The robots are coming - and it's great news for scriptwriters
Elon Musk wants a robot in every kitchen, folding laundry and cooking dinner. But for Hollywood, this ambitious goal provides the perfect movie villain - a super-strong genius with no nationality, no accent, and seemingly no weaknesses. But before you get too comfortable with that idea, it's worth asking who's actually responsible when the machine parked in your hallway reveals its criminal intentions.
BREAKING NEWS: Leaked from the screenplay of a forthcoming movie…
EXT. NIGHT. THE BYTES MOTEL
Fade in to:
Heavy rain falling on a tawdry lodging house.
It looks like a relic of times gone by. Shabby, shrunken, little sign of life.
Close on: the only guest room where lights show at the window.
We move to the door.
A shadow reaches for the handle.
INT. NIGHT. GUEST ROOM
We ease inside and track towards the bathroom - and the SOUND of running water.
In the bathroom, someone is showering behind the curtain.
Close on: a YOUNG WOMAN.
She is in bliss, enjoying the moment.
But…
A look of concern flits across her face. She quickly turns off the water. Listens. Hears only silence. Then - the FAINT WHISPER of a hydraulic piston.
She gasps as a something looms against the curtain.
The plastic rips back! She’s face to face with her killer.
It wears the uniform of a janitor.
Its lifeless, LED eyes glow red.
She screams.
A metal fist brings down a gleaming blade… again, again, again!
A robot in every plot
There. You see how neat that was. A completely fresh take on an overused movie trope.
Elon Musk might want an Optimus robot in your home, cooking dinner, folding laundry, petting the dog, but that’s not the only use for these machines. Because once a robot becomes just another appliance with legs, something far more interesting occurs: television and film gain a brand new villain, and thrillers get a brand new lease of life.
Meet your new leading villain
I’m so bored with the current bad guy line-up. There they are – the priest who’s a serial killer, the neighbour with the dead body in the flower bed, the hitman with the harsh foreign accent, the hacker who can break a Government firewall in 10 seconds flat. It's the same old stereotypes, recycled across a thousand procedurals because as writers, we’ve run out of ideas.
But robots fix this in a keystroke.
The options are endless.
A robot villain has no passport, no accent, and no home country to offend when the show sells abroad. He, or she, or it, whichever the script needs this week, can fly a helicopter, build a nuke, or crack the uncrackable code because they can just pull knowledge straight off the net.
Ask a robot to outrun the police and it'll do more than 60mph. Shoot it point-blank and it barely trembles, because it's built from Kevlar. Climb a wall, survive a fall, walk straight through a bomb blast: all in a day's work. Forget about the ‘Six Million Dollar Man’ and his lame slo-mo antics. There’s nothing these mechanical fiends can’t do!
The entertainment industry needed this so badly.
Screenwriters who ran out of plot ideas a decade ago just got a whole new box of toys.
So, thank you, Elon Musk. Your humanoids may suck in real life, but they'll make excellent villains on screen..
Where things stand right now
Before we get too carried away, let’s be clear about one thing. Optimus humanoids aren’t sitting in anyone's living room just yet. Tesla's plan, as of early 2026, was to repurpose part of its Fremont factory for Optimus production this year, with a suggested unit price of $20,000 to $30,000 once the machines go on sale. (As of today, production has still not begun).
So, our villain in the motel is, for now, quite a few steps ahead of the robot that will eventually be parked in your hallway. But that gap won't last forever, and by many accounts, it's closing faster than most of us have twigged.
The joke stops here
This is where the humour starts to crumble. Because the question your average TV procedural never asks is the one that really matters: who's responsible when the machine goes wrong?
Nobody, it seems..
This isn't just hypothetical hand-wringing. In July 2026 the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) added foreign-made humanoid robots to its restricted list, citing the risk that they could be remotely controlled, used to gather data on the people around them, or be built with backdoors that feed information straight to a foreign government.
Congressman John Moolenaar, who chairs the House Select Committee on China, went even further: “It is likely that one day robotic technology will be in American homes and workplaces and we must protect our country by keeping out Chinese robots with backdoors that share sensitive data with the CCP.”
Whatever you make of the politics behind this ban, the concern is real, and it’s not going away.
Putting humanoid robots in our homes raises concerns about accidents, unpredictable AI behaviour and privacy intrusions. But perhaps the biggest threat is third-party compromise. A hacked CCTV camera can spy on you; a compromised humanoid could follow you, listen to conversations, explore rooms, open doors and drawers, operate equipment or even physically attack you.
Meanwhile, if you're looking for solutions, none of the uber-rich overlords selling these things have offered much beyond “we'll sort the safety part out later.”
That's not good enough for something that gets to live alongside you.
I won't be adding my name to the wait list.
But it hasn't stopped big business from embracing robots with open arms.
Already on the job
While Optimus is still finding its feet, robots are now embedded on the shop floor. Amazon has been putting them to work in its warehouses since 2012, and the company’s own injury figures tell an ugly story. In 2019, they recorded around 7.7 serious injuries caused by robots per hundred employees, a third higher than three years before. What's more, the investigators found the problem was far worse at the most automated sites.
Nobody set out to build a machine that hurt people, but it happened anyway, because the robot set the pace and the human had to match it.
This is the workplace version of our horror movie. No blade, no LED eyes, just a system nobody got round to making truly safe, doing damage while everyone cheered the boost in productivity.
And it’s why the list below may be comical, but it’s worth taking seriously.
Six tips for surviving your robot butler
Like it or not, robots will soon become commonplace in the home, place of work and just about everywhere in between. Asimov’s laws won’t save us from their wanderings. Criminality is almost certainly baked in. So how can you protect yourself when the bots are in the house?
Here’s how:
1. Dump all your connected appliances and gizmos: To you, your IoT toaster is just a great way to burn bread, but to your robot villain, it’s a sapient henchman waiting on his bidding.
2. Get a car built pre-1975: Do you want your humanoid maid stealing your Tesla and using it to ram-raid the post office? No, you don’t. Stop using personal transport that has a CPU on board.
3. Never let your genius robot figure out your taxes: There’s no faster way to go from ‘comfortable middle-class’ to “home is a cardboard box”.
4. Get a carrier pigeon: Unless you want your robot assistant to hack your phone and make international calls for sixteen hours a day, you need to adapt the way you communicate.
5. Get your dog unchipped: Sure, you put a tracker in little Poppy because you didn’t want her getting lost. Well, well done, because now, your robot gardener has programmed her to be a mutant child killer.
6. Never, ever, feed the robot after midnight: You saw ‘Gremlins’ didn’t you? Did you think that was just make believe? Jesus. If you don’t recognise a plain warning when you see one, then all hope is lost.
Final word
Give the scriptwriters their due: a robot villain solves a host of lazy casting decisions in one fell swoop. But the rest of us might want to think twice before we let a machine bring in the shopping. At least the villain on your screen has the decency to announce themself with a dramatic entrance. The one plugged into your wi-fi never will.
If a humanoid robot moved in with you tomorrow, would you hand it the house keys, or start planning your escape route?
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