Rodney Brooks, cofounder of Roomba maker iRobot, has dismissed Elon Musk's vision of humanoid robot assistants as 'pure fantasy thinking.' In a blog post, the veteran roboticist argued that today's humanoid robots will never achieve the dexterity needed for general-purpose tasks, despite billions in investment from venture capitalists and major tech companies.

Brooks, whose former company iRobot filed for bankruptcy last December after Amazon abandoned its acquisition plans, criticized the training methods used by Tesla and Figure. He pointed out that while AI has benefited from vast speech and image datasets, there's no equivalent foundation for touch data. The human hand's 17,000 mechanoreceptors and complex sensory systems remain nearly impossible to replicate in robots.

The MIT professor suggested that investors would get better results by funding university research rather than pouring money into large-scale humanoid training programs. He predicts that successful robots in 15 years will look nothing like humans, instead featuring wheels, multiple arms, and specialized grippers. Brooks believes today's humanoid robots will be 'long gone and mostly conveniently forgotten,' with investors having lost substantial sums trying to force performance from fundamentally limited designs.