Sure, I understand the need for the robot autonomy. The problem, as I see it, is that current robots (autonomous or not) suck. They suck primarily because we do

Sure, I understand the need for the robot autonomy. The problem, as I see it, is that current robots (autonomous or not) suck. They suck primarily because we don't have good algorithms. Without such algorithms or models, it does not matter whether a robot is autonomous or not, or how much processing power it has. Only after we have the algorithms, the other issues you mentioned might become relevant. Finally, it's not clear yet if we need more compute than what's currently available (e.g. at Tesla) to develop the algorithms. p.s. I don't think AGI is needed for robotics. I suspect that even an ant's level of intelligence (together with existing ML algorithms) might be enough for robots to do almost all the tasks we might want them to do today. It's ironic that robots today can see, read, speak, understand spoken commands, drive a car (more or less), play simple video games, and do a lot of other cool stuff, but still can't walk around an apartment without falling or getting stuck, do laundry, wash dishes, or cook food.