Saturday Hashtag: #HumanoidsUnbound
Humanoids Are Coming. Oversight Isn’t.
Welcome to Saturday Hashtag, a weekly place for broader context.
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Figure, an artificial intelligence company backed by Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, and Jeff Bezos, plans to ship 100,000 humanoid robots in four years.
These robots are already working at BMW’s nonunion plant in South Carolina, with another big US company soon to follow.
The company claims its next-gen robot, Figure 02, is made in the US, is fully electric, and can lift 44 pounds, run five hours on a charge, and learn tasks using AI.
Figure aims to have these robots in homes, warehouses, and eldercare within two years — and even capable of building themselves.
The company has raised $675 million and is valued at over $2.6 billion, yet profit-obsessed investors prioritize cutting labor costs and scaling production over safety, ethics, or even preserving the capitalist system that created their prosperity.
Profit Over People
While this technology has some potential benefits, it isn’t designed to help society — it’s aimed at cutting costs and increasing stock prices.
The industry is in denial about the public harm caused by prioritizing profit over a stable, functioning capitalistic economy. Scientific research shows this is fueling job insecurity and toxic workplaces, yet companies downplay the impact, offering shallow fixes like self-affirmation mantras instead of real reform.
With Goldman Sachs projecting the humanoid market to reach $38 billion in the next decade, giants like Amazon and Tesla are rushing to compete — but public oversight and accountability remain absent from the conversation.
Experts Say We’re Unprepared
AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio warns robots with autonomy but no operational transparency risk “rogue behavior” and harm to democracy. His group LawZero pushes for strict rules — which don’t exist.
Oxford ethicists Marina Jirotka and Sandra Wachter demand “ethical black boxes” to track robot decisions, essential for accountability, yet currently nonexistent and out of reach.
Ethicist Wendell Wallach warns this tech is speeding toward becoming “a juggernaut beyond human control,” driven by hype and profits.
Legislation? Too Little, Too Late
Despite clear warnings, there’s no strong legislation. Federal laws are nonexistent and state laws are weak, scattered, and symbolic at best.
Industry lobbyists spending billions have totally overpowered lawmakers, actually stopping regulation legislation for the next 10 years, leaving ethics, safety, and worker protections behind.
We’re racing ahead without rules, as companies reshape society through code — while policy analysts raise alarms and lawmakers largely remain silent.
The Human Cost
Researchers warn humanoids may cause emotional harm and dependency, especially in eldercare. Bias in AI training risks worsening racial and economic inequalities.
Roboticist Rodney Brooks is “skeptical that we’ll even be able to create ‘a robot that seems as intelligent, as attentive, and as faithful as a dog’ before 2048.”
Who Decides Our Future?
Right now, it’s not the public.
Tech companies and investors are rapidly deploying robots that will reshape how we work and live — with the silent complicity of governments, and without public input, legal guardrails, or even basic common sense.
As Bengio put it, “The public needs a seat at the table — before the robots are already walking through the door” and locking us out of our own future.
A $2.6 Billion Humanoid Robotics Startup Under the Spotlight
The author writes, “Some tech companies seem to appear overnight. They capture imaginations, attract billions in investment, and redefine what’s possible. For artificial intelligence, that company was OpenAI; for humanoid robotics, it’s Figure AI. Much like OpenAI, Figure appeared seemingly out of nowhere and, in a very short time, reshaped an entire industry, quickly becoming the centre of attention in the robotics world. Yet behind the headlines and viral demo videos, a growing chorus of sceptics is asking how much of Figure’s story is real, and what it means for the future of robotics.”
Regulatory Challenges of Robotics: Some Guidelines for Addressing Legal and Ethical Issues
From Law, Innovation, and Technology: “Robots are slowly, but certainly, entering people’s professional and private lives. They require the attention of regulators due to the challenges they present to existing legal frameworks and the new legal and ethical questions they raise. This paper discusses four major regulatory dilemmas in the field of robotics: how to keep up with technological advances; how to strike a balance between stimulating innovation and the protection of fundamental rights and values; whether to affirm prevalent social norms or nudge social norms in a different direction; and, how to balance effectiveness versus legitimacy in techno-regulation.”
Companies That Replaced Humans With AI Are Realizing Their Mistake
From Futurism: “According to tech billionaire and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, 2025 was supposed to be the year ‘when AI agents will work.’ Despite widespread hype, so-called ‘AI agents’ — a software product that’s supposed to complete human-level tasks autonomously — have yet to live up to their name. As of April, even the best AI agent could only finish 24 percent of the jobs assigned to it. Still, that didn’t stop business executives from swarming to the software like flies to roadside carrion, gutting entire departments worth of human workers to make way for their AI replacements. But as AI agents have yet to even pay for themselves — spilling their employer’s embarrassing secrets all the while — more and more executives are waking up to the sloppy reality of AI hype.”
What ‘No Robo Bosses’ Could Mean for Employee Data and Privacy Security
The author writes, “A California Democrat [in April] introduced the No Robo Bosses Act, SB7, to the statehouse’s upper chamber requiring human oversight of automated decision-making systems (ADS) in the workplace. The move comes as state and local governments and businesses alike grapple with a federal vacuum on AI legislation amid uncertainty in Washington.”
Transcript of The Catastrophic Risks of AI — and a Safer Path: Yoshua Bengio
From TED2025: “Read the full transcript of computer scientist Yoshua Bengio’s talk titled ‘The Catastrophic Risks of AI — and a Safer Path,’ recorded at TED2025 on April 8, 2025.”
Humanoid Robots and AI in Elderly Care: Solving a Demographic Crisis with Exponential Tech
From OpenExO: “A future where your aging loved ones are supported not just by family, but by tireless, empathetic robots that help them live independently at home. This vision is fast becoming reality as the global population aged 65 and over surges toward 1.6 billion by 2050, outnumbering youth and doubling the count of children under five. With caregiver shortages mounting and traditional systems buckling under pressure, AI and humanoid robots are stepping in as game-changers. These exponential technologies offer a lifeline to address the demographic crisis while opening doors to transformative growth in healthcare and beyond.”
From 2015: ‘A Dangerous Master: How To Keep Technology From Slipping Beyond Our Control’ Review
The author writes, “[Wendell] Wallach (bioethics, Yale Univ.; Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong) argues that technological development often outpaces moral and ethical considerations and issues this call for vigilance to counter techn-outopianism, a method in which technical solutions exist for every technological problem.”
From 2014: Predictions for the State of AI and Robotics in 2025
From the Pew Research Center: “The sizable majority of experts surveyed for this report envision major advances in robotics and artificial intelligence in the coming decade. In addition to asking them for their predictions about the job market of the future, we also asked them to weigh in on the following question: ‘To what degree will AI and robotics be parts of the ordinary landscape of the general population by 2025? Describe which parts of life will change the most as these tools advance and which parts of life will remain relatively unchanged.’ These are the themes that emerged from their answers to this question.”
