Musk’s “Efficient” Humanoid Robot Is "Pure Fantasy Thinking," MIT Roboticist Says

While investors are pouring billions of dollars into humanoid robots, an MIT roboticist with three decades of experience claims they are wasting their money.

Brooks criticized the methods used by Tesla and AI robotics firm Figure to train their humanoid robots using videos of humans performing tasks. (Photo: Steve Jurvetson Flickr)

Rodney Brooks, co-founder of iRobot — the maker of the Roomba vacuum — said the idea of humanoid robots serving as general-purpose assistants, as envisioned by Elon Musk, is “pure fantasy thinking” because robots fundamentally struggle with coordination, Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez reported for Fortune.

“Today’s humanoid robots will not learn how to be dexterous despite the hundreds of millions, or perhaps billions, of dollars being invested by VCs and major tech companies,” Brooks wrote in a blog post.

He explained that touch — one of the most complex human senses — involves about 17,000 low-threshold mechanoreceptors in the hand that respond to light touches, pressure, and vibrations, all processed by numerous neural systems.

“We do not have such a tradition for touch data,” Brooks said, contrasting it with the vast datasets available for speech recognition and image processing.

Brooks criticized the methods used by Tesla and AI robotics firm Figure to train their humanoid robots using videos of humans performing tasks, arguing that such imitation learning would not yield true dexterity.

“If the big tech companies and the VCs throwing their money at large-scale humanoid training spent only 20% as much but gave it all to university researchers, I tend to think they would get closer to their goals more quickly,” Brooks said.

He predicted that successful robots 15 years from now will look nothing like humans — instead featuring wheels, multiple arms, and possibly five-fingered hands — though they may still be marketed as “humanoid.”

“A lot of money will have disappeared, spent on trying to squeeze performance — any performance — from today’s humanoid robots,” Brooks said. “But those robots will be long gone and mostly conveniently forgotten.”