it is hilarious to me that this is the market 
wants to pivot into
this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2026
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I don’t understand the business case for humanoid robots other than “cool toy for a show room floor”.
Surely anything an AI humanoid can do could be better done by a specialized regular robot.
A huge part of the Industrial Revolution was standardizing how everything got done, every car panel the same size and all that, enabling Henry Ford style factory floors.
What is the benefit of having robots who can do more or less anything (just like a human) but in varying and non-standard ways each time (just like a human) compared to Car-Panel-Bot-2000 which is going to make car panel after car panel for 20 years, each one microscopically the same?
the one benefit is as you say, the versatility. We already have a world built for humans, so a human shape means generalized compatibility with most objects
the one thing that immediately comes to mind for humanoid robots is that they excel at navigating elevation changes made for humans. while it is exceedingly hard to do right, bipedal motion is very good at navigating discrete elevation changes like stairs. this would make them ideal household task robots in multi-story houses, i think.
this is off the top of my stupid ass head so take it w a grain of salt.
the best argument for humanoid robots i've heard is that you don't need to change the environment that they will be working in, they can just be slotted in where a human once was and take over the work
Or you can just hire a housekeeper to fold your towels rather than spend $800,000 on a robot every 5 years to do it
Yeah, if they execute that idea successfully they could massively massively reduce the infrastructural costs of rolling these out.
If. But I don't think it's impossible.
Your argument could be applied to ASICs and FPGAs/microcontrollers, and look at the market share of the latter two
Isn’t that the exact opposite though?
ASICs are specialized chips. They are highly use-case targeted. Microcontrollers are extremely specific, often single-task specific.
The robot that has been designed for the task of cutting metal panels exactly the same over and over seems like the equivalent of an ASIC or microcontroller here. Something designed for a specific purpose or small subset of purposes and capable of doing that purpose in an extremely optimized manner.
The AI humanoid seems more like a CPU here… capable of solving any problem but due to its general purpose nature, not optimized for any particular problem.
To continue pushing the analogy, to me humanoid AI robots seem the equivalent of trying to sell CPUs to mine bitcoin. The world already has a better solution.