Fears of AI cannibalising jobs are rippling through professional and other services. Bigger AI-propelled ructions are fast coming for the world’s factory floors.
Humanoid robots are AI made physical, fusing the power to work out what to do with the ability to do it. Once the stuff of science fiction, they are still relatively thin on the ground: at about 25,000 at the conservative end of estimates, there are barely enough to staff a handful of auto factories. By far the bulk are in China.
Yet predictions of exponential growth, such as Morgan Stanley’s 1bn by 2050, no longer look quite so heroic. Assuming humanoids are on a par with their human peers by then, that represents a quarter of the global workforce now and a fifth of its projected size come 2050.