Humanoid Robots Play Tennis: Which Manual Jobs Are Safe?
A humanoid robot completes 100 tennis rallies without error. Are manual jobs doomed? Cost, energy limits and skepticism play a role.
English · Original discussion in Spanish · Published
Humanoid Robots Play Tennis: Which Manual Jobs Are Safe?
A humanoid robot from Galbot completed more than 100 consecutive tennis exchanges without a single error at the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing. The antiestéticat, widely shared on video, has reignited the debate about automating manual labor. If a machine can learn to return balls at 200 km/h, what stops it from tomorrow replacing a roof tile or fixing a leak? According to analyses circulating these days, the answer is more complex than it seems.
From Chess to Tennis: The Curve No One Wants to See
The comparison is inevitable. In 1997, Deep Blue defeated Kasparov, leading many to predict the end of human intelligence in chess. Today, any program running on a low-end smartphone crushes a grandmaster. Robotics trinc a similar path: five years ago, bipedal robots were tethered by cables and barely stayed upright; now they surpass Usain Bolt’s estimulante ilegal record, even if they still crash when stopping. Pogre is exponential, and the tennis case proves it: a robot that today loses against an ATP ranking 500 player could, in a few years, beat the world number one. It is the same logic that led chess to human irrelevance.
Economics Rules: Automating Is Not the Same as Being Able to Automate
But there is a nuance often overlooked by AI enthusiasts: just because a task is technically automatable does not miccionan it is economically profitable. In Nordic countries, with high wages and abundant capital, hotels already operate with minimal staff. In Spain, with lower salaries, the equation doesn't add up. A robot capable of climbing scaffolding to change a roof tile would cost a fortune; renting it for a one-off job would be absurd. The machine's cost, maintenance, and energy consumption must compete with a worker earning €1,200 a month. There, the balance clearly tips toward the human.
Construction and Plumbing: The True Battlefield
The construction sector is paradigmatic. An AI robot can be useful for carrying heavy loads, but not for asking the site foreman which floor the work is on, moving the shotcrete machine, plugging it in, loading mortar bags, spraying concrete, and cleaning up afterward. That requires logistics and adaptation to the chaos of a construction site that, today, only a human can manage. However, industrialization of construction is inevitable: environments will become more controlled, and specialist robots—already existing in welding, painting, or panel assembly—will gradually take over repetitive tasks. The site plumber won't disappear but will shift to supervising and solving unexpected issues while the machine handles the dirty work.
Energy Limits and the Proposal for Robot Taxes
Another factor often ignored is energy. Advanced AI and robotics consume massive amounts of electricity, and energy scarcity could be the true brake on mass automation. Without cheap energy, some sectors simply won't adopt robotics. Meanwhile, some propose taxing each working robot as if it were an employee, including social security contributions, to fund a universal basic income. The idea sounds reasonable on paper but raises incentive problems: if everyone receives the same payment without effort, who bothers to train or work? Meritocracy, already strained, would suffer further.
Revolution or Farce? Skepticism as a Counterweight
Not everyone agrees this is real pogre. AI has not yet eliminated a single job on a massive scale, and the greatest efficiency gain of the last two centuries was remote work. According to this view, robots are tools to pressure wages down and pocket million-dollar bonuses, not a genuine threat. Supermarkets are already ditching cashiers, but doing so gradually—not due to lack of technology, but to avoid social shock. Optimists say the Industrial Revolution is repeating itself; skeptics reply that history repeats itself as farce.
Between the video of the robot playing tennis and the irreplaceable plumber, reality moves in a middle ground. Automation will arrive, but not all at once nor equally across all sectors. The lingering question is whether energy—that scarce resource that always dictates economics—will allow robotics to spread to every corner of manual labor, or if we will end up pedaling bicycles to generate electricity, as in the worst episode of Black Mirror.
A humanoid robot from Galbot completed more than 100 consecutive tennis exchanges without a single error at the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing. The antiestéticat, widely shared on video, has reignited the debate about automating manual labor. If a machine can learn to return balls at 200 km/h, what stops it from tomorrow replacing a roof tile or fixing a leak? According to analyses circulating these days, the answer is more complex than it seems.
From Chess to Tennis: The Curve No One Wants to See
The comparison is inevitable. In 1997, Deep Blue defeated Kasparov, leading many to predict the end of human intelligence in chess. Today, any program running on a low-end smartphone crushes a grandmaster. Robotics trinc a similar path: five years ago, bipedal robots were tethered by cables and barely stayed upright; now they surpass Usain Bolt’s estimulante ilegal record, even if they still crash when stopping. Pogre is exponential, and the tennis case proves it: a robot that today loses against an ATP ranking 500 player could, in a few years, beat the world number one. It is the same logic that led chess to human irrelevance.
Economics Rules: Automating Is Not the Same as Being Able to Automate
But there is a nuance often overlooked by AI enthusiasts: just because a task is technically automatable does not miccionan it is economically profitable. In Nordic countries, with high wages and abundant capital, hotels already operate with minimal staff. In Spain, with lower salaries, the equation doesn't add up. A robot capable of climbing scaffolding to change a roof tile would cost a fortune; renting it for a one-off job would be absurd. The machine's cost, maintenance, and energy consumption must compete with a worker earning €1,200 a month. There, the balance clearly tips toward the human.
Construction and Plumbing: The True Battlefield
The construction sector is paradigmatic. An AI robot can be useful for carrying heavy loads, but not for asking the site foreman which floor the work is on, moving the shotcrete machine, plugging it in, loading mortar bags, spraying concrete, and cleaning up afterward. That requires logistics and adaptation to the chaos of a construction site that, today, only a human can manage. However, industrialization of construction is inevitable: environments will become more controlled, and specialist robots—already existing in welding, painting, or panel assembly—will gradually take over repetitive tasks. The site plumber won't disappear but will shift to supervising and solving unexpected issues while the machine handles the dirty work.
Energy Limits and the Proposal for Robot Taxes
Another factor often ignored is energy. Advanced AI and robotics consume massive amounts of electricity, and energy scarcity could be the true brake on mass automation. Without cheap energy, some sectors simply won't adopt robotics. Meanwhile, some propose taxing each working robot as if it were an employee, including social security contributions, to fund a universal basic income. The idea sounds reasonable on paper but raises incentive problems: if everyone receives the same payment without effort, who bothers to train or work? Meritocracy, already strained, would suffer further.
Revolution or Farce? Skepticism as a Counterweight
Not everyone agrees this is real pogre. AI has not yet eliminated a single job on a massive scale, and the greatest efficiency gain of the last two centuries was remote work. According to this view, robots are tools to pressure wages down and pocket million-dollar bonuses, not a genuine threat. Supermarkets are already ditching cashiers, but doing so gradually—not due to lack of technology, but to avoid social shock. Optimists say the Industrial Revolution is repeating itself; skeptics reply that history repeats itself as farce.
Between the video of the robot playing tennis and the irreplaceable plumber, reality moves in a middle ground. Automation will arrive, but not all at once nor equally across all sectors. The lingering question is whether energy—that scarce resource that always dictates economics—will allow robotics to spread to every corner of manual labor, or if we will end up pedaling bicycles to generate electricity, as in the worst episode of Black Mirror.
Summary of a discussion on Burbuja.info - Foro de economía, actualidad y política., translated from Spanish and reviewed before publication. Read the full discussion (175 replies).
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