# The skeptic’s guide to humanoid robots going viral on the Internet

> Source: <https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/06/the-skeptics-guide-to-humanoid-robots-going-viral-on-the-internet/>
> Published: 2026-06-04 22:23:36+00:00

It may appear that humanoid robots capable of handling any task have almost arrived—especially when tech companies showcase them performing acrobatic feats or handling household chores. But there is still a significant gap between these robot demonstrations and proving that the same robots can reliably and repeatedly manage such tasks in the real world.

The latest wave of [robot videos](https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/04/robot-runner-handily-beats-humans-in-half-marathon-setting-new-record/) can be particularly tricky, given the human tendency to anthropomorphize objects with a humanoid figure. A robot arm doing a dance move may simply seem “cool,” but a humanoid robot doing the same dance move can trigger more misleading assumptions, said [Jonathan Hurst](http://engineering.oregonstate.edu/people/jonathan-hurst), cofounder of Agility Robotics and a robotics researcher at Oregon State University.

“People automatically extrapolate and assume that the robot that looks like a person can do all the things that a person who can dance could do—which is not true,” Hurst told Ars. “But a lot of the startup companies do kind of prey on that for being able to raise a lot of money.”

One of the biggest challenges is developing robots that can generalize their skills across many different conditions and environments in the same way that humans can, said [Sergey Levine](https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~svlevine/), a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, and cofounder of the AI and robotics company Physical Intelligence. But that degree of generalization is practically impossible to capture within a single robot demonstration.

“Maybe the robot can pour a glass of wine, but can it pour it out of any bottle and into any glass in any environment?” Levine said. “That’s actually a lot harder than having a robot do a backflip in one stage demo.”

The real measure for robotic capabilities involves conducting “quantitative, large-scale evaluations” in real-world environments, Levine explained. “There’s always a gap between the kind of things that somebody can show in a demo and what the real capability of the robot is,” he said.