On the Horizon is a New Glarus 360 feature looking beyond today’s headlines at larger economic, demographic, technological and cultural changes that may eventually reach our community. The goal is not to predict the future, but to recognize consequential changes while they are still far enough away to prepare for them.

Imagine walking down 1st Street a decade from now (maybe sooner) and passing a human-shaped robot carrying two bags of groceries. It is not a festival attraction. It belongs to someone who lives nearby, and it is heading home.

For many people, that picture still feels closer to “The Jetsons” than New Glarus. Humanoid robots have been promised for decades, and the machines demonstrated today remain expensive, imperfect and limited. The skepticism is warranted.

But something has changed. Tesla is installing production lines designed to build many thousands of humanoid robots in a single year. BMW has already put a humanoid on an American assembly line. Morgan Stanley and Citi are publishing billion-robot forecasts. Nvidia is building the computing infrastructure, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is writing performance benchmarks for them. These are not fringe institutions, and they are acting now.

Elon Musk put an extraordinary number on the possibility Sept. 1 while speaking remotely to the G20 Innovation Ministerial in North Carolina. Musk said that 10 years from now there could be “well over a billion humanoid robots,” each eventually producing roughly five times the output of a human worker. His explanation: “The robots will start manufacturing the robots,” allowing production to accelerate as robots help build even more robots.