"The vision" is that instead of building 9999 specialist robots for 9999 different tasks, you mass produce one robot model that can do all of them.

Less efficiently, sure, but for the manufacturing, logistics, maintenance? The economies of scale are immense.

The reason why we weren't doing exactly that back in the 80s isn't that universal humanoid robots somehow weren't desirable. It's that for a universal humanoid hardware to be useful, you need a fairly universal AI to back it.

That "universal AI" was nowhere to be seen back in the 80s, or the 90s, or the 00s. Now, we finally have a good idea of how to build the kind of AI required for it.

> you mass produce one robot model that can do all of them.

This just occurred to me: do standard industry robotic arms not fit that description perfectly? They're not specialized for any particular task, the only customizable parameters are the size and the end effector.

They can move around car bodies or seats, or pick up an airbrush. They can probably be installed with a five-fingered hand, or onto a giant human torso, should such tools somehow made sense for some applications. They feel like the generalist robot that meets most of the expectations for the hypothetical factory humanoids, sans being a humanoid. I mean, I get it, but aren't those existing bots just what "the vision" calls for?

I can see that for the factory floor, but there's no particular reason for "it" to be "humanoid".

It's basically a robot arm with mobility at that point, and if you need more than one, just have more than one robot wheel into place. There's no particular reason to have two arms.. one, or three, or five are all sensible numbers. Heck, a chassis supporting a variable number of arms and other appendages (sensors and so on) is plausible, and the control system looks more like an ant-colony mind than a human one.

Which is a long-winded way of saying, there's no particular reason to link embodiment and cognition at the individual arm level in a factory scenario.

But then you need one robot that's got 9,999 specializations. A human can't actually do 10,000 things. You need 10,000 humans, each that goes through a specialization process (training, developing muscle memory, etc) that builds both physiology and mental capability specific to the skill. Not only does the robot need to be capable of every incredibly difficult physical skill we learn, it needs a matching program.

It's impossible to do this in a general way. This could theoretically be scalable (produce the robot and have 10,000 companies all develop their own specialization routines), but the hardware (both the parts as well as neural interface) needs to be as capable as a human body, which isn't even remotely true. The physical robot will always limit what skills it can learn, on top of the difficulty of programming the skill.

I think we're hundreds of years away from making a robot that's as capable as a human. We would get there faster with synthetics or cyborgs. Create a human body without a brain, use Neuralink to operate it. Until then, specialized robots are the only thing that will scale to 10,000 skills.

The other part of that argument that I've seen is that they'd be able to use generic tools made for humans.

The other part of this vision is that out of 9999 different tasks, only 1-2 are routine enough and valuable enough to merit a purpose-built robot. But a generalist robot could theoretically do an almost infinite variety of low-stakes tasks that people currently do.

The question is how much less efficiently. The point on which it all hinges is that it needs to be a little less efficiently, but the reality is probably that it's so much less that it's no longer really viable.

Like, Digit costs a quarter mil and is rated for 10 thousand hours. It can stack boxes. For that price you can turn every box in your warehouse into an AGV and they'll last you forever.