Humanoid robots barely progressed between 2000-2020. There have obviously been incremental improvements in things like dexterity, vision, self-balancing, and locomotion, but in terms of having a useful humanoid robot, Honda's ASIMO released in the year 2000 is not crazily behind what we had in 2020. So it's not surprise we haven't seen economic dividends yet in the real world.

I think AI is what could make humanoids turn from parlor tricks to huge amounts of utility, but we're really going to have to see how it plays out in the next 5-10 years.

I think they mostly tried to go down this path before we had the transformer. With VLA models, or really now "Large Behavior Models", what's possible has changed dramatically. I've seen robot arms fold laundry now. Textile work is insanely hard, now it's just putting a lot of learned behavior together.

The current humanoid hype don't have much substances or key technologies in it, and incumbent industrial robotics companies like FANUC are already in the process of rolling the techniques created for humanoids into their robots. I personally think this is going to be just series of incremental gains for big welding bots, and nursery equipment becoming mildly robotic, like Aperture Science wall panels, than humanoids walking into retirement homes and doing dishes in the future.

Sounds like "That's a bold strategy, Cotton, let's see if it pays off for 'em."

The "help" goes beyond taking care of themselves. What about food, clothing, infrastructure maintenance, and so on? An inverted population pyramid requires massive increase in the productivity of the economically active part of the population.