Why does a laundry folding bot have to have the physical strength to be able to kill somebody?

The principle of least privilege has been a hard learned lesson in cybersecurity. Why do we again need to first go through disasters to re-learn it in the physical world?

If a general-purpose humanoid robot has the strength to perform human actions at human speed, it will have that much torque in the motors. If it didn't, it can only move very slowly and/or jerkily. You need fast, high-torque feedback to stabilise the physical control system, especially if the robot is supposed to be able to lift and manipulate objects.

The idea here is Optimus-type robots that can do everything like a human and therefore don't need special infrastructure, as opposed to dedicated, immobile low-torque, low-velocity robots specifically for, say, laundry.

You can layer a safety system on top of the raw motor control but it's very complicated to define what is and isn't safe, especially when you consider what the robot is holding (and what it THINKS it is holding), where the robot is (or thinks it is) at the time, what is around it (what it thinks is about it) and so on.

Which isn't a robot-specific problem. Humans spend years learning how to subconsciously safely interact with their environment and even then fuck it up sometimes. What is robot-specific is being made of metal and having the "safe hand velocity within 10cm of a human head" function bypass be one bug or OTA update away.