And that is how you design…for longevity.
-Dr. Robotnik
If you’re at all familiar with the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise, you can immediately appreciate the genius of the main antagonist, Dr. Robotnik.
A supervillain extraordinaire with a 300–level IQ and a penchant for robotics—hence the name—he’s a true futurist.
To combat Sonic and the rest of the good guys, Robotnik spends his days crafting an entire entourage of robots.
Naturally, as these robots won’t train themselves, most are powered by animals inside the machines, transforming bunnies into Badniks.
Real life, of course, is a bit more ironic. Instead of robots being powered by bunnies, they’re now apparently being trained by humans.
It’s one thing to train your replacement to move up the ladder; it’s another thing entirely to train your replacement to kick you off the ladder! Even Robotnik had the decency to put the animals inside the robots. In 2026, humans are on the outside looking in.
Thousands of workers in India and Nigeria are strapping phones to their heads and filming themselves doing all sorts of ordinary tasks, from folding laundry to sorting items to welding.1 As technology unfolds rapidly in front of us, it still requires humans to show the robots how to grip, fold, assemble, bend, and move things. Those people are often low-wage earners, sitting squarely at the intersection of progress and future unemployment.
And the humanoid trend seems to only be growing. Unitree, China’s most well-known robotics maker, went public on August 19, with its shares soaring nearly six-fold on the day and becoming more than 8,000 times oversubscribed!2
For investors, the obvious temptation is to buy whichever robot maker has most recently gone vertical and assume the future has arrived on schedule. But the more durable opportunity may sit in the less glamorous bits: chips, sensors, motors, simulation software, data infrastructure, and the industrial companies that can use all of it to actually lower costs.
The thing to watch is not the viral video, or even the robot doing a backflip at a product launch. It’s whether these machines can repeatedly show up at real worksites and reduce the cost of getting actual work done. Until then, they remain very impressive—and, as tradition demands, extremely expensive.
Like all technologies, these things are inherently neither good nor bad. They have the potential to liberate workers from boring or even dangerous work. But, as the machines improve, the question of where those ultimate benefits accrue—to workers, customers, or shareholders—becomes both an investing question and a societal one.
Regardless, as with many things in life, truth really is stranger than fiction.
Until next time.
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What We’re Reading
This week, we’re reading Antonio Casilli’s Waiting for Robots: The Hired Hands of Automation, because the most interesting part of the robotics story remains the human element that makes it possible.
END NOTES
1Rutherford, Mark. “Indian Workers Film Their Own Jobs at $2.62/Hour to Train Robots That Will Replace Them.” Tech Times. 13 August 2026.
2Park, Ju-min, Laurie Chen, and Eduardo Baptista. “China Robot Makers Seek to Turn Humanoid Hype into Useful Work.” Reuters. 19 August 2026.
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