The human hand has about 27 degrees of freedom. Around 21 of those are in the fingers & thumb - four in each finger, five in the thumb with the rest in the wrist. Unitree's new Dex5-S hand has 22. Real-hand size for $6,500. On paper that's roughly finger-for-finger parity with you. In practice it isn't & the gap is the interesting part. Your hand is packed with sensors - touch, pressure, temperature, stretch & the motion is only half of what makes it a hand. Robotic hands have been matching joint counts for years while lagging badly on feeling what they're holding. What Unitree got right is closer to biology than the joint count: every joint is backdrivable. Push a finger & it yields rather than locking. Human hands work the same way where tendons & muscles are compliant, which is why you can catch a falling glass without shattering it. Rigid robot fingers can't. And the price is the other story. Dexterous hands used to cost more than most of the robots they were attached to. At $6,500 they become something labs can buy in quantity, break & iterate on. That matters beyond humanoids. Prosthetics research runs on exactly this kind of hardware & cheaper, more human-like hands are how better ones get built. Twenty-two joints is the easy part. Touch is still the hard one. 🦾