By 2026, we should have humanoid robots in private homes helping with laundry, vacuuming, and the dishes, at least in beta testing, says Peter Diamandis. By 2040, there could be as many as 10 billion globally in all areas of the economy, and their labor might be as cheap as $10 a day.
“If you lease it like you lease a car, a $30,000 car, your price point per month is 300 bucks,” says author, futurist, investor, doctor, and engineer Peter Diamandis in a recent TechFirst podcast. “And that translates amazingly to $10 a day and 40 cents an hour. So you’ve got labor that’s waiting for whatever your wish is. You know, clean up the house, go mow the lawn, you know, please change the baby’s diapers.”
Today of course most robotic manufacturers are focused on building tools for labor: warehousing, logistics, manufacturing. Just recently we’ve seen Digit by Agility Robotics get a paying gig, followed by Figure’s latest shipping model, Figure 02.
But in the future, they’ll be everywhere in our economy, Diamandis says: in healthcare, manufacturing, the service industry, public and urban spaces, transport, even entertainment. This is such a transformational change that analysts don’t yet really understand how to estimate its value: Goldman Sachs says selling humanoid robots will be a $38 billion space by 2035, while Ark Invest says the resulting economic value of their labor could be as high as $24 trillion.
The reason for the vast divergence: analysts’ opinions on what jobs humanoid robots will take. If the robots get really good, the high end of their value is Everest-like in elevation:
“50% of Global Domestic Product (GDP) is paying humans to do work every day, in other words human labor,” Diamandis’ recent autonomous robot report quotes Brett Adcock, CEO of Figure AI as saying. “That amounts to a marketplace of $40 trillion a year. It’s ten times bigger than all of transportation combined.”
Diamandis has identified 16 market leaders and up-and-comers in the space. Here they are, along with the name of their autonomous robot:
- Tesla (Optimus)
- Figure AI (Figure 02)
- Agility Robotics (Digit)
- Boston Dynamics (Atlas)
- Unitree (H1, G1)
- 1X Technologies (NEO)
- Agibot (Yuanzheng A2)
- Apptronik (Apollo)
- Beijing HRIC (Tiangong)
- EngineAI (SE01)
- Engineered Arts (Ameca)
- Fourier Intelligence (GR-2)
- Kepler (Forerunner K2)
- Robot Era (Star1)
- Sanctuary AI (Phoenix)
- Xpeng
Where are these companies?
Almost exclusive in the U.S. and China: six are in the United States, eight are in China, one is in the UK, and one is in Canada. None, at the moment are in the European Union, or 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)
- EngineAI (China)
- Engineered Arts (UK)
- Fourier Intelligence (China)
- Kepler (China)
- Robot Era (China)
- Sanctuary AI (Canada)
- Xpeng (China)
The big question right now is: which companies are going to win the battle to provide these billions of robots? And: which countries are going to win? These two questions are inextricably linked, because winning the race to develop autonomous robots is perhaps the economic, financial, and societal battle that will decide the future, on multiple levels.
On the economic and financial levels, the companies and countries that crack effective and efficient humanoid robots first will have a huge advantage in both labor force costs and labor force size: a massive deal for global economic power, especially for nations with a generally aging population.
On the societal level, nations or geopolitical groupings that solve autonomous humanoid robots will also have the opportunity to remake their communities in a world in which labor costs approach zero: tricky, difficult, guaranteed to be controversial, but a puzzle that contains the seeds of unleashing human potential unbounded by the need to made widgets and move things.
There’s even a military level to this: any observers of the Russia-Ukraine war know that drones, autonomous and semi-autonomous robots, and AI are increasingly the lion’s share of the weaponry that is winning on the battlefield. This is already happening: Anduril recently announced a billion-dollar investment into a hyper-scale factory in Ohio to “redefine the scale and speed that autonomous systems and weapons can be produced for the United States and its allies and partners.”
The scope of the potential transformation here can almost not be overestimated.
A big question is this: How much are the robots going to cost? The answer will drive who can afford to employ them: which countries, which companies (for which jobs), and which people. Diamandis thinks an equivalent of around $30,000 is where we’ll get to within a decade or so, which translates to around $10/day in leasing costs.
That changes a lot:
“What made China successful over the last 40 odd year is their low labor rate,” Diamandis says. “They had a lot of humans at very low cost that could manufacture almost anything … [but] the cost of living has been going up in China, so the labor rate per hour is going up.”
But not just in China. In the United States as well:
“California minimum wage is 20 bucks an hour,” he adds. “How do you ever not put a robot in that spot at 40 cents an hour? Which works 24/7, no drug testing, no fights with her girlfriend or boyfriend, no sick days. I mean, it gets pretty compelling.”
Another need is elder care. The UN predicts that by 2030—just five years away—the United States will have 25 people over 70 years old for each 100 people age 24 to 69 … a dependency ratio of 25%, the report says. We desperately need safe and effective humanoid robots to help here. I’ve just personally learned how taxing it is on individuals (and by extension, society) to take care of only one aging parent. Offloading some of that labor onto humanoid robots—but ideally not the human connection that the elderly still need—would be a huge help.
Perhaps the biggest question is what kind of world we want to build in a post-labor society.
Ideally it’s one summarized by this quote from the Indian thinker Sadguru:
“Technology is the means by which humanity takes a vacation from basic survival.”
But there are plenty of other ways autonomous robots could go too, and we see both of them in the Russia-Ukraine war as well as the deepening financial divide in America.
