One Billion Humanoids by 2050

More Human Than Human

Morgan Stanley recently predicted “there could be more than 1 billion by 2050, with 90% used for industrial and commercial purposes.”

That’s 25 years away and well beyond the time scale of most business plans (unless you’re living in China). But it’s not going to take that long for humanoids to start to appear in our lives. 

“Adoption should be relatively slow until the mid-2030s, accelerating in the late 2030s and 2040s,” says Adam Jonas, Morgan Stanley’s Head of Global Autos and Shared Mobility Research. 

So that’s only a decade away before adoption starts accelerating. And that’s assuming their timeline is accurate. Nobody really knows what AI-lead breakthroughs in humanoid engineering might bring in the next few years. Not to mention the China factor.

“There are some leading U.S. players in humanoid design and development at this stage, but China could catch up when humanoids reach downstream application and mass production, riding on its strong self-sufficient supply chain,” Zhong says.

I believe we’ll soon see hundreds of humanoid vendors emerging out of China, driving massive investments in innovation and pushing costs down, just like they did with solar panels over the last decade, which today cost a fraction of what they did twenty years ago.