The skeptic’s guide to humanoid robots going viral on the Internet

Key points

• It may appear that humanoid robots capable of handling any task have almost arrived—especially when tech companies showcase them performing acrobatic feats or handling household chores.
• But there is still a significant gap between these robot demonstrations and proving that the same robots can reliably and repeatedly manage such tasks in the real world.
• The latest wave of robot videos can be particularly tricky, given the human tendency to anthropomorphize objects with a humanoid figure.
• A robot arm doing a dance move may simply seem “cool,” but a humanoid robot doing the same dance move can trigger more misleading assumptions, said Jonathan Hurst, cofounder of Agility Robotics and a robotics researcher at Oregon State University.
• “People automatically extrapolate and assume that the robot that looks like a person can do all the things that a person who can dance could do—which is not true,” Hurst told Ars.