Asking the right question about the humanoid bubble

I need to do multiple posts on James Vincent's "Kicking Robots," which ran recently in Harper’s (breaking news — articles still appear in Harper’s). This is one of the best overviews to date of what I've been referring to as the humanoid bubble. Not perfect; it should have dove deeper into the problems with the technology, but it did make a reasonable effort to give the critics their say.

For now, I want to single out one paragraph because it's easy to miss, despite the fact that it raises implicitly the most important question around the entire multi-billion-dollar industry.

Musk’s showcase captured perfectly the power of spectacle to mask technological shortcomings and bridge the gap between expectation and reality. But for those who’d been toiling away on humanoid robots for decades, Musk’s announcement was something more than a publicity stunt. “After Tesla Bot, the whole world sort of woke up to humanoids,” Jeff Cardenas, Apptronik’s co-founder and CEO, told me. The number of people working on the technology prior to Tesla’s AI Day pronouncement “could fit in a small room,” but Musk transformed the industry almost overnight, even if all the public had seen of the Tesla Bot was a slide deck and a gyrating man in a robot costume. 

Immediately after this paragraph, Vincent shifts back to his profile of Cardenas and doesn't address the most important point in the entire piece: what changed?

The reason that only a vanishingly small sliver of roboticists were working on humanoids in August of 2021 was because, other than novelty value and the opportunity to push the edge of certain technologies that had a wider range of applications, the viable use cases for these C3POs were all but nonexistent.

The arguments currently being presented in defense of bipedal humanoid robots are silly, a combination of naïve biomimicry, a laughable misinterpretation of convergent evolution, the Cylon design fallacy and a bunch of warmed-over tropes from old sci-fi shows and comic books. What's most significant, though, is not the absurdity of the arguments but their age. Advocates for these designs had been making these same defenses for decades and had convinced virtually no one until Elon's dancer in a robot suit.

What changed? 

Musk's presentation did not mark any notable breakthrough in the tech or shift in the economics. There was nothing even approaching a new idea about how to make these designs viable in an industrial setting. The entire concept remained what it had always been: a cautionary tale of overengineering and putting the cool over the functional.

The only thing he brought to the table — pretty much the only thing he ever brings — was a massive, surging river of hype, hype that drove venture capitalists into a spending frenzy, hype that made respectable journalists credulous and stupid.

Unlike the AI bubble, which at its core does represent an exciting and potentially valuable technological advance, the humanoid bubble is pure tech-visionary absurdity. It's possibly the most Musk thing Musk has ever done.