I would say that the rise of manufacturing in China has had a huge impact on the cost of things like this. There is much more manufacturing capacity in the worl

I would say that the rise of manufacturing in China has had a huge impact on the cost of things like this. There is much more manufacturing capacity in the world today than there was in 2008 and it is more accessible on the lower end. I used to order assembled circuit boards in 2008 through a company called Gold Phoenix in China, and it was expensive and slow. Now I order them through JLCPCB and it is cheap and fast. I have been looking at getting some parts 3D printed in stainless steel and they're gonna cost $34 each even in single quantity. Back in 2008 I guess that would have been $600. Hell, in 2008 the cheapest 3D printer was $25,000. Now a cheap 3D printer is $200. Also, there would not have been any use for a humanoid robot in 2008. We didn't have the software to understand the world. Note for example this XKCD comic and the notion that "identify whether a photo is of a bird" was considered "virtually impossible". https://xkcd.com/1425/ https://xkcd.com/1425/ General Electric built a walking truck in 1965, where each actuator was manually controlled by a human. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walking_Truck https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walking_Truck Robotics has generally been held back by software constraints. Deep neural nets didn't get their start until 2012. In 2008, there would have been no market for a humanoid. This one is being sold as an "agent", a term in this context used to describe something acting based on deep neural networks. That's a viable research area now, but was not in 2008. Honda debuted Asimo in 2000, so the tech was possible. There were just limited uses and the software was really complex. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASIMO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASIMO