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Uncanny Valley | WIRED

Move Aside, Chatbots: AI Humanoids Are Here

Uncanny Valley | WIRED

WIRED

Technology

4.1572 Ratings

🗓️ 18 September 2025

⏱️ 30 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This week, WIRED learned that OpenAI is ramping up its efforts in robotics — specifically, by hiring researchers who work on AI systems for humanoid robots. Humanoids, robots built to resemble us and perform daily tasks, were famous for their clumsiness just a few years ago. WIRED’s Will Knight tells us how in the era of AI, that’s rapidly changing. 

Articles mentioned in this episode: 

Join WIRED’s best and brightest on Uncanny Valley as they dissect the collision of tech, politics, finance, and business, from Alexis Ohanian's newest tech venture to the effects of inaccurate information from artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots on social protests.

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Transcript

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0:00.0

Hey, Kylie. How you doing? Good. How are you? Not bad. Good to see you here in the chair that is normally occupied by Lauren Good. My Lord and Savior, Lauren Good. I'm so happy to fill in for her, but I miss her dearly. We all do. Also on the show this week, we have Will Knight, our AI expert at Wired. Welcome back to the show, Will. How you doing? Hello. Good to be here. I'm doing well. Thanks.

0:23.1

So given the topic of today's episode, I want to ask you both, do you have a favorite robot movie?

0:30.0

Yeah, mine is the Iron Giant. I was just looking up when that came out because I swear I watched it on VHS as a kid.

0:37.4

Yeah, I loved that movie. And it's got a

0:39.5

very sad ending. The robot, you know, is no longer. Oh, I guess we can probably spoil it. It's

0:44.7

been decades. Yeah, it came out in 1999. I think it'll be okay. Will, what is your favorite

0:50.3

robot movie? Okay, so I'm going to recommend Blade Runner, which is obviously a very

0:55.2

famous movie and very beautiful. And when I first saw it, I just thought it was just really

1:00.9

cool. And then I later read the book and realized that it's kind of ambiguous about whether

1:07.3

some of the characters are robots or humans. And it's just very, I found it mind-blowing this idea of blurring what it means to be human

1:16.0

and asking whether you could build something that's human, which I think we're a long way from,

1:20.5

but it's a kind of interesting idea.

1:21.9

That's great.

1:23.0

I'm going to go with Robocop.

1:24.7

Nice.

1:25.3

Which is the absolute opposite of the Iron Giant. But it's a great movie,

1:30.6

and it's timeless. It's a wonderful film. It's Paul Verhoeven going extremely hard in the 80s mode.

1:38.7

And it's about, you know, the privatization of the police force and the corporatization of America's public services. So it's very prescient.

1:47.0

Very classic Michael Pick.

1:48.6

Thanks.

1:54.1

This is Wired's Uncanny Valley, a show about the people, power, and influence of Silicon Valley.

2:00.2

Today we're talking about how the field of robotics is shaping up to be the next frontier

...

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