Humanoid robots are not the end of human purpose
My contribution to the Formiche magazine feature on the age of humanoid robots. A version was published in the February 2026 issue.
The headlines write themselves: humanoid robots will steal our jobs. Warehouses, factories, maintenance — first the repetitive tasks, then the rest. If machines do the work, what becomes of the workers? It is a reasonable fear, but it is also the wrong question.
We have asked this question before. A thousand years ago survival itself was uncertain, every winter a wager on the summer’s harvest. The idea that someone could live without working the fields would have seemed not utopian but insane. And yet, here we are. The twentieth century built social safety nets that, however fragile, have made mere survival an ordinary fact across much of the world. What once seemed impossible has become normal. This is the pattern: every transformation makes ordinary what was once unthinkable.
The emergence of humanoid robots follows a deep progression. It begins with energy: the solar, wind, and battery revolution is already delivering abundant energy at a marginal cost close to zero. From energy comes self-organization: universal Darwinism applies not only to biology but to any substrate in which variation and selection operate — economies, technologies, and ideas included. Knowledge accumulates. Capabilities multiply. And at the end of this chain there is not idleness but something we can call passion: the irreducible human drive to create value and meaning.
Humanoid robots, governed by advanced artificial intelligences, will coordinate at scales and speeds inaccessible to biological human beings. Their capacity for self-organization will exceed ours. That is precisely why they matter: they are not merely a new category of tools. They are a platform on which to design and build a new kind of civilization.
Projections suggest that within twenty or thirty years there could be ten billion humanoid robots on Earth, and a hundred billion in the solar system. This is not a replacement workforce, but an expansion of the operating capacity of human civilization by two orders of magnitude. At that point, talking about “lost jobs” will be like worrying that the invention of printing took work away from scribes. Scale changes the very nature of the question.
Let us look clearly at the paradox. By traditional economic measures — productivity, output, the value of labor — the spread of humanoid robots leads to an absurd conclusion: in the limit, 100% of human beings become worthless. But if a metric makes everyone worthless, the flaw is in the metric, not in the people. We must find new ways to measure the reason for being of individuals and communities. The supposed threat reveals itself as a liberation from being valued only for what we produce.
So what will human beings do? They will do what they have always done when freed from necessity: create. In a civilization built on abundant energy, intelligence, and robotic labor, everyone becomes both entrepreneur and investor. Not in the narrow sense of startups and venture capital, but in the deeper sense of those roles. The entrepreneur explores what it means to be human, and launches challenges worthy of attention. The investor decides to allocate passion and meaning toward those challenges. Curiosity attracts talent; passion attracts support. Self-realization, once the privilege of a few, becomes the baseline expectation for everyone.
Of course it will not be easy. The pace of change will exceed the limits of adaptability of many people. There will be anguish, tension, real suffering. We cannot ignore it as societies did during the Industrial Revolution. In a globally connected world we know — and so we must take care of the growing share of people who may throw in the towel and be seized by despair and anger. The window to act is now, before the turbulence hits in full. We must invest to protect people, not industries, not the status quo, so that they can experiment with how to define their own trajectories. The law of large numbers applies: if we want exceptional human beings to emerge, we must cultivate the conditions for everyone to live with dignity and purpose.
Humanoid robots are not the end of human purpose. They are the beginning of something we have not yet learned to name. The real threat is not the machines. It is our failure to imagine what we might become.
A version of this text was published in the Formiche magazine (February 2026 issue).