While those inside the industry have seen this coming for decades, the arrival of general-purpose humanoid robots feels abrupt to the wider public, who are now confronted with a seemingly endless stream of remarkably competent machines winning half-marathons in Beijing, performing kung fu routines on prime-time television, folding laundry in startup demo videos, and walking the floors of BMW and Mercedes plants alongside their human colleagues.

What was a research curiosity as recently as 2022 is now a category attracting tens of billions of dollars in venture and strategic capital, with Tesla, Figure, Apptronik, 1X, Agility, Boston Dynamics, Unitree, UBTECH, AgiBot, and XPENG all racing to put bipedal workers into live commercial environments.

If large language models were the defining general-purpose technology of the first half of this decade, humanoid robotics is positioned to be the defining one of the second.

Forecasting the trajectory of a transformational technology is, of course, a famously humbling exercise. To map the next twenty years of possibilities, this roundup gathers the views of seven figures who have spent the better part of their careers working on, investing in, or arguing about this technology.

They do not agree. And that, in itself, is the most insightful starting point.

Elon Musk

No one has tied his company’s destiny to humanoid robotics more aggressively than the Tesla and SpaceX CEO. Musk has repeatedly claimed that Optimus will be the biggest product in history, eclipsing both Tesla’s automotive business and anything Apple has ever sold, and has projected long-term revenues from the program of up to $10 trillion.

His vision is sweeping and utopian. Speaking at the U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum in late 2025, Musk argued that humanoid robots will fundamentally restructure society: work will shift from a necessity to a hobby, comparable to gardening for fun rather than buying vegetables. He has further claimed that AI and robotics together will “eliminate poverty and provide universal high income for all,” with money itself eventually losing relevance.

Musk has also predicted that by 2040, the number of humanoid robots could surpass the human population—a forecast that, even discounted heavily for his characteristic exuberance, points to a future in which intelligent machines are simply part of the everyday landscape.

Bill Gates

The Microsoft co-founder’s outlook is more measured but no less consequential. On his blog GatesNotes, Gates has written that “it’s less likely that robots replace us in jobs we love and more likely that they’ll do work people don’t want to be doing,” adding that in the process, they could make us “safer, healthier, more productive, and even less lonely.”

Gates has predicted that AI-powered humanoid robots will eventually become more affordable than human laborers and begin replacing blue-collar workers across industries from logistics to caregiving. In a 2025 conversation with Harvard’s Arthur Brooks, he framed the broader trajectory bluntly: over the next decade, advances in AI mean humans will no longer be needed “for most things”—particularly in making things, moving things, and growing food, which he expects to become “basically solved problems.”

What sets Gates apart from the more breathless commentators is his insistence that the transition will be both profound and a little frightening, requiring deliberate policy choices about education, retraining, and how the gains of automation are shared.

Jensen Huang

The Nvidia CEO has perhaps the clearest commercial line of sight into the robotics buildout, since virtually every leading humanoid developer trains its models on Nvidia silicon. At GTC 2025, Huang declared that “the ChatGPT moment for general robotics is just around the corner,” and at CES 2026 he went further, predicting that humanoid robots would achieve human-level capabilities that very year.

Unlike Musk, Huang frames the coming decade as a job creator rather than a job destroyer. Pointing to declining birth rates in China, Korea, and Japan, he has argued that humanoids are a “strategic imperative” for nations facing demographic decline, coining the term “AI immigrants” to describe the role they will play.

His broader thesis is that “physical AI and robotics will bring about the next industrial revolution,” with every industrial company eventually becoming, in some sense, a robotics company. For Huang, the next twenty years are less about replacing workers than about replacing the workers we no longer have.

Brett Adcock

The founder and CEO of Figure—one of the most heavily funded humanoid startups, with backing from OpenAI, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Jeff Bezos—has staked his career on the belief that the world will eventually host billions of humanoid robots. Adcock has predicted as many as 10 billion humanoids by 2040, with three to five billion deployed in the workforce and the remainder serving as personal robots in households.

His core argument is architectural: “The world was built for humans,” Adcock told TIME, “so if we can create a robot that interacts with it in the same way, we can automate a huge range of tasks.” Figure has already deployed robots commercially at BMW’s Spartanburg plant, and Adcock claims its latest generation can perform 80 to 90 percent of manual human tasks.

The endpoint, in Adcock’s framing, is a world in which “physical labor will be optional.” You will choose to do it, or you will ask your robot to do it for you—a vision that, like Musk’s, demands serious thinking about what economies and societies will look like once human labor is no longer the engine of either.

Fei-Fei Li

Often called the “godmother of AI,” the Stanford professor and World Labs co-founder takes a notably more humanistic view. Li argues that today’s large language models are “eloquent but ungrounded”—skilled with words but unable to perceive, reason about, or act in physical space. The next frontier, she contends, is what she calls spatial intelligence: the ability of machines to understand and navigate the three-dimensional world.

For Li, humanoid robots are valuable precisely because “the world we’ve built for ourselves” rewards human form factors. But she frames their role as collaborators rather than replacements—lab assistants helping scientists, home aides supporting elderly people without diminishing their autonomy, machines that stay “empathetically aligned with human goals and behaviors.”

Li has consistently warned against treating AI as a fait accompli. The technology, she insists, is a tool whose values are human values, and the next twenty years of robotics development will be shaped as much by policy, education, and ethical governance as by raw engineering.

Rodney Brooks

The MIT roboticist and iRobot co-founder offers the most pointed counterweight to the prevailing optimism. In a widely circulated 2025 essay, Brooks dismissed the dominant approach to teaching humanoids dexterity—training them on videos of humans performing tasks—as “pure fantasy thinking.” Human hands contain roughly 17,000 specialized touch receptors, he notes, and no robot comes close to that level of tactile sensing.

Brooks predicts that within fifteen years, the most successful “humanoid” robots will have abandoned much of the human form altogether, sprouting wheels for feet and additional arms optimized for specific tasks. The future of robotics, he believes, lies in augmentation rather than wholesale replacement of workers.

His bottom line is striking: the future is not one where we will “be able to give up work and sit around and eat grapes and write poetry while humanoid robots do everything for us.” Most jobs, in Brooks’ view, will be augmented rather than automated, with humans staying firmly in the loop for decades to come.

Wang Xingxing

The founder and CEO of Hangzhou-based Unitree Robotics has emerged as one of the most influential voices in China’s rapidly expanding humanoid sector. Wang likens today’s industry to the period one to three years before ChatGPT’s release: the direction is clear, but the breakthrough hasn’t quite arrived. He expects the field’s true ChatGPT moment within two to five years, defined as a robot that can complete roughly 80 percent of tasks in unfamiliar real-world environments simply through voice or text commands.

Wang positions humanoids alongside steam power and electricity as a technology capable of “freeing humans from the grueling manual labor” and driving a new industrial revolution. He has also acknowledged the harder questions this raises around legal frameworks, human-robot collaboration safety, and workforce retraining.

Perhaps most importantly, Wang represents a Chinese ecosystem that is now shipping consumer-grade humanoids at prices starting around $4,000—a development that may matter more for the next twenty years than any single Silicon Valley keynote, because it suggests humanoid robotics will scale not as a luxury but as a commodity.