Are Robots Democratizing Luxury—Or Reinventing It Altogether?

When I wrote “How Much Does a Robot Cost?” in 2024, I traced the nascent price spectrum of consumer humanoids—from Tesla’s Optimus estimates to Figure’s speculative range of $30,000 to $150,000. At the time, those numbers felt radical, bordering on science fiction for most households. Yet now, only a year later, the robotics industry is accelerating so quickly that those figures already feel transitional, even quaint. 

Today, the real revolution is not how much a robot costs, but what a robot does to the very notion of luxury itself. By the mid‑2030s, the divide won’t be between those who own robots and those who don’t—but between those who know how to live with them intentionally, aesthetically, and culturally.

Luxury in this new age will no longer be about having servants or staff, but about curating experiences, meaning, and expression. Your robot won’t merely serve you—it will become the ambient companion of your ambitions and your personal narrative. Imagine waking to a living room reconfigured for the creative project you mentioned yesterday; your wardrobe refolded by material, color, or mood; your garden redesigned to bloom in orchestrated cadence over days you never even thought to plan. In that daydream lies the new luxury: a home that reads your aspirations and wakes alongside you.

In older luxury narratives, scarcity mattered. The more exclusive the privilege, the more it signaled status. But the looming wave of artificial labor (AL) threatens to dissolve scarcity in labor itself. When I examined cost trajectories in previous articles, I noted how Tesla envisions mass production driving affordability, while Figure spoke about eventually dropping below $20,000 in later iterations. But the true inflection point comes not when robots become cheap—but when they become everywhere.

Once humanoids embed into millions of households, they won’t merely mimic luxury—they’ll become baseline infrastructure, as essential as electricity or running water. At that point, luxury will be less about access and more about taste, design, depth, and culture. Two homes might both employ identical robots, but one will feel enriched, alive, poetic—the other sterile and soulless. The ambient intelligence will fade into the background; what endures is the artistry of how we live, not the machinery that makes it possible. Luxury is not the machine—it’s the sensibility we bring to it.

One limited assumption is to imagine robots following the division-of-labor model: a plumber-bot, a cook-bot, a tutor-bot. But that is only a placeholder, not the destination. The true leap is when each robot embodies the full spectrum of human expertise, hopping between roles as fluidly as you switch apps. 

In “How Much Does a Robot Cost?”, I speculated on how advanced AI platforms could collapse modularity, enabling a single robot to perform drastically different tasks. That vision is quickly becoming reality.

Your robot might cook lunch, tune your piano, serve as a mindfulness coach, build your furniture, and debug your code—all in a single afternoon. The liberating consequence is that human lives are freed from coordinating specialists or tolerating delays. Luxury becomes the freedom to dream without friction, to experiment without consequence. What you ask of your environment becomes your identity, and your robot is the medium through which that identity takes form.

If one robot is powerful, multiple robots perceiving, communicating, and collaborating are exponentially transformative. We won’t just see household robots—they’ll operate in networks. Imagine a block of homes that coordinate maintenance, event staging, or even community art installations. What once took municipal budgets or dedicated civic planning might be executed on weekends by fleets of robots working in perfect harmony.

This is the new luxury of collective aesthetic: not just your home, but your block, your enclave, your community, arranged as a coherent experience. Just as boutique towns curate architecture, art, cuisine, and ambiance, future neighborhoods might choreograph light, sound, flora, and seasonal rhythms via cooperative robotics. Luxury becomes not only private but participatory—a shared milieu of designed living, a cultural upgrade extending beyond your walls into the collective imagination.

It would be naïve to enthuse only about convenience. A world where robots are everywhere carries deep cultural and ethical questions. What does privacy mean when your home is constantly observed by a thinking machine? What becomes of craftsmanship and human imperfections when machines can perfect every stitch, every finish, every curve? Who defines taste when underlying algorithms learn your preferences faster than you do?

These questions will distinguish shallow “automated homes” from genuinely cultured spaces. The new luxury will involve negotiating with your robot—not commanding it. Teaching it boundaries, curating its education, and instructing it in what matters to you. The role of the homeowner becomes that of curator and editor, insisting on friction where humanness must endure and clarity where design must persuade. A truly luxurious home in the robotic era will not just be functional—it will be philosophical, a space that articulates values as much as it organizes closets.

The phrase “live like a king” suggests hierarchy, obeisance, and service. That is not the future I want to write about—and I don’t think it’s the future worth building. The luxury I imagine is not commanded; it is chosen, shaped, and refined. It is where human agency meets machine fluency, where beauty, craft, meaning, and depth grow richer because the scaffolding of toil and friction has been lifted.

By 2040, many will own robots—just as most people already own smartphones. But only those who engage with them intentionally will experience luxury. The new frontier isn’t robots themselves—it’s the people who learn to live with them as curators of culture, design, and aspiration. The age of kings is over; the age of connoisseurship has just begun.