Robots Should Be Boring

Robots are cool. Objectively, something hits differently when you see a real robot doing something, especially in-person. Online videos don’t come close to capturing how cool it is to see a physical thing controlled by AI moving in the world.

But people forget that the goal is to be ordinary. They should be routine and mundane.

A good analogy is flying on a plane. It’s pretty insane that we fly on a magic capsule through the sky, and a lot of people find it not just boring, but maybe annoying to be whisked across the world in a pressurized tube. Flight has been a thing that for thousands of years, people looked at birds and thought it would be nice if we could do that too. And in the past 100 years, we accomplished it! And now we’re over it.

I had the fortune of working on The Everyday Robot Project at Google X for the first few years of my professional life. When I started, that wasn’t even the settled on name. We only went by a codename for a couple years, and then we announced it publicly in 2019. But I really liked that name because it captured the vibe of what makes technology normal. That you use it everyday, and they fade into the background.

It’s been ten years since I first started working in robotics. And I feel if you asked me in 2015, I would have thought we were 5 years away from multi-purpose home robots being normal. Now in 2025, it sounds like I hear the same timelines from friends at new humanoid and robot foundation model companies. And it’s a bit of a bummer that I may have become more jaded since I feel I hear the same timelines again ten years later.

I hope this time it’s true. In a lot of aspects, I feel today is different than before. There is some really novel intelligence in modern VLAs that are extremely compelling. Maybe cost, polish, and really focusing on the user experience are the main pieces that are not getting enough attention right now.

If I could make one plea to the robotics community, take your robot home. Actually use it in your life. And try to live the futuristic dream that all roboticists work so hard to make real. I have a feeling that if all employees at all robotics companies had the robots they worked on in their house, they would design it differently and focus on much more exciting problems.