Kicking Robots
November 21, 2025 at 04:48AMIf you’ve been (justifiably) keeping your head in the sand, let me break it to you: humanoid robots are moving a lot more . . . humanly. But even if one robot doesn’t make a revolution, it does convince a lot of companies to make a lot of very bold claims. Good thing James Vincent put on his hype-proof glasses to report out the latest Harper‘s cover story. Now, if you need me, I’ll be researching “robot-proof bunkers you can buy on a journalist’s salary.”
With AI in the form of chatbots, plausible mistruths and inaccuracies usually have a limited scope for harm, but with a domestic robot, mistakes could be catastrophic. Imagine you tell your machine butler, “Pour me a cup of tea,” and it pours boiling water into your baby’s sippy cup rather than your mug. Or you tell it, “Put my laundry in the washing machine,” and it grabs a hamper of clothes in which your cat is hiding and fires up the express cycle. There are obvious security and privacy concerns, too. Any robot in your home would have an array of cameras, microphones, and sensors, becoming an alluring target for hackers, while the robots themselves would need to be accessed remotely for troubleshooting, potentially giving attackers physical access to your house. For these and other safety reasons, skeptics in the industry allege that companies promising to deliver domestic robots in a matter of years are overly optimistic. “This is a very high uncertainty prediction for me,” Kuindersma tells me. His colleague, Marc Theermann, the company’s chief strategy officer, says: “I’m not sure if [we] even believe that humanoids in the home is a thing in the foreseeable future.”
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/11/20/kicking-robots/
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