marketing instrument for commercial and political goals. It stirs feelings that a machine shaped like a machine does not. It travels beautifully online. So you pay it more attention, which grows the market, which draws in more companies, which produces more robots and more videos and more attention, and round it goes.
Plenty of firms believe the human-like form lowers human resistance. My own sense is that it does the opposite.
In the Chinese case, this is propaganda for its own sake. China wants its technological power to reverberate, and just now this is the conversation and this is the way to have it.
