Currently, 16 major companies are making significant advances in humanoid robots.
Peter Diamandis
By 2026, there should be humanoid robots in private homes helping with laundry, vacuuming, and cooking, at least in beta testing, says Peter Dymandis. By 2040, there could be as many as 10 billion around the world in all parts of the economy, and their labor could be as cheap as $10 a day.
“If you lease a car, and you lease a $30,000 car, your price range is $300 per month,” says author, futurist, investor, physician, and engineer Peter Diamandis on a recent TechFirst Podcast . “And that translates to an amazing $10 a day, 40 cents an hour. So you have a workforce that’s waiting for whatever your wishes are. You know, keeping the house clean and , mow the lawn, you know, change the baby’s diaper.”
Today, of course, most robot manufacturers focus on building tools for labor such as warehousing, logistics, and manufacturing. Just recently, Agility Robotics By Agility By Digit got a paid gig, followed by the latest delivery model in Figure 02.
But in the future, they will be everywhere in our economy, says Diamandis. healthcare, manufacturing, service industries, public and urban spaces, transportation, and even entertainment. This is such a transformative change that analysts still don’t really understand how to estimate its value. Goldman Sachs says sales of humanoid robots will be a $38 billion space by 2035, but ARK Invest says the economic value of their labor could be as high as $24 trillion. .
Reasons for the vast differences: Analysts’ opinions on what kind of work humanoid robots do. If robots get really good, the high end of their value seems to be at altitudes like Mount Everest.
“50% of the world’s domestic product (GDP) goes to paying humans to do a job every day – to perform human labor,” Diamandis’ recent Autonomous Robots report says in Figure Quoting AI CEO Brett Adcock. “That’s a $40 trillion annual market. It’s 10 times bigger than all of the transportation systems combined.”
Diamandis has identified 16 market leaders and up-and-comers in this space. Here they are along with the names of their autonomous robots:
Tesla (Optimus) Diagram AI (Figure 02) Agility Robotics (Digit) Boston Dynamics (ATLAS) UNINTREE (H1, G1) 1X Technologies (NEO) Agibot (Yuanzheng A2) Apptronik (Apollo) Beijing Hric (Tiangong) Enginei (SE01) Engineering Art (AMECA) Fourier Intelligence (GR-2) Kepler (Forerunner K2) Robot ERA (STAR1) Sanctuary AI (Phoenix) Xpeng
Where are these companies located?
It is almost exclusive in the US and China. Six are in the US, eight in China, one in the UK and one in Canada. All currently located in the European Union, South America, or Africa.
Tesla (USA) Figure AI (USA) Agility Robotics (USA) Boston Dynamics (USA) Unitree (China) 1X Technologies (USA) Agibot (China) Apptronik (USA) Beijing HRIC (China) Engine Eye (China) Engineering Arts (UK) ) Fourier Intelligence (China) Kepler (China) Robot Age (China) Sanctuary AI (Canada) XPENG (China)
The big question now is which companies will win the battle to provide these billions of robots? And: Which country is going to win? These two questions are closely related. Because winning the race to develop autonomous robots is an economic, financial, and social battle that will likely determine the future on multiple levels.
On an economic and financial level, companies and countries that are the first to crack effective and efficient humanoid robots will have significant advantages in both labor costs and workforce size. .
At the societal level, countries or geopolitical groupings that resolve autonomous humanoid robots have the opportunity to reshape communities in a world where labor costs approach zero. Unleash human potential untethered to the need to create widgets and make things work.
There is even a military level to this. Observers of the Russian-Ukrainian war know that drones, autonomous and semi-autonomous robots, and AI are increasingly becoming the bulk of the weapons that are winning on the battlefield. This is already happening. Anduril recently announced a $1 billion investment in a hyperscale factory in Ohio that will “redefine the scale and speed at which autonomous systems and weapons can be produced for the United States and its allies and partners.” did.
The range of potential transformations here can hardly be overestimated.
Current Cost of Humanoid Robots, in part via Morgan Stanley Research.
Morgan Stanley Research
This is a big question. How much does a robot cost? The answer drives those who can afford to employ them. Diamandis believes that within a decade or so, a location worth about $30,000 will translate into a lease cost of about $10 per day.
It varies a lot:
“What has made China successful over the past 40 years is low labor rates,” Diamandis says. “They had so many people at such low cost that they could manufacture almost anything…(But) the cost of living is increasing in China, so the labor rate per hour is increasing. ”
But China is not alone. Also in the US:
“California’s minimum wage is $20 an hour,” he adds. “Why not put a robot in that spot for 40 cents an hour? 24/7, no drug tests, no fights with girlfriends or boyfriends, no sick days. I mean. , quite convincing.”
Another need is elder care. The United Nations predicts that in five years, by 2030, there will be 25 people over the age of 70 in the United States for every 100 people between the ages of 24 and 69…a dependency rate of 25%. We desperately need safe and effective humanoid robots to assist here. I personally learned how individuals (and by extension, society) are taxed to care for one aging parent. Offloading some of that labor to humanoid robots, while ideally not providing the human connection that older adults still need, would be a big help.
Perhaps the biggest question is: what kind of world do we want to build?
Ideally, it is summed up by this quote from Indian thinker Sadguru.
“Technology is a way for humanity to take a vacation from basic survival.”
But there are many other ways autonomous robots can also go, and we’re seeing both of them with the Russo-Ukrainian war and deepening America’s financial divide.
