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Humanoid Counterparts

Partner: Modem 🔗
Text: Thomas Gorton
Visual Research: Mattering

Humanoid robots are no longer confined to science fiction—they’re entering our factories, offices, and homes. Mattering partnered with office for design & innovation Modem to explore why we continue to shape the future in our own image—even when it defies logic or efficiency. Humanoid Counterparts investigates our collective ego and the emotional need to create machines that look like us.

On March 18th, at a Mercedes-Benz factory in Berlin, Apptronik’s humanoid robot Apollo went to work. The 5”8 tall figure assembled engine components entirely autonomously without human interaction, in what was billed as the first public demonstration of a humanoid performing real-life tasks. The vision is that Apollo – along with other humanoids being developed by tech companies – will do repetitive jobs that are too boring or dangerous for people, without complaining about being tired or having to go to the toilet. We’re used to AI chatbots and virtual assistants by now, but soon we’ll work alongside man-like machines, live with them, even fall in love. Artificial intelligence is being made flesh in the form of metal, bipedal robots that learn the same things we do, move like us, and speak our languages.

As of 2023, the global robotics market surpassed $70bn and is expected to quadruple by 2030. Morgan Stanley predicts that the humanoid robot population will be 40,000 by 2030 and 63 million by 2050. Citigroup’s assessment blows that out of the water – it estimates that 1.19 billion machines will walk among us in 25 years. In March 2025, Chinese electric vehicle manufacturer XPeng’s CEO announced that it would be investing nearly $14bn long-term in humanoid robots, having launched Iron in 2024, a robot that it wants to compete with Tesla’s Optimus. It’s bipedal, has 60 joints and the robots are already working in a Guangzhou factory, assembling cars with hands designed to exactly the same proportions as humans’. Next year, XPeng aims to mass-produce Iron. The appearance of Elon Musk’s Optimus is incredibly similar, another faithful tribute to the human form.

There are economic drivers behind the rapid advancements in humanoid technology. Birth rates are falling, populations are aging, and the manual skills that elders possess aren’t being transferred to the next generations. Meanwhile, the cost to produce humanoids has dropped significantly. Often, the narrative around robots is that ‘they’re coming for our jobs’, but they may stabilize entire sectors that would otherwise stagnate. The World Economic Forum’s Future Of Jobs report states that while automation could displace 85 million jobs, another 97 million are projected to be created. MIT engineer Pulkit Agrawal is building humanoid machines to assist with boring, domestic chores that he suggests may be mopping our kitchen within five years. This is no longer the preserve of science fiction authors – humanoids will be in our homes, offices and factories faster than you can say “fully automated luxury communism”. Our world is set to be entirely reshaped, economies transformed, in what is arguably the largest cultural and social shift in the history of humanity.

As we engineer a global fleet of attentive, subservient humanoids, one big question looms over this next stage of evolution – why do they look like us? Possibly, robotics companies’ design motives are inextricably linked with the Western origin story, an ancient perspective that compels us to perpetuate our own form. Genesis 1:27 states, “So God created mankind in His own image, in the image of God He created them.” It’s a superiority complex that has persisted over thousands of years and across cultures. In Greek mythology the embittered sculptor Pygmalion created an ivory statue of his ideal woman, prayed for it to become real, and subsequently fell in love with it. Today, “Pygmalionism” refers to the love a human feels for its own creation and can be applied to robotics, as human beings inevitably embark on social and emotional relationships with the technological other – we were meant to be having sex with robots by now, after all. Aristotle’s hierarchy of souls places us at the top, above animals and plants, on account of our capacity for rational thought. In robotics, we design mechanical counterparts in our image and revere them for looking “natural” or “real”, even if a different design could offer greater efficiency. We are self-referential to a fault.

If we are, as Microsoft AI’s CEO Mustafa Suleyman asserts, creating new species with artificial intelligence and robotics, then it’s in our genes to build a mirror image. The term “anthropomorphism” has its roots in religion, first coined in 1753 to describe the heresy of applying human form to God. It’s considered an innate tendency of human psychology, something we’ve done throughout time, from Aesop’s Fables to Lumiere, Walt Disney’s talking candle, or the way the front of cars are designed. Survival instinct, and an obsession with our own myth, encourages pareidolia. From an engineering point of view there is sense in designing bipedal humanoids. After all, via stairs, doors and vehicles, we have built our world to complement the way we stand and move – it’s an environment tailored for human movement. Redesigning our surroundings to accommodate non-humanoid robots would be prohibitively costly and time-consuming. Additionally, social interaction is also potentially more fluid when you’re dealing with a familiar form rather than say the RT-G, a small, amphibious, spherical robot seen assisting police in China at the end of last year.

Honda’s ASIMO humanoid was unveiled in 2000, a bipedal robot designed to be an assistant, perhaps to the elderly or people trapped in disaster zones. Its creators believe that its invention was a crucial breakthrough in helping people imagine a world where robots coexist with people. Modern humanoids also emphasise bipedal stability and reflect our physique – Norwegian robotics firm 1X even dresses its humanoid servant Neo Gamma in beige knitwear designed by gnuhr services to make it more approachable while it carries out domestic tasks like making tea or doing the washing. Why we ended up on two legs nobody can say for sure – perhaps in order to carry tools or food, or to conserve energy, vital for the australopithecines covering vast distances hunting for food. “Biologists have no settled theory on how our bipedalism evolved, but – like everything else in biology – it’s a kludge rather than an optimal design,” wrote Gideon Lichfield in the Financial Times. “Moving and balancing on two limbs is an impressive engineering feat, but it is dicey on rough terrain and puts terrible pressure on a spine first evolved for quadrupeds.” If you were a machine superintelligence looking for a host body, then would you choose human form? The human body is by no means a flawless design – a vulnerable vertebrae weakened by bipedalism, narrow pelvises making childbirth difficult, and inflexible knees. Our one clear advantage is our brain, an organ capable of intellectual thought unlike any other animal, and what we’re using to design humanoids in our image.

For all the advancements in humanoid technology, biomimetic robotics extends beyond copying the human body. If we ourselves aren’t the most optimal design, what happens when we look much further down the food chain at small but highly efficient organisms? Robotic jellyfish are being built for ocean exploration on account of the marine invertebrates being the world’s most efficient swimmers. Swarm robotics is bio-inspired, influenced by the collective rhythm of bee hives or ant colonies. These forays into designing robots that aren’t inspired by our bodies, rejecting the dated idea of the intelligence hierarchy, open up new possibilities and challenge the idea that machines must be created in our image in order to be effective.

Eventually, we may become a prototype to be altered as AI sees fit. Robots could add to and subtract from the human body in order to be most effective. Not every robot needs legs – torso-shaped machines could be installed in specific locations, most likely factory settings, and carry out tasks that it’d be prohibitive for a two-legged robot to do. Designing and operating bipedal robots is complex given the need for balance and coordination, while legs use more energy than wheels. For many basic tasks, a humanoid aesthetic is simply unnecessary, something acknowledged by Kawasaki’s CORLEO concept demonstrated in a viral video showing a hydrogen-powered robot horse traversing rocky, mountainous terrain with a human sitting on top. While Kawasaki caution that mass production shouldn’t be expected until 2050, it’s a glimpse into a world where robots’ form takes inspiration from other animals depending on their intended usage. CORLEO will be able to do things that a humanoid or a wheeled vehicle cannot. In the future, humanoids may evolve in the same way we did, modifying their bodies faster than we ever could, aided by the in-built, infinite knowledge we’ve afforded them that can inform them (and us) how they can achieve optimal efficiency. A new breed of ‘superhuman’ robots with added height or extra limbs for certain jobs will start to materialize in the “post-humanoid” era.

As they begin to emerge into our everyday lives, it’s clear that not everybody is comfortable with humanoids – “robophobia” is real. This unease was prophesied over fifty years ago by robotics professor Masahiro Mori in his now-legendary 1970 essay The Uncanny Valley. “When we realize the hand, which at first sight looked real, is in fact artificial, we experience an eerie sensation,” he wrote. “For example, we could be startled during a handshake by its limp boneless grip together with its texture and coldness. When this happens, we lose our sense of affinity, and the hand becomes uncanny.” This creates a paradox – we continue to design robots to look like us, even though this close-but-not-close-enough replication can be inherently unsettling. On February 9th 2025, Chinese robot manufacturer Unitree was holding an event at a lantern festival in Taishan, Guangdong province, to demonstrate the H1 – its “first general-purpose humanoid robot”. Two weeks later, lo-fi footage emerged from the event of one of the robots appearing to lunge at an elderly woman in the crowd. Its movements appeared aggressive and abnormal, at worst malicious and at best malfunctional. A security guard quickly restrained the robot but the footage went viral, generating speculation about whether this was just a slip, or something more sinister. The footage is eerie because when we see human violence, we are generally able to rationalise a motive or reason, even if we find it morally repugnant. In this instance we are looking at a humanoid, something designed by us to look like us, created according to the parameters of our physiology, but with none of our consciousness. We do not know what’s happening inside its mind because in theory it doesn’t have one, even if this is increasingly a contested topic amongst philosophers and neuroscientists.

We are now on the verge of a posthuman era, embarking on an unprecedented next stage in our evolutionary journey. It’s the dawn of a new species, one created by us. Thinker and techno-optimist Ray Kurzweil predicted this 20 years ago in his book The Singularity Is Near – in fact his proposed timelines for these monumental shifts have proven to be incredibly accurate. Kurzweil wrote that singularity – the word he uses to describe the point at which machine intelligence surpasses humans – would be achieved by 2045. He also predicted that we would have AGI by 2029, which looks eminently possible, backed up by DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, who said that “in the next five to ten years, we’ll start moving towards what we call artificial general intelligence.” This opens up questions, not just about who we are, but who we will become – after thousands of years believing ourselves to be elevated beyond all other species, are we set to cede power? James Lovelock, author of Novocene, sees this point in human history as neither positive or negative – just inevitable. “Just 300,000 years ago, this planet, alone in the cosmos, attained the capacity to know itself. We are now preparing to hand the gift of knowing on to new forms of intelligent beings.” He sees humanoids as our peaceful, natural successors, neither hostile enemy nor docile servant, just our harmonious cohorts on Earth. In some ways, his vision is a utopian one compared to the Terminator-style extinction narratives that dominate popular culture. At least in Lovelock’s future we’re still here.

There is now an opportunity for humanity to accept something important – we do not have to be the central reference point. This applies to the anthropocentric design paradigm that has been established for so long. In this next stage of human evolution, we could shed our skin and acknowledge that the future of robotics doesn’t necessarily need to be one dominated by the human form. By beginning to design superintelligent robots with physical attributes unlike the ones that we see in the mirror it could help reframe our emotional approach to the world around us – a decentring of human importance, a world in which we call upon the ancient design principles of all life in order to create the future. Robots will not prove to be the end of humanity, but conduits of intelligence for a new beginning where man and machine coexist – whether they need to walk alongside each other remains the big question.