Neighborhood robots, humanoids, and people as usual

Positive visions help create direction

I was nominated to contribute to the newsletter The State of AI by RISE, where each issue highlights a researcher’s thoughts on a possible future within their field. My theme is how AI can step into the physical everyday world and become part of our shared infrastructure. To make this tangible, I’ve chosen to describe a possible scenario—a snapshot of how a Swedish neighborhood might function when robotics, digital twins, and distributed intelligence blend seamlessly into daily life.

Much more than candy

My journey here began back in 2025, when we at RISE started experimenting with how AI could take on physical form and context. Candytron 4000, our early prototype of a physical AI agent handing out candy, was built by combining several AI models. It became a playful testbed where we could explore how language models, sensors, and robotics might work together in practice. These were small steps at first, but they opened the door to new ideas about how AI could operate in the physical world and fueled our creative drive.

Humanoids and bike racks

By 2035, neighborhood robots are as natural a part of life as waste collection once was. They tend green spaces and gardens, deliver medicines, inspect pipelines, sort waste, and help older residents with small tasks that used to take up valuable time for municipal staff. They operate as a coordinated swarm—connected to digital twins of our cities, learning through continuous feedback and federated learning.

Humanoids, meanwhile, have found their place in areas where human presence is still essential: everyday services, light logistics, support in care environments, and education. They are open and modular, built on shared European standards and developed as public infrastructure rather than private products. They belong neither to a tech giant nor to the state but are owned and shaped through collaboration between municipalities, researchers, citizens, and small innovative companies. It is an expansion of European digital sovereignty—not only over data, but over the intelligence embedded in our daily lives.

We’ve also learned a lot along the way. The first legal ruling related to an AI decision came as early as 2030 and led to today’s European accountability framework for autonomous systems—a shared set of rules for transparency, revocability, safety, and human control. Today, every robot can explain the assumptions it made, how confident it was, and why it suggested a particular action.

And still—despite all this technological transformation—much feels familiar. Sometimes a parcel-delivering humanoid gets stuck in a bike rack; a neighborhood robot needs help at a snowbank; people laugh, help out, and move on. The new technology has become a natural part of the human fabric—visible when we need it, invisible when we don’t.

A new rhythm

This is not a future where machines replace us. It is a future where they collaborate with us—where intelligence is distributed, where technology is open, and where Sweden and Europe have shown that a human, democratic, and sustainable AI-driven everyday life is possible.