More than a dozen robots with human-like forms are scheduled to hit the market in the next twelve months. Experts are nervous. Plus:

• What have visiting World Cup fans discovered in the U.S.?
• How FIFA’s president has remade soccer in his image
• When kids used to play in the streets

Stephen Witt
A writer who covers technology—and who met more than ten robots for this story

Watching an autonomous humanoid robot come to life is one of the more stunning experiences of my career. A hand articulates, the head swivels, and the legs begin to take tentative, deliberate steps. The machine moves with circumspection, as if consciousness had just been ensouled in a new body. Driving the humanoid is the latest generation of “physical A.I.,” grown in a data center, put through millions of training runs in a virtual reality, and downloaded into a real-world robot body.

Similar scenes of digital quickening are taking place all over Silicon Valley. One memorable encounter I had while reporting this article was at 1X, a startup that is marketing its humanoid robot Neo for home delivery later this year. Neo is soft, light, and nonthreatening; in its presence, it is possible to forget that Neo is a machine. My initial impulse, upon meeting Neo, was to give it a hug.

It should be admitted that Neo’s brain has not quite caught up with its body: it fumbles simple tasks and does not always do as you ask it. That is typical of today’s humanoids, which seem to yearn for autonomy without quite achieving it. But the pace of progress is rapid, and one engineer I spoke with compared the influx of programming talent into robotics over the past year to the surge of interest in language modelling that preceded the 2022 launch of ChatGPT. Soon—maybe too soon—we will find ourselves staring into the expressionless eye cameras of our robotic doppelgängers, in search of obedience, intelligence, and perhaps even recognition.

FIFA shocked the soccer-watching world yesterday by announcing that the U.S. striker Folarin Balogun would be eligible to play in tonight’s World Cup match against Belgium, despite having been suspended after receiving a red card in the previous game. Today, President Donald Trump confirmed reports that he had called FIFA’s president, Gianni Infantino, after the game, asking for a review of the suspension. (In a statement, Infantino said that FIFA’s decision had been made by an independent judicial body.)

Last month, The New Yorker published reporting by Sam Knight on Infantino’s tenure atop the global soccer organization. As Knight explains, Infantino “has transformed the role of the FIFA president into that of a prominent international politician (President Donald Trump calls Infantino ‘the king of soccer’) while dramatically increasing FIFA’s revenues and reach.” Read or listen to the full story »

• The World Cup has brought millions of fans to the United States. What have they discovered about the country during their American vacation?

• A white-supremacist coup in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898, has reverberated across generations, as a reminder of democracy’s terrifying vulnerability.

• These photographs show how city kids used to play in the streets.

• The most-clicked item in yesterday’s newsletter was a close reading of the wedding of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce.

• A book: “The Infinity Machine,” by Sebastian Mallaby, is about the A.I. startup DeepMind. It’s one of the best books of the year, so far.
• A song: Remember that summer everyone wanted to have a good, good night?
• An exhibition: In Ryan McGinley’s “Night Shift,” the photographer brings his travelling bacchanal home to the city’s streets.

• Today’s Crossword Puzzle: Name of the woman mourned in Poe’s “The Sleeper”—five letters.

• Shuffalo: Can you make a longer word with each new letter?

• Catalogues: Can you sort the items into the correct order?

• Laugh Lines: Test your knowledge of classic New Yorker cartoons.