The end of cheap labour?

China has just wrapped up an Olympics of a rather different kind. The athletes have two arms and two legs. They run, jump, box, play football, lift weights. They fall, and increasingly, they get back up in ways that are unsettlingly human.

Except they are not human.

At the 2026 World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing, more than 2,000 humanoid robots from 666 teams competed across 51 events. One robot, Tiangong Ultra, ran the 100 metres in 8.64 seconds — almost a full second faster than Usain Bolt's world record. Others competed in high jump, football and boxing, alongside less Olympic pursuits such as restaurant service, industrial work and emergency response.

One moment stayed with me. A robot finished its run and collapsed, the way an exhausted athlete might after giving everything it had. Others crumpled after crossing the finish line. The scenes felt oddly familiar — mechanical bodies performing the choreography of human exhaustion.

A decade ago, I would have found all this enormously entertaining.

Today, I find it terrifying.

Those of us who grew up in the 1980s and '90s watched The Terminator as science fiction — an intelligent machine in a human body, safely confined to the screen. The comfort was knowing that when the film ended, the Terminator stayed inside the television.

That distinction is disappearing.

Where I live in America, robot taxis now drive themselves past me with nobody behind the wheel — sometimes with no passenger at all. An empty robotaxi often glides up beside me at a red light, then pulls away, presumably en route to its next paying fare. Waymo says its autonomous vehicles now provide more than 400,000 rides a week across six major U.S. metropolitan areas; in 2025 alone, they completed 15 million rides.

This is no longer a conversation about the future.

The future has begun its shift.

And for countries like Bangladesh, that should trigger a far more serious conversation than the one we're having.

Bangladesh possesses something we have long treated as an almost inexhaustible economic resource: people. Millions of Bangladeshis work overseas, particularly across the Gulf and other labour-importing economies.

The IOM estimates that 8.7 million Bangladeshi nationals were living abroad by 2024, with labour migration dominating the country's outward flow. Those workers send enormous sums home — remittances reached a record $32.8 billion in 2025, roughly 7.4% of Bangladesh's GDP, according to World Bank data.

But what, precisely, are we exporting?

In large part, we are exporting human physical capability. Construction workers. Drivers. Machine operators. Warehouse staff. Security guards. Restaurant employees. Cleaners. Delivery workers. Factory hands.

For decades, the economic logic has been simple: wealthy countries need labour done, and Bangladesh has millions willing to do it at competitive wages.

Now imagine a machine that can do much of that work instead.

It needs no visa. It requires no housing. It sends no salary home to another country. It does not tire after an eight-hour shift. It can work through the night, converse in multiple languages and absorb new skills through a software update rather than a training course.

That machine is no longer hypothetical.

BMW says its Figure 02 humanoid robot worked ten-hour shifts during a 2025 deployment at its South Carolina plant. Over ten months, it helped produce more than 30,000 BMW X3s, moved over 90,000 components and logged roughly 1,250 operating hours. BMW is now expanding humanoid testing into Germany.

In American warehouses, Agility Robotics' bipedal Digit has moved beyond laboratory demonstrations into commercial logistics, unloading containers and feeding goods onto conveyor belts. China already had more than two million industrial robots in operation in 2024 — the largest installed base in the world.

The point is not that robots will eliminate every migrant job next year. They will not. Construction sites are chaotic. Plumbing demands improvisation. Elder care demands empathy. Restaurants involve the unpredictability of human customers. The human hand remains extraordinarily versatile.

The danger is subtler than replacement.

Robots do not need to replace every worker to upend the economics of migrant labour. They only need to become cheaper than hiring the next one.

And physical automation is only half the story.

Now give that humanoid body an AI brain. Today's large AI systems can already translate languages, parse documents, write code, interpret images and answer sophisticated technical questions. Pair increasingly capable artificial intelligence with increasingly capable robotic bodies, and the old distinction — manual workers threatened by robots, educated workers protected by knowledge — begins to dissolve.

The construction worker may face the humanoid robot.

The office worker may face the AI agent.

Eventually, many of us may face both, sometimes in a single robotic device.

This is where Bangladesh's development strategy needs urgent reconsideration.

For years, we have congratulated ourselves on a large population and cheap labour. But in an age of intelligent machines, having millions of people with two functioning hands cannot remain an economic strategy. Bangladesh must move its workforce upward — into advanced manufacturing, nursing and healthcare, engineering, robotics maintenance, skilled construction trades, industrial electronics, AI-assisted services and other fields where humans complement technology rather than compete against it purely on cost. We should also teach workers to operate, repair and supervise the machines that threaten their jobs.

The robot Olympics are funny today. A machine topples over and everyone laughs. Another throws an awkward punch. A third fumbles an object a five-year-old could pick up without thought.

We should enjoy the comedy while it lasts.

Because between the 2025 and 2026 Games, machines that once looked clumsy began breaking human athletic records. The speed of that improvement may be the most important message to come out of Beijing.

The question for Bangladesh, then, is not whether robots are coming.

They are already here.

The question is whether, by the time they become cheap enough, smart enough and reliable enough to outcompete the labour we currently export, we will have prepared our people to do something the robots cannot.

That may prove to be one of the defining economic questions of the next decade.

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Shafquat Rabbee is a Geopolitical Commentator who writes from the United States