The robots in my building are multiplying. It started with one roughly the size of a doghouse that cleans the floors, and not very well — a commercial-grade Roomba that talks to you if you get in its way. Somehow, I’m always in its way.

My landlord was clearly excited about the new, technical marvel of an addition to the building, which takes up half the size of a New York City block. There are plenty of floors to clean and human hours of labor to save. Then my landlord told me the robot, which had been confined to the lobby, could now wirelessly connect to the elevator and control it. The robot now rides up and down all day, exiting the elevator to clean each floor’s hallway. The landlord, pleased with this new complexity, got two more, bigger robots to complete the fleet. In the spring, he told me with a straight face, there would be drones to clean the windows. I fully expect to see them as soon as Daylight Savings Time kicks in.

If you believe the press releases, we’re about to start seeing more robots everywhere — and not just doghouse-sized Roombas. Humanoid robots are on track to be a $200 billion industry by 2035 “under the most optimistic scenarios,” according to a new report from Barclays Research. The cost of the hardware needed to give robots powerful arms and legs has plummeted in the last decade, and the AI boom is giving investors hope that powerful brains will soon follow. That’s why you’re now hearing about consumer-grade humanoids like the 1X Neo and the Figure 03, which are designed to be robot butlers.

The full picture of what humanoids can do is more complicated, however. As James Vincent explained in Harper’s........

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