By Futurist Thomas Frey

When people imagine humanoid robots in 2040, they picture the obvious: household helpers doing laundry, eldercare companions, manufacturing workers, retail associates. These are inevitable.

But I’m far more interested in the applications nobody’s talking about yet—the weird, unexpected, psychologically complex uses that will emerge once the technology becomes cheap and capable enough for creative experimentation. Here are eight applications that sound bizarre now but will seem obvious in retrospect.

1. Professional Mourners and Funeral Attendees

In 2040, you’ll hire humanoid robots to attend your funeral, ensuring a respectable crowd regardless of how many actual humans show up. The robots won’t just fill seats—they’ll be programmed with information about the deceased, sharing memories, crying appropriately, comforting relatives. You can specify exactly how many attendees you want, their demographics, even their emotional responses. “Attended by family, friends, and professional units” will be a standard funeral service offering.

2. Protest Crowd Augmentation and Strike Replacement

Labor unions will deploy humanoid robots to bolster protest attendance, while companies use them as automated scab labor during strikes. Imagine fifty human workers on picket lines while two hundred robots keep the facility running—and the workers respond by deploying their own robots to make their crowd look larger. Rally attendance becomes fakeable. Every significant protest will face questions: how many of those bodies were real?

3. Romantic Relationship Practice Partners

Humanoid robots will be marketed as “relationship training partners”—safe companions for practicing intimacy and learning healthy relationship patterns before attempting them with actual humans. Someone emerging from trauma can practice vulnerability without risking rejection. Someone with severe anxiety can learn emotional skills through graduated exposure. Therapists will prescribe specific robot interactions as homework. By 2040, “I’m working through some things with my practice partner before I start dating again” will be socially acceptable.

4. Memory Preservation and Family History Embodiment

Wealthy families will commission humanoid robots embodying deceased relatives, trained on lifetime data to serve as interactive family historians. The robot doesn’t claim to be you—everyone knows it’s a memorial construct. But it can answer questions about family history from your perspective, share stories, even offer advice filtered through your documented values. Holiday tables could seat both living relatives and robot versions of deceased family members. Some will find these memorial robots irreplaceable connections to the past. Others will find them creepy puppet shows disrespecting the dead.

5. Placeholder Humans for Avoiding Social Obligations

You’ll rent humanoid robots as convincing “placeholder humans” to attend social obligations you want to avoid. Your cousin’s wedding conflicts with a concert? Send a robot programmed with your mannerisms and family knowledge. It sits through the ceremony, mingles during cocktails, appears in photos. This works for work conferences, holiday gatherings, networking events—anywhere showing face matters but genuine presence doesn’t. If someone later says “I don’t remember seeing you,” you have plausible deniability: the robot’s memory confirms conversations happened.

6. Extreme Environment Tourism Surrogates

You’ll “visit” Mount Everest, the Mariana Trench, or Mars through humanoid robot surrogates you pilot remotely with full sensory feedback. When your robot stands at Everest’s summit, you experience the actual mountain through a physical body that’s really there. This democratizes extreme experiences—climbing Everest costs $50,000-100,000 and requires excellent health; piloting a surrogate might cost $5,000 and requires only VR controls. The disabled, elderly, and health-limited can access adventures their bodies can’t handle.

7. Therapeutic Confrontation Proxies

Humanoid robots will serve as stand-ins for people you need to confront therapeutically but can’t or shouldn’t face directly. Your therapist programs a robot to embody your abusive parent, allowing you to express anger and practice boundary-setting safely. The robot responds with patterns matching the real person’s behavior, but you control the session and can stop anytime. Victims can confront perpetrators without re-traumatization. Estranged children can practice difficult conversations before attempting reconciliation—or decide the relationship isn’t worth saving.

8. Extinction Species Recreation

Zoos and museums will deploy humanoid robots modified to embody extinct or nearly-extinct species for educational purposes and conservation awareness. Not just displays—interactive experiences where “Neanderthals” demonstrate tool-making, “dodo birds” (in appropriate non-humanoid forms) show behavior patterns, extinct indigenous peoples share cultural knowledge preserved in historical records. Controversial but powerful: giving physical form to what’s been lost, making extinction viscerally real rather than abstract.

The Pattern Behind the Unusual

These applications share common themes: they address psychological and social needs rather than purely functional ones. They solve problems of authenticity, presence, identity, and experience in ways that wouldn’t occur to engineers focused on utilitarian applications.

Humanoid robots won’t just replace human labor—they’ll complicate human experience. They’ll blur lines between presence and absence, authentic and performed, real and simulated.

Final Thoughts

The obvious applications—household chores, eldercare, manufacturing—will happen because they’re economically rational. But the unusual applications will happen because humans are weird, creative, and constantly finding unexpected ways to use new tools.

We want to avoid obligations while claiming credit for attendance. We want perfect mourning at our funerals regardless of how many genuinely cared. We want to practice intimacy without risk. We want to preserve ancestors in editable form. We want to visit Everest without danger.

Humanoid robots will give us all of this—and it will be weird, complicated, ethically murky, and absolutely inevitable. By 2040, the question won’t be “what can robots do?” It will be “what will humans do with robots?” And the answers will be far stranger than anyone predicts.

Related Links:

The Psychology of Human-Robot Relationships

Telepresence Robotics and Embodied Experience

Social Applications of Humanoid Robots