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Huberman Lab · 3 min · Aug 10, 2026
Care robots could ease elder care and hospital workloads
Fei-Fei Li sees robots helping with physical caregiving, wildfire response and hospital work, without replacing family or clinicians. She expects robotics to take decades to mature.
Fei-Fei Li is a professor of computer science at Stanford and AI pioneer.
Co-founded World Labs, whose Marble product generates persistent, high-fidelity 3D worlds from images, video or text.
Andrew Huberman, Host · Host, Huberman Lab
About this segment
Fei-Fei Li sees robots helping with physical caregiving, wildfire response and hospital work, without replacing family or clinicians. She expects robotics to take decades to mature.
From “Using AI to Increase Your Intelligence & Enrich Humanity | Dr. Fei-Fei Li”, Aug 10, 2026. Watch the full episode
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Thanks. We'll look at and fix what's off.
“We know that on a given shift, nurses walk miles to fetch things, get medicine.”
Dr. Fei-Fei Liat 1:40:19 · Huberman Lab1:40:19Takeaways
- Li wants help with physical caregiving while keeping family responsibility intact.
- Robots could assist older people living alone and support wildfire response.
- Nurses spend miles walking to fetch supplies and medicine.
In this episode
Full episode- 9:43ImageNet helped trigger the modern AI breakthrough7:57
- 1:04:34Surgical robots help, but rare procedures lack training data3:06
- 1:50:07World Labs is building AI for spatial intelligence4:09
- 37:05AI can remix recorded ideas but not private experience7:40
- 1:15:35AI can mimic motivation settings without experiencing feelings3:43
- 1:24:21AI oversight needs professional norms and multiple stakeholders3:12
- 1:29:38Students need AI access without losing the effort of learning5:29
1:37:55Care robots could ease elder care and hospital workloads2:54
Transcript
Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.
- 1:37:59
12 months is a little bit too fast for robotics. Two years, three years? I would say if we zoom out, 30 years. 30 years, okay. I'm not saying that's the first time robots hit the street. We already have robotic cars. I'm just saying it takes longer for especially a hardware-also-involved technology to manifest. But I would say, hopefully in you and my lifetime, I would love to see robots being part of our society, helping us.
- 1:38:32
For example, I'm a single grown-up child taking care of two very advanced-aged and very sick parents. And they happen not to speak English either. The amount of work I do is incredible, right? So I would love to have help. It doesn't take away family's responsibility. It doesn't take away love. It doesn't take away the necessary communication. But the physical labor would really, certain part, I would love to get help.
- 1:39:07
We live in the state of California. What is the one thing we all experience? Traffic. High taxes. A certain part of California doesn't have traffic, but wildfires. Oh, wow. Yes. Right. Who is fighting these wildfires? Putting humans in danger of rescue, natural disaster is not a great idea, right? So my family and my parents happen to have enough means, but I was just thinking an elderly living alone, how do they go get grocery?
- 1:39:45
How do they go get medicine? Now, there might be some shipping we are starting to see, but what if they want to go, you know, for a walk or want to go to a park? So there are just so many things. Oh, by the way, you're in the School of Medicine. We don't have an excess of caretakers. We have a shortage of caretakers. Our nurses are deeply fatigued and overworked. I was literally in the hospital with my dad for the past month and just watching the amount of work nurses do.
- 1:40:24
We know that on a given shift, nurses walk miles to fetch things, get medicine. There's just so many. Can you imagine robots helping, right? Like, so there are just so many ways that our society can be structured and can benefit from help. Oh, I love these examples.