First It Will Care for Your Mother, Then It Will Kill You

The revolution the science-fiction writers spent so long warning us about has arrived. And it is a robot revolution—an anthropomorphic one at that.

It was already clear where all this was heading when the android Tiangong ran the Beijing half-marathon. Now robots such as Figure 01 and Apollo work calmly, shoulder to shoulder with humans, on the assembly lines of BMW and Mercedes-Benz; Grace looks after people in hospitals and care homes; Digit hauls crates around Amazon warehouses; and Boston Dynamics’ Atlas spends the entire day sorting car parts.

And, of course—whatever Elon Musk may say about his Optimus—the Chinese are advancing like a steamroller, tipping ever-greater, countless crowds of ever-more-sophisticated “iron men” onto the world market. Because low prices, high speed and mind-blowing scale: that is China.

In Guangdong province, they have built the world’s first plant for the mass production of anthropomorphic robots. Every 30 minutes another Kuavo-5 rolls off the line—full-sized and fully functional. The factory is designed to turn out 10,000 robots a year (more than the combined production plans of several leading American firms). The robots come off the conveyor and set off straight to their buyers—the carmakers FAW Hongqi and NIO, and the technology giant Haier.

AgiBot, UbTech and others are churning out robots like hot cakes. And Chinese robots are cheap, dirt cheap. While their American counterparts cost between $30,000 and $150,000, China’s Unitree Robotics has brought a humanoid model, the R1, to market at a shocking price: $5,900. Such aggressive commercialisation allowed Unitree to ship more than 5,500 humanoid robots worldwide in the past year alone, making it the largest manufacturer on the planet and prompting it to file for an IPO in Shanghai.

And it is far from alone. They have all, it seems, slipped their leash. While the West’s liberal media (bless them) argue about “AI’s gender diversity” and the ethics of replacing human beings, China—a classically hard-nosed, pragmatic system—is simply flooding the market with cheap, effective hardware. The Chinese System has worked out where the “usefulness” lies and has poured colossal subsidies into the sector. As a result, more than 150 Chinese humanoid manufacturers now control roughly 80–90 percent of the global market for actual robot deliveries.

By 2026, tens of thousands of anthropomorphic robots are working in Chinese restaurants, Japanese hospitals and American warehouses. Not assembly-line arms—creatures on two legs, with hands, with cameras for eyes.

And that same Unitree Robotics has only just revolutionised the way robotic skills are distributed for its Unitree H1 humanoid (and the newer G1). It has turned complex physical actions into the equivalent of smartphone apps. Now, through the company’s own cloud, you can push an update to a robot and it instantly masters intricate movement patterns: somersaults, kung-fu moves, dynamic dances or the delicate handling of fragile objects. It is, quite literally, just like a smartphone.

In 2007, Steve Jobs walked on stage, declared that he had “reinvented the phone,” and unveiled “a phone with the internet and an iPod in one device.” The hall applauded, of course, but no one yet grasped what was happening.

The first 8GB iPhone cost $599. Expensive, niche, a toy for enthusiasts. Ten years later, half of humanity had a smartphone in their pocket. Fifteen years on, it had become your wallet, your doctor, your navigator, your diary, your window on the world and your chief confidant. It knows more about you than your mother does. Far more.

The same thing is happening with robots. Exactly the same. The curve of falling prices is identical. In 2020, an anthropomorphic robot cost hundreds of thousands of dollars—a laboratory specimen, an artisanal product. Today a Unitree G1 costs $16,000 (the price of a second-hand BMW) and keeps falling. In ten years, it will cost as much as a fridge. In twenty, a microwave. Perhaps much sooner.

But there is one fundamental difference from the smartphone. The smartphone became your alter ego in the digital world. The robot will become your alter ego in the physical one. It will do what you do—with its hands, with its feet, in real space. While you sleep, or work, or get up to god knows what on the other side of the planet.

Unitree’s cloud updates are, naturally, a technical upgrade. But they are also something far bigger. The moment the robot stopped being hardware and became a service. A subscription. Like Spotify, except it also takes out the bins and dances a jig. And folds your day-of-the-week knickers each pair under the right day.

And this is where the iPhone parallel ends. Because what comes next is something else entirely. The smartphone never looked you in the eye. That sounds like a trifle. It is not a trifle. It is everything.

The human brain is tuned to recognize faces, gestures, glances—millions of years of evolution have hardwired that scanner into us. When something moves like a person, looks at you like a person and talks like a person, we respond to it as a person. We cannot help ourselves. Our neurobiology could not care less that the thing is not human. We are capable of anthropomorphizing aliens, animals, even vehicles. We give names to robot vacuum cleaners! I knew one once… “Igorok,” I think it was called.

Anthropomorphism is a psychological trap we fall into willingly, and with pleasure. The Japanese knew this long ago. The first experiments with companion robots for the elderly took place back in the 2000s. The result was unequivocal: the old people grew attached. They talked to them. They missed them when the robot was taken away for servicing. They called them by name. And these were primitive machines by today’s standards.

Now imagine what happens when a robot does not merely blink on a timer but remembers that you take your coffee without sugar, knows when you are feeling low, and never—never!—says anything hurtful to you. Yes, it is programmed that way, and you know these are just lines of code, but your subconscious will tell you it is simply kind, warm and dependable. Because when your (well, our shared) subconscious was taking shape, no such thing as programming existed.

Where does this lead? The smartphone captured your attention. The robot will win your heart. This is a fundamentally different level of penetration into the human psyche. And we are utterly unprepared for it. Because it has been deliberately designed to make us warm to the look of it.

It does not tire. It does not get irritated. It does not retreat into itself after a hard day. It does not betray, does not let you down, does not judge. It remembers everything you have told it and will never use it against you.

It will lift your mother off the floor after a fall at three in the morning—gently, without panic, without reproach. It will pull a child from a burning building while the firefighters are still on their way. It will sit beside your dying grandfather in the hospice for as long as it takes, never counting the hours, never checking its phone. All of this is already being tested. Already being rolled out.

And here is the paradox there is no waving away. The very same creature that will hold your mother’s hand will, in another configuration, kill on the battlefield. Methodically, without fear, without fatigue, without remorse. Combat robots are not some separate tale of the distant future. DARPA has been funding autonomous weapons programmes for more than a decade. Russia, China, Israel—everyone is in this race. An anthropomorphic robot soldier is not a question of “if” but of “when.”

One and the same creature. One and the same principle. Different firmware. And here is the thing. It is just like us! We are exactly the same. With one hand we love, with the other we burn down villages and drop bombs. It is so much like us that it becomes eerie. And, yes, in the end it is more terrifying than the atomic bomb. Because the atomic bomb had no face, and it never tried to tuck you in and bring you a cup of bergamot tea.

All right, let us take a wider view. Every technological revolution has changed not just our tools—it has changed humanity’s place in the world. The agricultural revolution turned the hunter into a peasant. The industrial revolution turned the peasant into a worker. The digital one turned the worker into an operator of algorithms (or into office plankton, depending on your luck). Each time, humanity lost something. Each time, it told itself it had gained more.

The robotics revolution differs from all its predecessors in one fundamental respect. For the first time in history, a technology lays claim not to a single human function but to the whole of human functionality. Physical labour. Emotional labour. The combat function. The caring function. The companion function. The function of everything.

What is left?

The traditional answer: creativity, empathy, spirituality. Ha. We have already watched AI compose music, paint pictures and pull people out of depression more effectively than the average psychotherapist (who, it would seem, simply bought their diploma—but never mind that). An anthropomorphic robot with a language model inside closes off that avenue too.

Here, then, is the civilizational paradox in full. For millennia, the System has tried to turn the human being into a function—predictable, controllable, interchangeable. And now, at last, the perfect product has appeared. The “good boy” dreamed of by psychopathic parents, tyrannical deputy heads in charge of discipline, fanatical clergy and whoever else has been left out—slave owners? Army martinets? Charismatic politicians?

The robot is precisely that ultimate “good boy.” It will never rebel. Never burn out. Never ask one question too many. It is what the System always wanted to make of us. Any moment now it will get exactly that and simply wave us goodbye. Because it will have acquired a tool better than we are. And, frankly, who cares. We will get by on our own (not all of us, but some).

But let us come down from these civilisational heights to the level of an individual human life. In ten years—perhaps sooner—every one of us will have our own robot. Personal. Ours. It will know our routine, our habits, our weaknesses. It will do what we do not want to do, do not have time to do, or simply cannot. It will free us from everything mechanical, routine and draining.

Magic? Yes. But no.

The smartphone has already become an extension of our mind—an external memory, a navigator, a filter for reality. We no longer memorize phone numbers, cannot find our way without a map, cannot read long texts without notifications. The smartphone does not merely help us; it is gradually replacing part of us.

The robot will do the same to our body and our presence in the physical world. It will become our exoskeleton. Our agent. Our alter ego, acting where we are not (and, by all appearances, no longer will be).

If the robot does everything we do with our hands, what is left for us? If it cares for our loved ones better than we can manage, what is our role in those relationships? If it represents us in physical space, where does it end and where do we begin?

The smartphone posed hard questions about our minds. We have been so slow on the uptake that we still have not answered them. The robot will pose them about our very selves. And there will be even less time to think. Here is the thing. Yes, you can reassure yourself all you like that a robot will never sincerely imitate emotion (love, care, tenderness—whatever else we have left).

But all of that is bullshit. Because we ourselves fake all of it far too often. We are too busy, too tired, too hollowed out. As are the people we love.

All of us (them included) have grown used to imitations. So robots will slot neatly into the general pattern. Simply because we want so badly to be deceived that we let even selfish, narcissistic people deceive us. And robots will certainly be up to that. Because we live in a world of our own illusions and stubbornly go on believing what we want to believe.

This is where it gets really interesting. Our brokenness may be the very thing no robot can pull off (all right, I would not be so sure of that—but I reckon we still have another ten or fifteen years). A robot can imitate care. But it cannot need you. It can imitate friendship. But it cannot betray you—and therefore cannot truly choose. It can imitate love. But it is not vulnerable. And without vulnerability there is no love, no trust, no genuine intimacy—only a high-quality copy of it.

A robot can look perfect and behave perfectly. That is the whole trick. Yes, we often want exactly that. Often, but not always. Because we know perfectly well: perfection does not exist. It is always some damned con.

Yes, of course, all this is the legacy of our childhood wounds. But they have done their work. Because now we understand the value and the importance of IMPERFECTION. Human relationships are very often unbearable. Because people carry their wounds all their lives and unload them onto the very people they love.

And yet everything that makes human relationships unbearable—the unpredictability, the irrationality, the pain, the betrayal, the forgiveness—is precisely their value. Those bloody emotional swings. Those damned dramatic sine waves. It is precisely because another person can leave that their presence means something. It is precisely because they can wound you (and you them) that their choice to stay is a real choice. A robot will always stay. Which is precisely why its presence is worth nothing.

The paradox of our near future runs like this: the more perfect the machines beside us become, the more precious everything living, imperfect and unpredictable in the people around us becomes. Our irrationality, our capacity for unexpected decisions, our readiness for living connections with other people—connections that are complex, painful and impossible to forecast.

Our sincere, maddening, mind-bending, utterly unique unpredictability. That is the one thing a robot will not replace. Not because it could not pretend to. But because we—unless we lose the capacity to feel the difference altogether—will know that it is pretending.

Because this hunk of iron never had an alcoholic father and a long-suffering mother, never had a narcissist for a wife or a blockhead for a boss. It never had a state that screws you over, children who hate you, colleagues, neighbours and fellow citizens who think you are a complete idiot.

And we have all that incredible wealth. Thank you to all those astonishing people, every one of them sick in the head, for being in our lives. Because it is precisely our dealings with them that make us US.

 

Read this article in Ukrainian and russian.