Humanoid robots are increasingly featuring in the news. Some of them are a bit creepy, some make you anxious because they might take your job, but others are a lot of fun, and they’re getting better at taking humans on.
I was captivated by the recent achievement of Sabastian Sawe, who was the first person to finish under two hours for the marathon in an official race. In this month’s issue we have a story about another impressive achievement. A bipedal robot, aptly named Lightning, recently completed a half marathon nearly seven minutes faster than the human world record of 57:20 set by Ugandan runner, Jacob Kiplimo. Last year’s winning robot took more than two and a half hours to finish, and only six of 21 entrants completed the course. In contrast, this year’s event saw a record pace, vastly improved reliability and far fewer of the collapses, collisions and control failures that characterised the 2025 inaugural race. Anyone who has finished a half marathon would identify with the hilarious staggers, crashes and collapses that some of the robotic competitors exhibited before being carried off the field, literally in pieces.
Another sport where robots are beating humans is Sony AI’s autonomous robot, Ace, which competed against top world table tennis players and one won three of five matches. Ace uses nine cameras, event-based sensors, eight joints, and AI-based control with a 20-millisecond reaction time, ten times faster than humans. This technology could transform manufacturing and other industries requiring split-second decisions in unpredictable environments.
Another very cool robotic application is to have your Amazon parcel delivered by drone. It’s already happening in the USA, and if you live in Darlington in the UK, you too can have your Amazon parcels delivered by drone. Now that is a status symbol. I wonder if the day will come when our Takealot deliveries arrive by drone.
Behind all these is some impressive engineering. Imagine being a robotics engineer at Boston Dynamics. A typical day involves brainstorming meetings with cross-functional teams of engineers and technicians, working up a concept and new detailed design for one of their robots, a dog called Spot, building the design, and spending time in the hardware lab investigating problems and how to fix them.
This made me wonder what other dream jobs engineers can do. Ten years ago, nobody was advertising roles for smart grid engineer, theme park robotics specialist, digital twin architect, circular manufacturing specialist, energy storage systems integrator or water resilience engineer. Nowadays a mechanical engineering graduate might be calculating the G-force profile of a new coaster drop at a theme park, and an electrical engineer interested in audio might be designing the speaker geometry for a new stadium.
The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 named renewable energy engineers, environmental engineers and autonomous vehicle specialists among the fastest-growing roles globally. A decade ago, most of these job titles didn’t exist. Today they are among the most sought-after careers on the planet, often carried out by people who were trained as traditional engineers and then found themselves in new territory.
On the industrial side, smart grid engineers design the intelligent electricity networks that balance load from solar panels and wind farms, and decide when to store or release power. Digital twin architects build virtual replicas of factories, supply chains and power stations so that problems can be solved by software before even one bolt is turned. Water resilience engineers design the systems that will determine which facilities survive the coming water crunch. Predictive maintenance now draws on machine learning that was not part of any undergraduate curriculum five years ago. The engineers who designed the sensors in those days have a new role today: interpreting what the sensors are saying.
Meanwhile, the career guidance available to most South African school leavers is still describing engineering like it was twenty years ago; but while the traditional engineering role will continue, there will be new opportunities. Imagine working in the control room of a smart grid, or on the team building a digital twin of a water utility in the Karoo. The WEF reports that by 2030, 39% of core engineering skills will change and evolve rather than being replaced.
This is good news for engineers, whose training is built around systematic thinking and problem solving. Their knowledge is transferable in a way that few other degrees can match. Young engineers entering the field nowadays can be excited about a profession that absorbs new knowledge, creates new specialities and keeps reinventing itself. An engineering degree is a licence to keep learning rather than a fixed destination.
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