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Robots For Hire En Masse
Peter Diamandis, founder of the XPrize, thinks that the big effect of humanoid robots will be as workers-for-hire that could belong to you:
A humanoid robot costs between $20,000 to $30,000 to purchase outright, but that's not the number that matters. The number that matters is what happens when you lease one:
"You could grab this robot for $300 a month on a lease. Which is $10 a day. Which is 40 cents an hour."
He lets the arithmetic do the work and then asks the only question that follows naturally:
"How many of them would you want?"
That's the shift. Not robots as a novelty or a threat, but as an economic decision so accessible it becomes unremarkable, the same quiet logic that put a smartphone in every pocket.
XPRIZE Foundation Founder Peter Diamandis on the most underestimated economic force coming to reshape labour by 2040:
— Big Brain AI (@realBigBrainAI) April 5, 2026
The conversation around humanoid robots has been dominated by spectacle. The videos. The demos. The fear.
Diamandis cuts through all of it with a single number.… pic.twitter.com/PIulglRV1b
The idea that cheap humanoid robots can earn money for individuals this was predicted in the extraordinary 1956 short story The Instigators by Raymond Banks:
MEN LONG ago had dreamed that in a robot age the factories and businesses would own the robots and service them. Instead, individual people made the capital investment, paid for maintenance and repairs. The companies hired the robots and paid a small wage to the owner. This way the company got the benefit of cheap labor, without major investment and the small investors profited, too — once they had paid off their robot loans.
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 1/19/2026)
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