This is my thinking as well. Robots have become the new jetpack it seems. Lots of conjecture and promises from people unfamiliar with the industry. I read these

This is my thinking as well. Robots have become the new jetpack it seems. Lots of conjecture and promises from people unfamiliar with the industry. I read these articles from time to time and they more or less assume we have some level of working AI and cheap robot arms and legs with the degrees of freedom and strength a person has. We're not remotely there. In fact, services like Google Now, Cortana, and Siri are comically well... stupid. Expert systems tied to various databases does not make for a very intelligent agent, at least on the level we're talking about here. The home robot market is also comically stupid and filled with things like Pepper or Jibo or Robotbase which are little more than ipads on wheels. As a robot hobbyist I'm very bewildered about all this empty futurism. What robots have these journalists seen that can trivially roll into McDonalds are start taking orders, for example. How are they handle natural language processing in a noisy and high speed environment full of fault prone humans? If robots like these are going to come about we'll first be seeing stuff like this on the hobbyist level, then in children's toys and other novelty seeking industries, and only later in places like retail or offices. I'm sure physical automation paired with intelligence will eventually eat the world, but eventually isn't two years from now. It might be more like two hundred. Or even two thousand. General purpose robotics is a hard problem. Its not remotely solved.