Why not both?

Big humanoid robots are expensive, the actuators still suck, and the control problems are hard. Their big advantage is that they can occupy human-shaped spaces, but struggle to do anything useful.

Not to say we won't get humanoid robots eventually, but I think there's probably some low hanging fruit for people to make some other kinds of solutions. Specialized robots for industrial environment, well-thought out appliances for the home.

It would be a bit surprising if the progression was Roomba -> humanoid robot.

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s08148692 an hour ago | parent [-]

We have Google, Figure, Tesla, Boston Dynamics, and literally dozens of Chinese companies building humanoid robots and making huge improvements in the tech. Not there yet by any means as a general-purpose home assistant, but I don't think it will be too surprising if at least one of them succeeds

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chrsw an hour ago | parent [-]

It will take a while before humanoids become useful. You can speed it up with extreme amounts of investment but it still wouldn’t be soon.

	▲	micromacrofoot 29 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I'd say 10 years before they're a luxury item, if you look at what has progressed in the past 10 years it's been massive

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baron816 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I hope humanoids will be ever present, it’s just that the scale of impact from specialized robots will be far greater. Humanoids will be our butlers, but the other robots will be creating a world of unimaginable abundance.