Humanoid, a UK-based robotics company, may have just created the most hypnotically slow, mind-bendingly boring video of autonomous humanoid robots performing mundane tasks since the current era of humanoid robot hype began. And that’s not a bad thing. In fact, it’s a nice example of the actual capabilities and limits of these devices when they perform tasks autonomously.
Yes, certain non-expert viewers might mistake this video for one of David Lynch’s Y2K-era experiments in extremely slow pacing, but there’s a reason the walking robots shuffle around and move objects like they’re recovering from surgery: they’re improvising these movements, not being teleoperated or relying on a previously programmed and rehearsed routine.
In this video, just released today, Humanoid is demonstrating a conceptual system it calls KinetIQ, a combination of interlinked pieces of AI software and robot hardware, meant to, theoretically, coordinate and carry out complex tasks across home and industrial settings. “Each layer treats the layer below as a set of tools, orchestrating them via prompting and tool use to achieve goals set from above,” according to a descriptive statement from Humanoid.
If you watch the first part of this video and all you see is a robot in a kitchen doing literally nothing, you’re actually meant to be seeing the robot as one appendage in a super-entity, conveying the verbal instructions it received from its human to its counterparts, the warehouse robots with wheels.
And if all you see the robots with wheels doing is taking an eternity to put one (1) package of cocoa powder and one (1) bottle of oil in a paper bag, you’re sleeping on the fact that those robots are completely off-rails, figuring out—millisecond by millisecond—how to get that highly breakable glass bottle into that highly tear-able grocery bag.
And if you see the guy grab the bag, and you say, “Hey, why didn’t he just walk to the shelves and get the powder and oil off the shelf himself?” you’re missing the fact that these robots have been deemed safe enough that Humanoid’s lawyers are okay with them showing a person standing next to them during a demo where they’re not teleoperated.
Added up, it’s not nothing. In fact, if you squint, it’s a real achievement.
But it should also give you some pause when it comes to big promises from tech leaders about companies like Hyundai and Tesla reinventing factories by filling them with hyper-competent humanoid robots. This is unproven technology, and tech companies are increasingly worried about that.
So if you’re watching a video in 2026 where robots prance, twerk, or make cocktails, what you’re seeing is little more than a sizzle reel, designed to stimulate wonderment and little else. Or you’re just missing the fine print where it says you’re actually looking at a human-controlled robot.
If, on the other hand, you see a robot shambling, shuffling around, and struggling to open a dishwasher, pay attention. That boring video might just tell you something about where this technology currently is.
English (US) ·