Elon Musk's daughter stars in an ad where she torments a robot modelled on Optimus. Vivian Wilson, 22, is the face of Desigual's fall campaign, "Born to Disobey." Over the course of the film she uses the robot as a golf tee, walks it on a leash, and tries to teach it to pronounce the brand name. It malfunctions and starts banging its head against a wall. Her closing line: "Some things aren't meant to be fixed." The brand never said the robot was a reference to her father. It didn't have to.

A century ago this job was done by a woman with a tube and a handful of dried peas. In 1930s London, Mary Ann Smith got up at three every morning and walked the East End, shooting peas at her clients' windows. Sixpence a week. She wouldn't leave a house until she was sure the person was actually awake — that was the whole value of the service. The trade was called knocker-upping, and it survived into the 1960s. Cheap alarm clocks killed it. A hundred years later, she's back. Three servos, a bracket in the headliner, a 40 cm reach. AI or real prototype?

A robot dog will replace your pet in 5–10 years. The Hengbot Sirius was at IFA this month. One kilogram. Fourteen degrees of freedom on proprietary joints. Over a thousand motions. A 5 TOPS chip running locally with a cloud model behind it. Voice, gestures, a touchscreen in its head. $1,299. A Shenzhen startup pulled $912,768 out of Kickstarter from 1,150 people who had never seen one move in person. First generation. That's the demand signal. The company isn't advertising movement — movement is solved. It advertises a personality that shifts depending on how you treat it, and memories that accumulate over months of living together. That's not a robotics claim. That's an emotional one, and it ships with a version number, which means it improves every year. Meanwhile the animal costs two thousand a year, needs walking at 6am in January, wrecks your travel plans — and one day you say goodbye. You won't switch. That was never how this works. The next generation grows up in apartments that ban animals, with a cheaper version on the shelf that talks back, and never experiences the choice as a loss.

A single ant can carry a leaf. A colony can build a bridge out of its own bodies. Researchers at Hanyang University just built the mechanical version of that. Their robots are cubes 600 micrometers across — smaller than the period at the end of this sentence. No motor. No battery. No onboard computer. Just ferromagnetic particles inside, steered by a rotating magnetic field from outside. Alone, one of them can do almost nothing. Together, they self-assemble into chains, squeeze through gaps narrower than themselves, ferry cargo across the surface of a liquid, and drag objects 350 times their own weight. Nobody programmed a leader. There isn't one. The behavior is the swarm. Where this goes: drugs delivered to one specific spot instead of the whole body. Surgery with no incision. Machines that build things too small for human hands. Cleanup crews for water we've already ruined. We keep imagining the future of robotics as something enormous and humanoid. It might just be a cloud of dust that knows what it's doing. Yang et al., Device (2024)

Three hours. Every two weeks. That's what a manicure actually costs. Not the money. The Saturdays. Her husband is a machinist. One night he added it up: seventy-eight hours a year of his wife sitting still in someone else's chair. He couldn't unsee it. So he built her a way out. Fourteen months. Seven prototypes. One scratched her. One painted her knuckle. A garage that never got above freezing all winter. The version that worked has a scanner. It reads the curve of each nail before it moves. Ninety seconds a hand, and she never has to book anything again. She looked at it and said, "Fourteen months for ninety seconds?" Yes. That's the whole job. Fourteen months of someone's life so that ninety seconds of yours is free. That's what every single thing you use today is. Somebody's absurd amount of time, converted into a small amount of yours.

$75,000 ROBOT VS $300 ROBOT. The price difference is absolutely ridiculous. One is serious robotics hardware. The other costs less than some phones. And somehow this is still a fight. Who are you betting on?

ROBOTS IN HUMAN FORM AT BEIJING’S 2ND WORLD HUMANOID ROBOT GAMES. Real bipedal robots raced each other, pushed their balance to the limit, and spectacularly crashed near the finish. Then generative AI gave them realistic human bodies. The movements and crashes are still based on the real robots — but seeing the same mechanical behavior in human form makes the whole thing look completely different. Now you really notice how non-human the movement is.

What if robots could make Hajj easier for elderly pilgrims? They could help elderly pilgrims move through crowded areas, carry supplies, provide Zamzam water and dates, offer cooling, and assist people with limited mobility. This AI-generated vision imagines a future Makkah where humanoid robots assist people during Hajj and Umrah. Not every robot needs to replace a worker. Some could simply make one of the most important journeys in a person’s life a little easier. Would you want to see technology like this at Hajj?

THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO BE A WEEKEND PROJECT. Two weeks later, he had built a real R.E.P.O. robot. 3D-printed body. Custom electronics. Moving parts. And even a microphone so it can react to sounds around it in real time. This is exactly how “I’ll build something quick” turns into an obsession.

LOSING A HAND CAN CHANGE YOUR ENTIRE LIFE. GETTING ONE BACK SHOULDN’T REQUIRE BEING RICH. Aadeel Akhtar built PSYONIC around that problem. Its bionic Ability Hand can be controlled through muscle signals and even provides touch feedback. It costs around $1,800 to manufacture. The selling price: $15,500. And demand was already higher than they could handle. At the time of his Shark Tank pitch, more than 100 patients were already using the hand, while PSYONIC could produce only around 100 units a year. So Aadeel asked for $1M to scale production from hundreds to eventually thousands. Three Sharks backed him. Because for someone trying to regain basic independence, this isn’t just expensive robotics. It can mean getting part of their life back.