Hello and welcome back to Inside Tech from our studios in London.
I'm Tom Standage, deputy editor at The Economist.
With me is my co-host, fellow tech writer, and fellow tech enthusiast, Alex Hern.
Happy New Year, Alex.
Happy New Year, Tom.
Right, so what we're going to do this month is look at technologies to watch in 2026.
We are drawing on the coverage in The World Ahead 2026, our annual publication,
which I just happen to be the editor of and which you happen to have written about.
I thought it was fantastic, Tom, didn't you?
I thought it was wonderful.
But you wrote a piece for this which surprisingly wasn't straightforwardly about AI, was it?
No, no, this was me branching out to the physical world.
I'm not very comfortable there, but I had to go to Norway to meet some humanoid robots.
Excellent.
So we're going to be talking about humanoid robots.
We're also going to be doing a bit of biotech,
and we're going to talk about energy technology as well.
So, let's start with the first of those, which is humanoid robots.
And this is an idea that's been around for a while, hasn't it?
It's sort of been in sci-fi for... robots, the whole word comes from the 1920s.