Note: This is a research note supplementing the book Unscarcity, now available for purchase. These notes expand on concepts from the main text. Start here or get the book.
The Humanoid Robot Revolution: The Body of the New Economy
The “Model T” Moment Nobody Saw Coming
Here’s a fun exercise: go back to 2020 and tell someone that in five years, you’ll be able to rent a humanoid robot—a real, walking, talking, door-opening android—for the price of a Netflix subscription and a gym membership. They’d ask what sci-fi novel you were writing.
And yet here we are. 2025 is the year the Physical Labor Constraint stopped being a law of economics and started becoming an engineering choice. Just as the internal combustion engine turned “horsepower” from a biological reality into a quaint metaphor, the convergence of three technologies—AI brains, lithium-battery muscle, and scaled manufacturing—is decoupling physical work from human bodies.
In the Unscarcity framework, this is The Body, completing the triad with The Brain (AI cognition) and The Fuel (fusion energy). Together, they form the technological substrate for post-scarcity civilization. But The Body is where the rubber meets the road—literally. AI can write your emails and compose your sonnets, but someone still has to take out the trash, build the houses, and care for grandma.
Until now.
The Numbers That Change Everything
Let’s do some arithmetic that will ruin your intuitions about the economy.
1X Technologies’ Neo robot: Available for pre-order at $20,000 outright or $499/month (six-month commitment). The robot weighs 66 pounds, lifts 150 pounds, carries 55 pounds, operates for 4 hours on a charge, and fast-charges in 24 minutes. It’s quieter than your refrigerator (22 dB).
Here’s where it gets uncomfortable. At $499/month:
- 40 hours/week (standard job): $2.87/hour
- 80 hours/week (two shifts): $1.44/hour
- 24/7 operation (720 hours/month): $0.69/hour
The federal minimum wage in the United States is $7.25/hour. A humanoid robot costs one-tenth of that. No health insurance. No bathroom breaks. No complaints about the graveyard shift.
“But wait,” you say, “early adopters always pay more. This is just a toy for techies.” Fair point. Except 1X just signed a deal with EQT to deploy up to 10,000 Neo units across 300+ portfolio companies by 2030—manufacturing, logistics, warehousing. This isn’t a science project. It’s a purchasing order.
The Big Three: 2025 Status Report
1X Neo: The Consumer Breakthrough
The pitch: A safe, soft, silent household assistant.
The reality: The first humanoid robot designed to live with you, not just work for you. At 66 pounds, it won’t crush your cat. At 22 dB, it won’t wake the baby. The anthropomorphic design isn’t just aesthetic—it lets the robot navigate homes built for human bodies: stairs, narrow hallways, standard doorknobs.
The catch: Early units ship with basic autonomy (opening doors, fetching items, controlling lights). For complex tasks, a human teleoperator takes over remotely. You’re essentially hiring a pilot for your robot—which sounds creepy until you realize you’ve been doing this with customer service chatbots for years.
Why it matters: For the first time, the “household robot” isn’t a Roomba pretending to be useful. It’s a general-purpose physical agent. The economic implications are staggering: if you can outsource physical chores for $500/month, what happens to the gig economy? To house cleaning services? To that “side hustle” culture we’ve been romanticizing?
Figure 02: The Factory Graduate
The achievement: Figure AI deployed its Figure 02 robots at BMW’s Spartanburg plant for 11 months. The results?
- 30,000+ BMW X3 vehicles produced with robot assistance
- 90,000+ sheet metal parts loaded
- 400% speed improvement over initial deployment
- 7x improvement in task success rate
- 1,000 placements per day
The significance: This wasn’t a demo. It wasn’t a carefully choreographed video. It was an 11-month industrial deployment where robots learned, failed, improved, and eventually graduated from the line—literally retired to make way for the next generation (Figure 03).
The secret sauce: Figure 02 integrates OpenAI’s multimodal models directly into its “brain.” You don’t program it; you talk to it. The barrier to automation has collapsed from “hire a robotics engineer” to “hire anyone who speaks English.”
The backing: $675 million Series B from OpenAI, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Jeff Bezos at a $2.6 billion valuation. This isn’t venture speculation—it’s coordinated industrial policy by the people building the AI stack.
Tesla Optimus: The Scale Play
The vision: Millions of humanoid robots manufactured like cars.
The 2025 reality check: Let’s be honest—Optimus has underdelivered. Musk projected 10,000 units by end of 2025, then downgraded to 5,000, and actual production sits at a few hundred. Gen 3 won’t ship until 2026.
But here’s what matters: Tesla is targeting $20,000 cost of goods per robot at scale, with ambitions of 4 million units per year by 2027. Whether they hit that timeline is almost irrelevant. Once any manufacturer cracks humanoid robots at automotive scale—with automotive manufacturing discipline—the game changes permanently.
The data advantage: Every Optimus learns from every other Optimus. Tesla’s neural simulation system generates hyper-realistic virtual environments for robot training. If one unit learns to fold laundry in Fremont, that knowledge can propagate globally overnight. This is the “fleet learning” that made Tesla’s Autopilot possible, now applied to physical labor.
Why This Changes the Equation
1. The Labor Cliff Is Physical
The “Labor Cliff” discussion usually fixates on white-collar knowledge workers losing ground to GPT. But there are 3.5 billion employed humans on Earth. Of those, the majority work in informal sectors—agriculture, construction, domestic work—where AI chatbots are irrelevant.
These workers aren’t threatened by language models. They’re threatened by $3/hour bipedal robots.
The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 already flags what’s coming: “manual dexterity, endurance and precision” are seeing net declines in demand, with 24% of employers reporting reduced need for these skills. Forty percent plan to reduce headcount where AI and automation can fill the gap.
When economists talk about “technological unemployment,” they usually imagine coders and accountants. The humanoid robot makes the threat concrete for the factory worker, the warehouse picker, the home aide, the janitor—the “bottom rungs” that have traditionally absorbed displaced workers.
If those rungs disappear, there is no “reskilling” path that moves 2 billion people into knowledge work. The only coherent response is decoupling survival from labor entirely. Welcome to the Abundant Foundation.
2. Solving the Demographic Collapse
Japan is the canary in the coal mine. Over 10% of Japanese are now 80+. They face a shortfall of 380,000 healthcare workers by 2025 and potentially 11 million workers by 2040. Nursing home bankruptcies hit record highs this year—81 in the first half alone—driven by labor costs and staff shortages.
China’s racing toward the same cliff, hitting “hyper-aged society” status (over 20% aged 65+) by 2030. Their transition from 7% to 14% elderly took just 27 years. France took 115 years. Germany took 42. China’s moving at Japan-speed without Japan’s wealth or infrastructure.
The math doesn’t work. You cannot care for aging populations with shrinking workforces using human labor alone. It’s not a policy failure; it’s arithmetic impossibility.
Humanoid robots are the only scalable answer. They provide labor “liquidity” that biology can no longer supply. One robot per elderly household isn’t dystopian—it’s the difference between dignity and neglect when there simply aren’t enough young people to go around.
3. The End of “Dangerous, Dirty, Dull”
Every industrial safety poster conceals an uncomfortable truth: we’ve been using human bodies as disposable tools for centuries. Mining, construction, sewage, repetitive assembly—these jobs exist because we haven’t yet built machines capable of doing them.
The World Health Organization reports that 2.4 billion workers already suffer productivity losses from extreme heat, with performance dropping 2-3% for every degree above 20°C. These aren’t corner-case statistics. This is the lived reality of labor in a warming world.
In an Unscarcity civilization, no human has to enter a coal mine, process meat in a slaughterhouse, or stand on an assembly line for 12 hours. These become voluntary pursuits (for the rare person who genuinely loves them) or machine tasks (for the rest).
The shift isn’t from “worker” to “unemployed.” It’s from Operator to Architect. Instead of executing physical tasks, humans design the outcomes those tasks serve. You stop being the paintbrush and start being the artist.
The Market Speaks
The humanoid robot market is projected to grow from roughly $2-3 billion in 2025 to $11-15 billion by 2030—a CAGR of 40%+. But the long-term forecasts are more revealing: Morgan Stanley projects $5 trillion by 2050, representing roughly one billion units sold.
One billion humanoid robots. For a global population of ~10 billion.
That’s not “automation.” That’s a parallel labor force—larger than any single nation’s workforce—operating 24/7 without wages, benefits, or retirement. The economic implications are difficult to overstate.
Healthcare alone (elder care, rehabilitation, surgery assistance) is expected to capture 28% of the humanoid market by 2025. Bipedal service robots—the kind that can navigate human environments—will dominate with 63% market share.
Asia Pacific leads adoption (thanks to demographic necessity), but North America holds 52% of revenue (thanks to capital concentration). The geography of this transition will reshape geopolitics as profoundly as the oil economy did in the 20th century.
The Question We’re Not Ready For
The arrival of the $20,000 humanoid robot is the final nail in the coffin of the “labor-for-survival” social contract. When a household can acquire a full-time physical assistant for the cost of a used car, and enterprises can deploy fleets at sub-minimum-wage rates, labor ceases to be a viable mechanism for distributing resources.
We built our entire civilization—our concept of “earning a living,” our moral framework around “work ethic,” our social hierarchies of “productive” vs. “unproductive” citizens—on the assumption that human labor was the scarce input into the economy.
That assumption is dissolving in real-time.
We are building a species of helpers. The challenge is no longer “how do we get the work done?” The challenge is “how do we organize society when the work is already done?”
The answers to that question—the Abundant Foundation, Impact Points, Civic Service, the MOSAIC governance structure—are what the rest of this project explores. But make no mistake: the question is no longer theoretical. The robots are shipping next year. The countdown has started.
References & Further Reading
Internal Links:
- The Labor Cliff
- The Stagnation Problem
- Foundational Principles
- The Great Shift
- Employment Statistics 2025
External Sources:
