On September 5, 2025, IEEE Spectrum published an article by Maya Cakmak, a professor at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. Titled “Do People Really Want Humanoid Robots in Their Homes?”, the article reports on a study conducted by Basia Radka, Evolone Layne, and Maya Cakmak and offers some observations on the current state of humanoid robotics. There is one interesting thing about this piece, which I think worth attention (and it’s not the findings of the study, which are pretty predictable: “Our survey showed that people generally prefer special-purpose robots over humanoids”).
Professor Cakmak says that she decided to learn whether ordinary users would like to see humanoid robots in their homes after witnessing the surge in investment by multibillion companies in the development of humanoid robots in recent years. She speculates that “Surely some fraction of those billions had gone into market research and customer insight”. I think this perspective—that companies developing or investing in humanoid robots are driven by the usual business motive of profit, which presupposes the calculations about the possible customers—is inadequate for understanding the current hype around humanoids. As the example of Professor Cakmak shows, if we assume that these companies’ decisions are based on “insights about in-home humanoid customers”, we can only wonder “why are they convinced that replicating humans is the right solution for the home?” without having any answer and only guessing that they have conducted some secret focus groups and/or interviews and their findings suggest that customers would love to see humanoid in their homes, whereas scientific research shows time and again that this is not the case.
What is missing from this picture of the field of commercial humanoid robotics is that developers and investors in the field may be motivated by their futuristic visions rather than by the data from customer research. When Elon Musk presents new generation of Tesla’s Optimus robots by announcing that “you can have your own personal R2-D2, C3PO”, he is doing more than just using a popular media reference to make Tesla’s humanoids more appealing and familiar to a general public. It’s not just a marketing stunt. He and many other humanoid robot developers and investors genuinely believe that they can “see the future” and that this future bustles with humanoids. This is the future for tech guys. In this vision, customers play no role because it is a vision of the social order rather than a vision of the profitable business. In other words, it is essentially a technocratic, not a commercial, vision.Therefore, I would argue that it is senseless to “encourage these companies to dig deeper and share their insights about in-home humanoid customers”, as Professor Cakmak tries to do. What we need is a detailed analysis of the visions of the future that inspire and are propagated by the companies, and of the ways these visions are embodied in the machines they build. Because these visions influence not just the money flows, but also the architecture of robots’ “hands”, for example, which must be able to hold and manipulate with kitchen appliances.