Earlier quoted context omitted.
VRML may not have taken off in the 90's, but I can, today, go to https://play-cs.com/ and have a have a jaunt in a virtual world. There are tons of other virtual worlds to explore. Second Life is still around. It took 3 decades to get to where we are today witht that. If it takes until 2066 for humanoid robots to arrive, I won't be around to see them, but it also won't be a fantasy by then. I'm hoping it won't take q…
You might have forgotten some of the most-funded ventures in VRML. It wasn't just "exploring virtual worlds" or whatever, they wanted VR to be the way you interact with the whole of computing. Checking emails, web browsing, chat, spreadsheets. Second Life at al are cool, but a fraction of the vision of VRML as it was presented in the '90s. Apple quite literally reheated the idea of VRML with Vision Pro, and we all sa…
It's impossible to predict the reality of product market fit for the future. It sucks doing the dishes, even with the washing machine doing the work, so how about the cabinets themselves are the washing machine so you just put dishes back where they came from and they're cleaned by the cabinets. No humanoid robot maid needed.
If we look at cost as the optimization driver, we really have to dig into the nitty-gritty of robotics. The big one is the amount of energy that we exert just standing there versus a humanoid robot just standing there is ridiculous. So then a centar looking thing. Or maybe one point of contact with the ground which is a ball and the machine runs balancing and hopping algorithms. Pogo stick traversal might be most efficient, given enough compute to make it feasible.