Hey, I'm Flor Lickman, and you're listening to Science Friday.

That is the sound of a 150-pound robot break dancing. Pretty well, actually. I'm sure you've seen these clips of humanoid robots dancing and

doing cartwheels, putting clothes in a washing machine, serving drinks. And you've probably also

seen headlines from tech CEOs telling us to prepare for the forthcoming humanoid army

that is going to make all of our lives totally different and better. But what is real?

Where are we with this technology? And are these humanoid robots really ready to take

washing the dishes off our plates or to work beside us in warehouses? Here with the

perspective is tech journalist James Vincent, who became an expert on this subject.

He toured humanoid robot factories, talked to CEOs, and rubbed shoulders with humanoids for a feature story he wrote for Harper's Magazine.

James, welcome to Science Friday.

Wonderful to be here. Thank you, Flora.

Okay, we've all seen these videos. First of all, should we take them at face value?

No, I mean, the short answer there is definitely not, not all the time. A lot of these videos that

these companies are putting out, they are selectively edited or they're selectively presented.

And the great phrase that I heard used by NVIDIA's director of robotics was the blind gymnast phenomenon.

It refers to the fact that you can see a robot backflipping, you know, perfectly doing parkour, doing all these fantastic moves.

But in a sense, it doesn't know what it's doing.

It can't adapt the environment it in.

It's like a blind gymnast. So even when you see these

humanoid robots creating these sort of fantastic spectacles, that might be the limitation of

their abilities. The other thing is that the robot might also be teleoperated, which means that it

might be being controlled remotely by a human using a VR headset and a couple of controllers.

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