Do humanoids dream of becoming human?
Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Stories of human-like dolls yearning to become real people turn up everywhere. Pinocchio wants to be a real boy. The robot child in Spielberg’s A.I. wants to be loved like a human son. The story keeps getting retold because people assume the trajectory is obvious. Build something that looks human, keep improving it, and one day the copy becomes indistinguishable from the original. What’s happening on the ground is stranger than that. At CES 2026, Boston Dynamics’ Atlas demonstrated wrists that bent backward and a torso that spun a full 180 degrees. Elsewhere, humanoid robots are beginning to diverge in even more striking ways. Some can swap their own batteries by reaching both arms behind their backs. Others walk on reverse-jointed legs. The human silhouette is still there, but the movements inside it have gone somewhere else entirely. There’s an obvious objection here. Hasn’t copying nature worked before? Sometimes. Gecko toe pads gave engineers the idea for dry adhesives. …
