Of course we don’t need them. We don’t need so many things that the ruling class pushes on us like war and austerity.
What we have now is feudalism with a few extra layers of abstraction. Can you picture feudalism without the need for a class of serfs? I’ll give you a hint…on a long enough timeline this humanoid robot serf replacement program produces only two potential outcomes:
- countless murdered poor people.
- post-scarcity utopia like we see in Star Trek: TNG.
Which one do you think is more likely?
Further thinking on this topic: https://youtu.be/7Pq-S557XQU?si=SQOhfYjLoy2rt0lw
The utopia of Star Trek was only able to happen because they had a WWIII and the communists won
i think humanoid robot are inefficient. We shouldn’t follow the blueprint of human body but give them legs and arms that are suited for mechanical move and metal structure so they are easier to maitain and repair.
I think it’s moreso a matter of evolution. We know humanoid bodies can do anything we can do, so we start with that and make incremental improvements from there. We already do have plenty of other body shapes for robots (6-axis arms, SPOT, drones, etc) but none of them are general-purpose. Also, the robot shown in the article is pretty clearly not fully humanoid, it has weird insect legs probably because it’s easier to control and it doubles as a vertical lift.
