WEF Experts: Walking, Talking Robots Are Just Five Years Away

Humanoid robots will be walking and talking among us in the next four or five years, according to a discussion on tech regulation at the World Economic Forum (WEF).

The joint WEF Annual Meetings of the Global Future Councils and Cybersecurity concluded on October 16, with discussions ranging from neurotech to food liberation and tech regulation.

Speaking during the panel called “Regulation: Friend or Foe?” SandboxAQ CEO Jack Hidary said that humanoid robots would be entering society by 2030.

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\ “Right now in this room, as far as I know, we are all human, but four or five years from now at this very room when we have a global leadership futures council of the WEF in the UAE, we’re going to have humanoid robots in this room,” said Hidary.

“They’ll be robots; they’ll be sitting in a chair; they’ll be taking notes, or doing other things, and we’re going to have to grapple with this as governments, as regulators, and as companies,” he added.

One of the positives of having humanoid robots in society, according to Hidary, is that they are going to take care of the elderly in their own homes, so they don’t have to go to nursing homes.

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\ “As people get older, instead of having them go to a nursing home or other kinds of places, they can stay in their homes. They can be cared for by a robot,” said Hidary.

“I think we all think this is a very positive thing.”

While robots looking after the elderly may be viewed as a positive thing, especially for those without family members, it does eliminate the human connection that people may crave.

Let’s just hope it doesn’t turn into a dystopian sci-fi scenario like in the Netflix series “Cassandra” where the robot caregiver called Cassandra has some rather horrifying abandonment issues that lead to quite nefarious outcomes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-u1WgNJgmug&embedable=true

Dystopian or not, Hidary said that “Introducing humanoid, walking, talking robots in our society is going to be a much bigger shock than any ChatGPT that we’ve now engaged with.

“This is going to be a very big shock to the system as we now have them enter into society. That’s only four or five years away.”

As far as which country will be best equipped to manage and integrate robots into society, Hidary made the case for Japan.

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\ Hidary praised Japan for preparing for the coming robots over the past 40 years while putting in place “regulations that make sure that robots are safe.”

The SandboxAQ CEO’s words echo those of WEF interim co-chair and BlackRock CEO Larry Fink when he spoke at the 2024 WEF Special Meeting on Global Collaboration, Growth, and Energy Development.

There, Fink argued that developed countries with shrinking populations would be better prepared for the social problems that come from “substituting humans for machines.”

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https://x.com/TimHinchliffe/status/1785042264860848489?embedable=true

\ “We always used to think shrinking population is a cause for negative growth, but in my conversations with the leadership of these large, developed countries that have xenophobic immigration policies, they don’t allow anybody to come in, shrinking demographics — these countries will rapidly develop robotics and AI and technology,” said Fink in April, 2024.

“And if the promise, and it’s going to happen, if the promise of all of that transforms productivity, which most of us think it will, we’ll be able to elevate the standard of living of countries, the standard of living of individuals, even with shrinking populations,” he added.

While Fink didn’t mention Japan directly, his words align with those of Hidary about robotics and aging populations.

Going back to what Hidary said about humanoid robots entering society in four or five years, what will it take to get there?

We can look to the 2025 WEF Annual Meeting of the New Champions, aka “Summer Davos” for some insights.

On June 24, 2025, University of Twente professor Vanessa Evers explained that a digital twin of the entire world would be required to achieve “true robot intelligence.”

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\ Creating a digital twin of the entire world is an extremely complex undertaking that goes way beyond Large Language Models like ChatGPT.

In order to achieve true robot intelligence, a Large Behavioral Model would be needed to access and process enormous data from real world phenomena, which is far more complicated than creating and feeding Large Language Models.

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\ According to Evers, “In theory it would be possible to train a robot like a Large Language Model, but then a Large Behavioral Model — to use a lot of data from the real world and have it predict the next best action.

“A Large Language Model predicts what is the next best token, but of course that is super complicated in the real world.“

Getting back to Hidary, he believes, that through periodic meetings between stakeholders, humanoid robot regulation should have the capacity to update itself.

He said, “One way to make sure there’s a level playing field for all players in the field is for the government to convene the players, to listen to them, and to keep a process that in the regulation itself, it says, every six months or something like that, there should be a convening of the key stakeholders, and we shall update it.

“Put that into the regulation itself to recognize that any robot law we say today is irrelevant four or five years from now, and that law four or five years from now is irrelevant 10 years from now.”

“Let’s build in the ability to update itself into the very regulation itself.”

The special joint session of the WEF “Annual Meeting of the Global Future Councils and the Annual Meeting on Cybersecurity” convened more than 500 experts from business, government, civil society, academia and media, alongside 150 of the world’s foremost cybersecurity leaders from October 14-16 in Dubai, UAE.

:::info Tim Hinchliffe, Editor, The Sociable

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