We explore the coming robot realm – design revolution or dystopian nightmare?

It’s not too late to offer some alarmist new year predictions. Regardless of what other horrors the news cycle has in store for us, 2025 is shaping up to be the year of the robot with multiple humanoid models in development. And the country at the centre of that revolution? Unsurprisingly, it's China. It wasn’t always meant to be this way. Cast your mind back just a decade ago and Japan was at the forefront of robotics technology, a perception mostly driven by the high-profile status of Honda's Asimo, one of the most familiar and ubiquitous of all android ambassadors.

Asimo was a research project (image) and public relations triumph, touring the world putnting on stilted but unthreatening displays of servo-powered agility, from dad dancing to light football skills and effective if awkward jogging. Maintaining just the right balance of sci fi and kawaii, it was initially unclear if Asimo existed solely to demonstrate tech or was to form the basis of an all-new industry. Breathless press reports from the time suggested Japan's ageing population might one day benefit from a robotic squad of care home cadres, but it soon became clear that neither Honda nor anyone else was going to join the dots between Asimo's stage show and an actual future career in caring.

Honda seems to have given up on taking Asimo any further. Yet just as Japan was pulling the plug, key developments were happening elsewhere. Enter a scrappy little American startup called Boston Dynamics. Founded in 1992, BD created the first robots for the internet age, charting its tech development with short films that read like dispatches from the uncanny valley, a world of muscular technical prowess and scenarios to needle the android paranoid.

You wouldn't ever have felt threatened by Asimo, but BD's stable of wheezing, trotting headless quadrupeds and tethered bipeds gave off a don't mess vibe that was wholly in line with the more dystopic and militarized image of robotic futures. Even when the BD staff did deliberately mess with their metallic offspring - trying to kick them off balance or put them through some dangerous feat of endurance or agility - it felt both wrong, as if one was playing with future fire.

Alongside the bite-size visual snacks of Boston Dynamic’s progress, with each drop trailed and dissected by an eager, awestruck online following, China was quietly ramping up its industrial production and technological capabilities, first in computing, then in mobile, then in cars and batteries and now in robotics. At the same time, computer science labs around the world were making the breakthroughs in what we are now reaping as ubiquitous, relentlessly boosted AI capabilities.

Perhaps you now see where all this is heading. For better or for worse, there is a revolution brewing in robot design, powered by increasingly advanced AI systems that are far, far better at learning and controlling motion, balance and activity than the cautious sensors of old. Throw in more advanced and more compact battery technology and the age-old dream of creating a like-for-like mechanical equivalent to a human being is very much within reach.

Why make robots shaped like us? Global industry has benefitted from decades of robotic assistance, but for the most part these are highly specialised machines that focus on a singular task, from welding to painting, dipping, lifting, etc. Similarly, the modern warehouse hums with robotic activity, from shifting to sorting to keeping watch. And as for places that humans can’t or would rather not go to – disaster zones or danger areas – there are robots for that as well.

From the point of view of sheer practicality, one could argue that a humanoid robot is the least practical application for automation. Consider it a distinction between specialised robots and generalised robots. Whereas specialised robots live their life on production lines and warehouse floors, the latter would be a bit more useless, a bit weaker, more decorative and entertaining, with a strong social and interactive focus.

This is the point the current robotic revolution has reached. While Asimo and Boston Dynamics' Atlas were broadly humanoid, these now ancestral forms are lumbering gorillas in comparison to the lithe, athletic machines currently being paraded around tech shows and social media. For the creators and promoters of these new machines, the thinking seems to be that if they can recreate the physical characteristics and capabilities of a human worker, then labour shortages can be solved in a stroke. Drudge work would become a thing of the past and a leisurely life with droid-driven assistance awaits us all. In short, if we have thought of something, chances are we're going to try and build it.

Ups, downs and brave new worlds

Of course there will be downsides. With any new technology, ask yourself what the most egregious, sinister, unpleasant and socially divisive use it could be put to, and then steel yourself to expect exactly that to happen. The world's modern conflicts are transformed into a sci-fi nightmare hellscape thanks to the transformation of over-the-counter consumer drones into buzzing personal death machines. Forgive us for our lack of enthusiasm about each and every innovation in mobility, dexterity and flexibility that comes with new generation robots.

One of Boston Dynamics’ early tech demos was a huffing great headless beast of burden designed to haul backpacks for GIs. It was a precursor to the company’s successful Spot, a quadruped robot used for industrial inspection and security applications. In turn, Spot was the model for the robotic hunter killers in the 2017 Black Mirror episode ‘Metalhead’ (S4E5), which at a stroke combined long-standing cultural anxieties –robotic terminators – with existing technology – facial recognition and fast, unstoppable devices.

It would be naïve at best to ignore the dystopian potential of the new robots. If Spot was cheaper (it currently starts at $75,000) and as readily available as a consumer drone is from Amazon, you could guarantee that the killing fields of Ukraine and elsewhere would have weaponised it. One artificial humanoid is a novelty, whether it's on the floor of a trade show or stomping around a warehouse carrying boxes or doing the dishes at home. Scale it up to a group of robots (is there a suitable collective noun?) and the perception shifts. Row upon row of perfectly synchronised robots is a longstanding science fiction cliché, with acknowledged origins in the massed ranks of lock-stepped jackboots popularised by one Leni Riefenstahl.

One thing the nascent industry is struggling to shake off before it’s even got up speed is the lingering unease generated by the human-matching proportions and movements of this new generation of robots. We've had a century of cultural conditioning that warns us to be wary of any form of automated human. Throw in the links between robotic ranks and what one might call technofascism, add in a political climate awash with technocrats clamouring for less and less oversight, and you'd be right to mix apprehension in with any scepticism. Wait, just wait, until someone adjacent to the current American administration appears in public with a phalanx of these machines by their side. You might not have to wait very long.

Paranoid about androids?

So what will happen? Without wishing to be remembered like the person who speculated wildly and inaccurately about the range and scope of a new invention like the telephone or the computer, the answer is we just don't know. It's entirely possible that a new shadow population of robotic assistants will spring up, performing domestic duties, logistical, industrial and medical roles, as well as - inevitably - military ones.

Boosters of this particular robotic future predict a droid in every home, a multifunctional assistant that’ll cook, clean, collect parcels, feed the cat, mow the lawn and even soak your overnight oats. This is the area we'd expect to find increasingly 'lifelike' human characteristics, such as facial features, movements, proportions, etc. Designers are already trying to find ways of bridging the uncanny valley with a blend of sci-fi familiarity and cute, unthreatening gestures, expressions and movement. Witness Fuseproject’s recent work for Kind Humanoid, for example.

As the following listings show, actual human imitating robots are pretty thin on the ground, mainly for the reason that they just look odd. Instead, the ‘head’ has evolved as an array of geometric forms, and some even bear no hints of any emotive feedback or understanding.

If the revolution ever gets out of the gate, the warehouse and shop floor will be the first robotic stomping grounds. Shelf stackers, sweepers, box movers and security guards should all start looking over their shoulder. The autonomous domestic robots of the near future will start at the top of the market – butlers, bodyguards, French polishers –before filtering down to the masses (if they ever do). There are precedents for mass adoption of hitherto massively complex technology; the widespread deployment of consumer drones - once expensive items that were the preserve of skilled pilots but are now semi-disposable toys.

There would be a corresponding expansion of the logistics and support network required to keep them all going, along with a rapid overhaul of social acceptance and integration. This would bring another inevitability - anti robotic campaigners of all stripes, from economic, ethical, moral and probably religious standpoints. Unlike phones or PCs, all this would be played out in the open, every day, with real and visible consequences for society as a whole.

That's a best-case scenario. The flip side might be a little bit darker. Never has the phrase ‘be careful what you wish for’ been so freighted with unknown dread. It goes without saying that the vast datasets compiled and distilled by the world’s various LLM-based Ais form the underpinnings of most of these devices and their ability to process the world around them.

Read our necessarily incomplete guide to the many manufacturers looking to play a part in this fast-moving but still uncertain robotic future. Regardless of how it all plays out, it’s good to be forewarned.