Most physical problems require some level of creativity: your door opening robot should be able to handle some level of dust on the handle, some level of slipperiness of the floor, some amount of packages blocking where it wants to stand, and crucially: some level of all of those things where it gives up rather than causing damage.

You can't open-loop everything, and the edge cases in a closed-loop absolutely explodes.

Yes, a “digital assistant“ responsible only for handling a door is manageable, but even “get a pot, fill it with water, and boil it” gets _remarkably_ complicated if you need reduce all the edge cases to known regions of behaviour that you can pre-program responses to.

Yes, but I want those sensor input and fail modes handled with deterministic classical algorithms without (LLM) creativity, otherwise I envision doors that refuse to open on certain dates, because somewhere in its training corpus was a satirical sci fi story about depressed smart doors.

(And no, I was not talking about a robot butler, but a automatic door. Infrared triggered, but enhanced with a text mode for control)