Humanoid Robots Won't Save Manufacturing. Here's What Will.

At CES 2025, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang declared physical AI "the next big thing," positioning humanoid robots as the future of the $50 trillion manufacturing and logistics industries. Goldman Sachs projects a $154 billion market by 2035. Fellow Forbes Contributors seem enthusiastic; Ethan Karp sees opportunities, Cornelia Walther calls them inevitable, fellow futurist Bernard Marr predicts a robotic culture shock, although Dev Patnaik worries about social permission, at least in the home. The Rodney Brooks—co-founder of iRobot and MIT professor emeritus—delivered the bluntest assessment in September 2025: humanoid robots pursuing dexterity through video-based learning represent "pure fantasy thinking." Brooks identifies the hardware deficit: human hands contain approximately 17,000 specialized tactile receptors; humanoid robots have effectively zero. The infrastructure for collecting high-fidelity haptic data—the ImageNet equivalent for touch—doesn't exist. Every humanoid robot Manufacturing Leadership Council reports 22% of manufacturers plan to deploy humanoid robots within two years. But the International Federation of Robotics recently questioned whether humanoid robots represent "an economically viable and scalable business case for industrial applications."