By Adam Dorr
What does it mean to “live like a king”? This expression has long captured humanity’s aspiration for the ultimate in material comfort and personal service. Kings and queens, emperors and empresses, and titans of industry are the privileged few throughout history who have enjoyed something the rest of humanity could only dream of: complete freedom from domestic toil and instant access to any service they desired.
By 2040, this ancient dream will become universal reality. Not through political revolution or economic redistribution, but through artificial labor (AL) in the form of AI and humanoid robots. The disruption of labor by humanoid robots is about far more than just having help with the dishes. It will fundamentally redefine what constitutes a normal standard of living for all of humanity.
Most depictions of household robots in popular entertainment and media suffer from a poverty of imagination. They show robots taking out garbage, doing laundry, maybe even preparing meals. This is what we might call the “luxury hotel” experience. Come home to a clean room with the bed made, and perhaps order the equivalent of room service. It’s of course pleasant and convenient, and for most of us it feels luxurious. But this barely scratches the surface of what’s coming.
The reason why centers on a single critical insight: humanoid robots won’t be specialists.
At first, yes, humanoid robots will be relatively unskilled generalists, similar to what in many societies throughout history were termed domestic servants. For most of us today, a more familiar parallel might be our teenage kids. They can help cook, clean, and do basic chores, but they have no real expertise.
But by the mid-2030s this will be changing fast. And crucially, there won’t be distinct plumber robots versus electrician robots versus tutor robots. Every single humanoid robot will possess the full knowledge and skillset of its entire AL fleet.
Your household robot won’t just clean. It will simultaneously be a five-star chef, olympic-coach-calibre fitness trainer, master carpenter, bonded electrician, licensed therapist, PhD-level tutor, and more. And not sequentially, but simultaneously, switching between skills as effortlessly as you switch between apps on your smartphone.
Consider what this means. Today, even billionaires must schedule and coordinate different specialists. They need to book the electrician for Tuesday, the piano teacher for Thursday, the massage therapist for Saturday. Each expert commands premium rates for their scarce time and specialized knowledge. But when every robot embodies all expertise simultaneously, scarcity of skillsets evaporates and excellence becomes the rule rather than the exception.
Within hours, and sometimes within minutes, a King or Queen could summon any expertise their realm possessed. Need an architect to design a new wing of the palace? Summon them. Want a musician to compose a symphony for the upcoming holiday feast? They appear. Require a physician, lawyer, astronomer, or artist? They stand ready to serve.
This immediate access to comprehensive expertise defined royal privilege as much as any other form of wealth or power. It meant never having problems persist unsolved or needs remain unmet for lack of skill or knowledge (or, for that matter, time and effort – within reason).
By 2040, everyone who owns or rents a humanoid robot will command greater expertise than any historical monarch. And more people in 2040 will own and rent robot than own or rent a car today.
Your robot will diagnose that mysterious rash with the combined knowledge of every dermatologist who ever lived. It will repair the leaky faucet in the bathroom sink with techniques perfected across millions of homes. It will teach your child algebra with the patience of a saint and the skill of history’s greatest mathematicians. All of this and vastly more, available instantly, continuously, without scheduling or negotiation or social friction.
The home itself will transform from static shelter to dynamic environment. Small problems that today persist for months, like squeaky hinges and peeling paint, will literately vanish overnight. Not because you will finally have time to fix them yourself while your robot folds the laundry, but because your robot also handles such maintenance automatically while you sleep.
But maintenance is just the beginning. Imagine waking to find your living room furniture rearranged for the morning yoga session you mentioned wanting to start. Imagine your closet reorganized by season, with clothes pressed and ready. Imagine a patch of neglected lawn transformed into a garden with new plantings that will bloom in sequence throughout the year. Imagine vacations planned, home renovations designed, creative art and music projects for you and your children laid out, and much more.
This isn’t fantasy. It’s the logical consequence of tireless workers with comprehensive skills operating continuously at near-zero marginal cost. While you sleep eight hours, robots work through the night, improving and revitalizing your environment in ways that would cost tens of thousands of dollars today. Building and maintaining homes like palaces will become the norm, not because everyone becomes wealthy in monetary terms, but because the labor to create such environments that is so scarce and costly today becomes ubiquitous and virtually free.
With two or more humanoid robots, capabilities multiply. Just as humans work better in teams, robots can collaborate on tasks beyond any individual unit’s capacity. Moving furniture, construction projects, elaborate meal preparations, and many other tasks that require coordination become trivial when teams of humanoid robots never miscommunicate, never disagree on technique or complain or get distracted or take breaks.
This collaboration will extend beyond individual households as well. Communities might pool their AL into robot crews for collective projects. Imagine thirty neighborhood robots converging to build a playground in an afternoon, renovate the local school over a weekend, or transform vacant lots into vertical farms in days. The same coordinated labor that once required royal decree and massive expense becomes a casual community choice.
The most radical aspect of the artificial labor revolution is that it will be universal.
Humanoid robots won’t remain luxury goods for the wealthy. Instead, they will follow the pattern of many other transformative technologies we have seen throughout history. Like smartphones and automobiles, every household in every prosperous society will have at least one robot – and possibly several. (And less prosperous societies will shortly follow, since they will rapidly join prosperous ones too, thanks to the same superabundance of AL alongside superabundant clean energy).
Humanoid robots will initially be accessible and affordable to businesses. Then to everyone who can afford a car. Then to everyone who can afford a smartphone. And then simply to everyone, everywhere. The entire phase change will unfold over within two decades.
This means means a radical flattening of global material inequality. Today’s poorer nations won’t need to progress through generations-long stages of industrialization and modernization. The same humanoid robots working in Tokyo can build houses in Lagos, perform surgery in São Paulo, and teach mathematics in rural Bangladesh. Anything that needs to be built or repaired or recycled, anywhere on Earth, can be done equally easily by any standard fleet of humanoid robots.
Geographic advantages matter little, if at all, when clean energy and labor are both superabundant. Capital endowments and accumulations becomes irrelevant when clean superabundant clean energy and AL drive production costs to near-zero. The distinction between “developed” and “developing” nations becomes obsolete when development can be downloaded like software.
For all of human history, dramatic inequality in living standards has been accepted as natural, inevitable, even necessary. The pharaohs needed pyramids while slaves needed only bread. The lords required castles while serfs made do with huts. Even in modern democracies, some enjoy personal trainers and private jets while others struggle for basic necessities.
Superabundant artificial labor breaks this ancient pattern.
When the marginal cost of labor approaches zero, when every human can access comprehensive expertise instantly, and when there is no financial difference between premium versus mediocre quality of goods and services, then true material equality will become possible for the first time in human history. Today’s advantages and disadvantages between rich and poor communities, and between rich and poor countries, will evaporate.
This is the dawn of what Tony Seba and James Arbib call a Stellar World.
Within just two decades or so, the disruption of labor by AI and humanoid robots will catapult billions into material prosperity that previously only hundreds enjoyed. And in the Stellar world to come, we will all “live like kings” in universal luxury.