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TENDER GEOMETRY

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How a Texas robot named Apollo became a meditation on dignity, dependence, and the future of care.

This essay is inspired by an episode of the WSJ Bold Names podcast (September 26, 2025), in which Christopher Mims and Tim Higgins speak with Jeff Cardenas, CEO of Apptronik. While the podcast traces Apollo’s business and technical promise, this meditation follows the deeper question at the heart of humanoid robotics: what does it mean to delegate dignity itself?

By Michael Cummins, Editor, September 26, 2025

The robot stands motionless in a bright Austin lab, catching the fluorescence the way bone catches light in an X-ray—white, clinical, unblinking. Human-height, five foot eight, a little more than a hundred and fifty pounds, all clean lines and exposed joints. What matters is not the size. What matters is the task.

An engineer wheels over a geriatric training mannequin—slack limbs, paper skin, the posture of someone who has spent too many days watching the ceiling. With a gesture the engineer has practiced until it feels like superstition, he cues the robot forward.

Apollo bends.

The motors don’t roar; they murmur, like a refrigerator. A camera blinks; a wrist pivots. Aluminum fingers spread, hesitate, then—lightly, so lightly—close around the mannequin’s forearm. The lift is almost slow enough to be reverent. Apollo steadies the spine, tips the chin, makes a shelf of its palm for the tremor the mannequin doesn’t have but real people do. This is not warehouse choreography—no pallets, no conveyor belts. This is rehearsal for something harder: the geometry of tenderness.

If the mannequin stays upright, the room exhales. If Apollo’s grasp has that elusive quality—control without clench—there’s a hush you wouldn’t expect in a lab. The hush is not triumph. It is reckoning: the movement from factory floor to bedside, from productivity to intimacy, from the public square to the room where the curtains are drawn and a person is trying, stubbornly, not to be embarrassed.

Apptronik calls this horizon “assistive care.” The phrase is both clinical and audacious. It’s the third act in a rollout that starts in logistics, passes through healthcare, and ends—if it ever ends—at the bedroom door. You do not get to a sentence like that by accident. You get there because someone keeps repeating the same word until it stops sounding sentimental and starts sounding like strategy: dignity.

Jeff Cardenas is the one who says it most. He moves quickly when he talks, as if there are only so many breaths before the demo window closes, but the word slows him. Dignity. He says it with the persistence of an engineer and the stubbornness of a grandson. Both of his grandfathers were war heroes, the kind of men who could tie a rope with their eyes closed and a hand in a sling. For years they didn’t need anyone. Then, in their final seasons, they needed everyone. The bathroom became a negotiation. A shirt, an adversary. “To watch proud men forced into total dependency,” he says, “was to watch their dignity collapse.”

A robot, he thinks, can give some of that back. No sigh at 3 a.m. No opinion about the smell of a body that has been ill for too long. No making a nurse late for the next room. The machine has no ego. It does not collect small resentments. It will never tell a friend over coffee what it had to do for you. If dignity is partly autonomy, the argument goes, then autonomy might be partly engineered.

There is, of course, a domestic irony humming in the background. The week Cardenas was scheduled to sit for an interview about a future of household humanoids, a human arrived in his own household ahead of schedule: a baby girl. Two creations, two needs. One cries, one hums. One exhausts you into sleeplessness; the other promises to be tireless so you can rest. Perhaps that tension—between what we make and who we make—is the essay we keep writing in every age. It is, at minimum, the ethical prompt for the engineering to follow.

In the lab, empathy is equipment. Apollo’s body is a lattice of proprietary actuators—the muscles—and a tangle of sensors—the nerves. Cameras for eyes, force feedback in the hands, gyros whispering balance, accelerometers keeping score of every tilt. The old robots were position robots: go here, stop there, open, close, repeat until someone hit the red button. Apollo lives in a different grammar. It isn’t memorizing a path through space; it’s listening, constantly, to the body it carries and the moment it enters. It can’t afford to be brittle. Brittleness drops the cup. And the patient.

But muscle and nerve require a brain, and for that Apptronik has made a pragmatic peace with the present: Google DeepMind is the partner for the mind. A decade ago, “humanoid” was a dirty word in Mountain View—too soon, too much. Now the bet is that a robot shaped like us can learn from us, not only in principle but in practice. Generative AI, so adept at turning words into words and images into images, now tries to learn movement by watching. Show it a person steadying a frail arm. Show it again. Give it the perspective of a sensor array; let it taste gravity through a gyroscope. The hope is that the skill transfers. The hope is that the world’s largest training set—human life—can be translated into action without scripts.

This is where the prose threatens to float away on its own optimism, and where Apptronik pulls it back with a price. Less than a luxury car, they say. Under $50,000, once the supply chain exists. They like first principles—aluminum is cheap, and there are only a few hundred dollars of it in the frame. Batteries have ridden down the cost curve on the back of cars; motors rode it down on the back of drones. The math is meant to short-circuit disbelief: compassion at scale is not only possible; it may be affordable.

Not today. Today, Apollo earns its keep in the places compassion is an accounting line: warehouses and factories. The partners—GXO, Mercedes—sound like waypoints on the long gray bridge to the bedside. If the robot can move boxes without breaking a wrist, maybe it can later move a human without breaking trust. The lab keeps its metaphors comforting: a pianist running scales before attempting the nocturne. Still, the nocturne is the point.

What changes when the machine crosses a threshold and the space smells like hand soap and evening soup? Warehouse floors are taped and square; homes are not. Homes are improvisations of furniture and mood and politics. The job shifts from lifting to witnessing. A perfect employee becomes a perfect observer. Cameras are not “eyes” in a home; they are records. To invite a machine into a room is to invite a log of the room. The promise of dignity—the mercy of not asking another person to do what shames you—meets the chill of being watched perfectly.

“Trust is the long-term battle,” Cardenas says, not as a slogan but like someone naming the boss level in a game with only one life. Companies have slogans about privacy. People have rules: who gets a key, who knows where the blanket is. Does a robot get a key? Does it remember where you hide the letter from the old friend? The engineers will answer, rightly, that these are solvable problems—air-gapped systems, on-device processing, audit logs. The heart will answer, not wrongly, that solvable is not the same as solved.

Then there is the bigger shadow. Cardenas calls humanoid robotics “the space race of our time,” and the analogy is less breathless than it sounds. Space wasn’t about stars; it was about order. The Moon was a stage for policy. In this script the rocket is a humanoid—replicable labor, general-purpose motion—and the nation that deploys a million of them first rewrites the math of productivity. China has poured capital into robotics; some of its companies share data and designs in a way U.S. rivals—each a separate species in a crowded ecosystem—do not. One country is trying to build a forest; the other, a bouquet. The metaphor is unfair and therefore, in the compressed logic of arguments, persuasive.

He reduces it to a line that is either obvious or terrifying. What is an economy? Productivity per person. Change the number of productive units and you change the economy. If a robot is, in practice, a unit, it will be counted. That doesn’t make it a citizen. It makes it a denominator. And once it’s in the denominator, it is in the policy.

This is the point where the skeptic clears his throat. We have heard this promise before—in the eighties, the nineties, the 2000s. We have seen Optimus and its cousins, and the men who owned them. We know the edited video, the cropped wire, the demo that never leaves the demo. We know how stubborn carpets can be and how doors, innocent as they seem, have a way of humiliating machines.

The lab knows this better than anyone. On the third lift of the morning, Apollo’s wrist overshoots with a faint metallic snap, the servo stuttering as it corrects. The mannequin’s elbow jerks, too quick, and an engineer’s breath catches in the silence. A tiny tweak. Again. “Yes,” someone says, almost to avoid saying “please.” Again.

What keeps the room honest is not the demo. It’s the memory you carry into it. Everyone has one: a grandmother who insisted she didn’t need help until she slid to the kitchen floor and refused to call it a fall; a father who couldn’t stand the indignity of a hand on his waistband; the friend who became a quiet inventory of what he could no longer do alone. The argument for a robot at the bedside lives in those rooms—in the hour when help is heavy and kindness is too human to be invisible.

But dignity is a duet word. It means independence. It also means being treated like a person. A perfect lift that leaves you feeling handled may be less dignified than an imperfect lift performed by a nurse who knows your dog’s name and laughs at your old jokes. Some people will choose privacy over presence every time. Others want the tremor in the human hand because it’s a sign that someone is afraid to hurt them. There is a universe of ethics in that tremor.

The money is not bashful about picking a side. Investors like markets that look like graphs and revolutions that can be amortized—unlike a nurse’s memory of the patient who loved a certain song, which lingers, resists, refuses to be tallied. If a robot can deliver the “last great service”—to borrow a phrase from a theologian who wasn’t thinking of robots—it will attract capital because the service can be repeated without running out of love, patience, or hours. The price point matters not only because it makes the machine seem plausible in a catalog but because it promises a shift in who gets help. A family that cannot afford round-the-clock care might afford a tireless assistant for the night shift. The machine will not call in sick. It will not gossip. It will not quit. It will, of course, fail, and those failures will be as intimate as its successes.

There are imaginable safeguards. A local brain that forgets what it doesn’t need to know. A green light you can see when the camera is on. Clear policies about where data goes and who can ask for it and how long it lives. An emergency override you can use without being a systems administrator at three in the morning. None of these will quiet the unease entirely. Unease is the tax we pay for bringing a new witness into the house.

And yet—watch closely—the room keeps coaching the robot toward a kind of grace. Engineers insist this isn’t poetry; it’s control theory. They talk about torque and closed loops and compliance control, about the way a hand can be strong by being soft. But if you mute the jargon, you hear something else: a search for a tempo that reads as care. The difference between a shove and a support is partly physics and partly music. A breath between actions signals attention. A tiny pause at the top of the lift says: I am with you. Apollo cannot mean that. But it can perform it. When it does, the engineers get quiet in the way people do in chapels and concert halls, the secular places where we admit that precision can pass for grace and that grace is, occasionally, a kind of precision.

There is an old superstition in technology: every new machine arrives with a mirror for the person who fears it most. The mirror in this lab shows two figures. In the first: a patient who would rather accept the cold touch of aluminum than the pity of a stranger. In the second: a nurse who knows that skill is not love but that love, in her line of work, often sounds like skill. The mirror does not choose. It simply refuses to lie.

The machine will steady a trembling arm, and we will learn a new word for the mix of gratitude and suspicion that touches the back of the neck when help arrives without a heartbeat. It is the geometry of tenderness, rendered in aluminum. A question with hands.

THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN AND EDITED UTILIZING AI

Aging, Essays, Health, Psychology, Society

THE CURIOSITY CURE

From Darwin’s worms to Turner’s sunsets, why wonder may be the last great art of growing old.

By Michael Cummins, Editor, September 4, 2025

The rehearsal for memory begins with a question. Where on earth do trees grow with square trunks? It sounds like a riddle from a child’s notebook or a surrealist painting. And it is the question that opened a recent episode of The Guardian’s Science Weekly podcast. The scientists on the program did not answer right away. They made us wait. And that pause, that stretch of uncertainty, is the secret heart of curiosity—the ache that sharpens the mind. To age well, perhaps, is not to gather the answers, but to continue cultivating that ache.

Consider the way a child treats the world. A blurred photograph, a half-said phrase, a dinosaur’s unpronounceable name—all of these are invitations to wonder. Researchers like Dr. Matthias Gruber and Dr. Mary Watley have made a career out of studying that impulse, and what they’ve found is both simple and astonishing. Curiosity—when we let it run its course—lights up the reward circuits of the brain. The hippocampus stirs awake. Memory forms like clay pressed to the mold of desire. The moment of anticipation, the leaning forward in one’s chair before the answer drops—that is where learning becomes not a duty but a joy.

It sounds obvious in theory, yet how often do we short-circuit it? A conversation stalls on a forgotten film title and within seconds a phone flashes the answer. We no longer linger in the sweet spot where knowledge is almost, but not quite, in reach. We save ourselves from the discomfort of not knowing, and in the process, we cheat ourselves of the neurological reward. As Jordan Litman writes in The Curiosity Effect, “we rob ourselves of the very thing that makes knowledge memorable when we outsource every answer to a device.” One study found that people would rather sit with a question, guessing and fumbling, than have the answer immediately revealed. The waiting was the pleasure. In a culture allergic to delay, what are we losing by satisfying every flicker of curiosity instantly?

The story deepens when curiosity is followed across a lifespan. As children, we are indiscriminate: we want to touch, taste, and know everything. By the time we hit our forties, something constricts. The world presses in—mortgages, children, aging parents, bosses, and deadlines—and curiosity, broad and restless, shrinks to a pinhole. This is the curious paradox: we are at our least curious precisely when we are most in need of escape. In middle age, to wonder feels like a luxury. Yet in the later decades, curiosity resurges, not in breadth but in depth. Watley and colleagues, in their 2025 study Curiosity Across the Adult Lifespan, found that while trait curiosity—the stable appetite for knowledge—declines with age, state curiosity, or situational bursts of interest, actually increases in older adults. “We are not less curious with age,” they write, “but differently curious.”

The arc of curiosity across life resembles a river: wide at the source, narrowed by the rocks of midlife, widening again as it approaches the sea. Sakaki, Yagi, and Murayama argue in Curiosity in Old Age: A Possible Key to Achieving Adaptive Aging that this narrowing and widening reflects the brain’s flexibility itself: “Curiosity serves as a dynamic coping resource, allowing older adults to adapt cognitively and emotionally to the challenges of aging.” To age with curiosity is not simply to preserve information, but to practice resilience.

Wallace Stevens sensed this:

Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful…

Aging, in his vision, is not decline but the condition of wonder itself. We perceive beauty because we know it vanishes. Curiosity, then, is a metaphysical defiance, a way of leaning into what slips away. Wallace Stevens also reminds us:

Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.

For the aging mind, curiosity is the metaphorical escape hatch, a refusal to let life calcify into cliché.

Why does it matter? Because curiosity, more than any supplement or crossword puzzle, appears to be a quiet ally against cognitive decline. Those who sustain trait curiosity—the broad hunger for new things—show stronger “cognitive reserve,” the brain’s ability to withstand the slow bruises of age. As Gene Cohen put it in The Aging Brain, “curiosity is not a byproduct of youth; it is a neuroprotective force, a way the brain rehearses its own adaptability.” Cohen’s case studies tell of octogenarians who take up painting, learn Mandarin, or dive into family genealogy not for professional gain, but for sheer, stubborn delight. Their curiosity does not erase aging; it rewrites its script.

Charles Darwin understood this in his final decades. Long after the voyage of the Beagle and the storm of On the Origin of Species, he retreated to Down House, weakened by chronic illness yet still possessed by restlessness. His notebooks from his seventies reveal obsessions not with grand evolutionary arcs but with the behavior of earthworms, how they swallowed soil, turned fields, altered the landscape. Many mocked these studies as trivial. Darwin did not. To him, worms were a final frontier, a slow curiosity about the smallest architects of the earth. He dug into soil and into age itself, confirming what Paul Celan would later crystallize in poetry:

There was earth inside them, and they dug.

Darwin’s late life curiosity was not about conquest but about humility, the patience to follow small questions wherever they led.

So too with Michelangelo, whose last sculptures—the unfinished Rondanini Pietà—show the great master chipping away at marble almost until the day he died at eighty-eight. Gone were the muscular certainties of his youth. What remained was a restless, trembling exploration of form dissolving into spirit. Figures blur, limbs elongate, stone seems to sigh. This was curiosity turned inward, the artist asking: what remains when mastery fades? It was less triumph than question—curiosity as chiseling into mystery itself.

And then J.M.W. Turner, nearly blind, staggering into the London fog of his late years. His paintings in the 1840s dissolve into storms of light and color—Rain, Steam and Speed, the Sea Battles, his almost abstract sunsets. Critics scoffed that he had lost his way. But Turner’s late canvases were curiosity made incandescent: a refusal to paint what he had already mastered, a hunger to see how light itself might undo form.

Turner’s brushstrokes became metaphors for perception itself, daring us to see the world not as fact but as possibility.

But curiosity does more than keep the brain agile—it preserves identity. In their research on learning among older adults, Kim and Merriam discovered that curiosity is inseparable from purpose. “Older learners do not learn to pass time,” they note. “They learn to affirm who they are becoming.” Susan Krauss Whitbourne echoes this in Curiosity and the Aging Self: “Curiosity allows older adults to stitch together continuity and change, to make meaning of both what has been and what is still possible.” To be curious in later life is to declare: I am not finished. Rilke, in Letters to a Young Poet, insists:

The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.

Curiosity in age is not nostalgia but preparation—the invisible pressing inward, asking us still to change. Or, in his famous imperative:

You must change your life.

Of course, the dark side cannot be ignored. Curiosity lures us not only toward symphonies and languages but toward car crashes and scams. Morbid curiosity is what slows traffic by the wreck. Online, it is the bait behind headlines—You won’t believe what happens next—that seduces us into click after click. For older adults, whose craving for resolution may make them less discerning, curiosity can become a liability, leaving them vulnerable to fraud and misinformation. As the Innovative Aging time-sampling study revealed, curiosity in older adults fluctuates with anxiety: high levels of uncertainty can sharpen curiosity, but they can also corrode judgment. “The desire to resolve tension,” the study concludes, “can make older adults more vulnerable to accepting simple but false answers.”

Still, to dismiss curiosity for its risks would be to dismiss fire for its burns. The great artists and thinkers carried it as both burden and gift. Goethe, scribbling in his eighties, remained restless as a student. Toni Morrison published novels when most of her peers were content with memory alone. Frank Lloyd Wright designed the Guggenheim Museum at ninety. Their curiosity was not a refusal to age, but a way of ageing differently—turning each year into another aperture rather than another wall. T.S. Eliot gave it a timeless formulation:

Old men ought to be explorers.

And in his final Quartet:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Curiosity does not deny mortality; it loops us back to origins, reframed by age.

Paul Celan’s fractured lyricism captures the moral weight of this work:

Speak, you too, speak as the last, have your say.

In old age, curiosity is no longer optional—it is the last duty, to remain open, to refuse silence.

One elderly woman, at ninety-one, could often be found hunched at her kitchen table, teaching herself Spanish verbs from a battered paperback workbook. She would never travel to Madrid or Mexico City. She was not chasing utility. She wanted the taste of a new language in her mouth, the satisfaction of puzzle and pattern. When she forgot the word for door in English, she would still smile at having remembered puerta. Her curiosity was not a guard against ageing; it was ageing done with grace. Her curiosity, like what Sakaki and Murayama call a “proxy for adaptive aging,” became her measure of resilience, even in decline.

Curiosity is also spiritual hunger. John Donne, caught in his paradoxes, reminds us:

Be thine own palace, or the world’s thy jail.

To age without curiosity is to dwell in the jail of repetition; to age with it is to build palaces of interior richness. And in the Holy Sonnets, he whispers across centuries:

When thou hast done, thou hast not done, for I have more.

Curiosity ensures that even at the edge of life, there is always more.

So is curiosity the key to ageing well? The podcast hedged. Scientists prefer caution. Yet what their data suggested was less a key than a posture, a way of leaning into the world. Curiosity keeps us not young, but alive to the present. It prevents the slide into cynicism, the sense that we already know what the day will bring. To be curious is to keep finding the world strange and therefore worth waking up to. Or as Whitbourne writes, “Curiosity is the stubborn insistence that the story isn’t over yet.” Stevens, Eliot, Rilke, Donne, Celan—they all converged on the same truth: curiosity in age is not ornament but essence.

The riddle that opened the podcast lingered across the episode like a withheld gift. Where do trees grow with square trunks? Not here, not in the daily landscape we take for granted. They grow in Panama’s Anton’s Valley, a reminder that the world still offers unlikely geometries if we are willing to ask. Perhaps that is the true answer: curiosity does not smooth the years or extend the clock. It gives us square trees in a round world, a glimpse of wonder tucked inside the ordinary. And maybe that glimpse is enough.

THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN AND EDITED UTILIZING AI