The History of Insurance and the Coming Age of Humanoid Robots

Who pays when the machine is wrong? It's a question insurance has answered five times in 160 years — for the steam boiler, the automobile, the aircraft, the power grid, and the networked computer — and each time, the coverage that emerged quietly became the safety standard the technology had to live by. Right now the AI agents running inside your company are losing that coverage as insurers write new exclusions, and the humanoid robots headed for the warehouse floor and the public sidewalk will force the question harder than anything before them. In this talk I'll trace the 160-year pattern that turns every "uninsurable" new machine into an insurable one, and use it to forecast the timeline, the trigger events, and the liability reckoning coming for physical AI. You'll leave able to see the next machine age the way an underwriter does — as a series of predictable, dated events, most of which haven't happened yet. If you build, deploy, insure, or invest in AI, come find out who's really on the hook when the machine gets it wrong.