Aim for a dual revolution: India needs a dramatic leap in farming that AI-powered automation can deliver

Toyota’s factory in Woodstock, Ontario, will soon deploy Digit, a humanoid robot from Agility Robotics, on its production floor. These bipedal machines will unload auto parts from warehouse tuggers and onto the production line—work that until now was performed by humans. Toyota chose humanoid robots because its factories are designed for people.

By using robots that move like humans, Toyota can automate without redesigning its assembly lines.On the face of it, this is a small efficiency improvement. But it is a signal of something far larger: the rise of embodied AI and its potential to reshape the global economy. It indicates a future in which countries that build robots will prosper while those that rely on labour supply will struggle.Just as mechanization replaced physical labour, artificial intelligence has begun to automate cognitive work.

For decades, white-collar jobs were immune to automation. That assumption is collapsing. As AI becomes embedded in machines and gains the ability to interact with the physical world, it will breach the final barrier between software and labour.

Toyota is not the only company using robots. Intuitive Surgical’s da Vinci robots are being used in hospitals around the world and have already completed millions of procedures. Waymo vehicles now complete over 150,000 trips per week, proving that AI-embedded physical systems can operate at scale in unstructured and unpredictable environments.

Tesla’s Optimus range of humanoid robots is in production and is projected to scale significantly by the end of the decade. As interesting as this sounds, rapid automation is likely to have serious repercussions on society, especially in developing economies. A recent paper in Labour Economics argues