Comment by lambdaone
People always vastly overestimate what can be done in the short term, and vastly underestimate what can be done in the long term.
I'm reclining right now typing on what would have been in the 1980s an unimaginable hypercomputer lying in my lap, at a cost far less in inflation-adjusted terms roughly that of a ZX80, connected by gigabit-speed links to a world-spanning network of similarly unimaginably fast servers connected by near-terabit optical links. And all this has changed the world in ways impossible to anticipate in the 1980s, ways that look like the most extreme cyberpunk fiction of that time. Who could have anticipated, for example, that politics is now substantially driven by covert bot farms, or that LLMs could seduce people into suicidal psychoses?
Yes, robots are going to be underwhelming for quite some considerable time, just like the ZX81 represented almost no improvement over the ZX80 and so on - each generation represented only a marginal increase over the previous. Solar panels were crap 20 years ago; toys useful only for powering pocket calculators. But they got a little bit better year by year, and small improvements compund exponentially. Now renewables are approaching 50% of electrical power generation in many places, and it's pretty clear that in another 20 years, wind/solar/battery will be the sole generation source for all but the most niche activities.
I expect the robot boosterism of the present day to bust pretty quickly when we see how different their capabilities are from the fantasy. But fast-forward just 20 years, and supply chains adapt much faster than expected (cf. Chinese electric car manufacturing) and the concept of ubiquitous robotics seems much more feasible. It certainly seems likely that if we can make roughly 100 million cars every year, we can make robots at a similar rate. I think it's likely to change the world in ways we can't imagine yet.
People live longer than 20 years, and the average person born today can expect to see perhaps four such technological revolutions. Think long-term.
Your laptop is an advanced computer, but the intelligence and computer power is in the cloud. GPU is expensive and no way we can provide it to everyone on earth. Material-wise we have limitations. Unless we destroy the earth, we won't have the amount of raw material that we need to automate cheap jobs. The ROI is too low.
So the likely trajectory is not a sudden wave of millions of helpful humanoids, but selective automation in structured environments like warehouses, factories, controlled logistics, where conditions are predictable and ROI is clear. Meanwhile, messy, unstructured "dirt jobs" persist as human work because humans are still the most adaptable system available at the lowest upfront cost, maybe not today in the welfare state in Europe, but for sure in other places on Earth...