The comment which originated this subthread was about telling a bot to get a sandwich and clean the toilet. This implies a single bot and the verbiage implies a

The comment which originated this subthread was about telling a bot to get a sandwich and clean the toilet. This implies a single bot and the verbiage implies an agent with strong autonomy. The disadvantage of the specialized machines you speak of is their limited to no adaptability, inflexibility to novel situations and obsolescence upon changing environments. There's need for actually smart appliances (which is what the kind of robots you spoke would be) but they'd be best suited to easily circumscribable tasks. Not what many have in mind when they think robots.