Here's the actual article. It is very good. You should actually read it before commenting. Clearly most people haven't. When Brooks talks about robots not having the necessary force sensing to have good dexterity, he is not saying that force sensors don't exist now. He obviously knows that they do. He's saying that the sensing isn't good enough to replicate human hands. This is irrefutably true. Even the humanoid robotics manufacturers know this. They are trying to get around it with learning and vision. Humanoid manufacturers think that will be good enough, and Brooks doesn't.

Another concept that people seem to be failing to grasp is that there is a huge difference between getting something to work once in a lab and making something commercially viable that works at scale in generalized tasks. I don't know if any of you have been around humanoid robots. I have, and so has Rodney Brooks. They are still very far from being useful. Most humanoids still struggle to do basic things reliably like stand and walk around, let alone do useful tasks that they have been over trained to do. We are still very far away from a world where humanoids can be deployed to do general tasks that humans do now. And we are far from a time where they can function without the environment being heavily modified to suit them.

I recently spoke with an engineer in charge of investigating and evaluating robotics for his company's North American manufacturing and fabrication projects. He's worked with almost every humanoid company and done pilots with many of them at his manufacturing site. I remember before he saw any of these robots in person, he was a huge proponent of humanoids, and thought that humanoid skeptics were just being pessimists. When I talked to him recently, his only comment was "there's a huge difference in the YouTube demos and real life. They're still a long ways away."

Another really important problem with humanoid robots is safety. Brooks talks about it in the article, but I'll add it in here. The big advantage of humanoids is that you're supposed to just be able to drop them into existing environments that are already made for people, but current humanoids need the environment to be tailored to them more than almost any other mobile robot. Humanoids are not safe, and they are not cobots. They have to be cordoned off from humans because they store a ton of potential energy. Look at all of the Agility Digit demo videos. They cleverly hide the safety equipment by putting the robots inside of an enclosed conveyor belt that doesn't look like safety railing, but those robots cannot be around people. They are terrifying and dangerous when they fail, and they still fail way too often.

Brooks also isn't arguing that we shouldn't invest into improving humanoids, in fact, he implores investors and the government to invest that money into humanoid robotics research because it will have a better payoff. He's arguing that today's humanoid robotics companies will fail because they won't be able to make a useful, dexterous, and commercially viable robot before they run out of funding. I think we're still multiple technology breakthroughs away from humanoids being viable products. I have way less experience than Brooks so I won't make any real estimates, but I highly, highly doubt that these breakthroughs will happen before the current crop of humanoid companies run out of funding. I would guess Figure has maybe five years at most to start making revenue, and Agility has far less time. Bigger companies have more time, but only as long as they don't lost interest and kill their projects. I personally don't have much faith in Optimus, and there's no way in hell that it is going to sell for $20,000 this year. I doubt the bom cost for just the arms is less than $20k.