I 100% disagree with your conclusion. People don't want robot buddies, they want dishwashers. And dishwasher equivalents for other household tasks.
It was interesting.
A history of mafia men shoveling cash and threats to DJs has me convinced otherwise.
There is/was big money to be made getting your song played on the radio and that system is/was gamed pretty hard.
Give me a smart watch: "This is great, I don't need to pull my phone out!"
Predicting what people will/won't like seems like black magic to me, with after-the-fact efforts to diagnose why "obviously" people did/did not love something somehow only works in hindsight.
I'm not saying the idea of finding something useful and making money providing it is broken, only that pushing the boundaries is inherently unpredictable, because we aren't terribly logical (or at least have a lot of variables at play)
Who ever said that, and why didn't those people carry pocketwatches?
(To be clear, I've always liked having a watch on my wrist but then I grew up with one.)
Years later I got the original Pebble, and while it was great for seeing who was calling me or getting a quick text, or banishing phantom buzz...my primary use was to check the time.
When I was a kid in the 90s, my impression was that most adults wore cheap quartz wristwatches. 25 years later, their kids have grown up but instead of wearing watches just carry phones around, because the smartphone is a good enough time-keeper.
Obviously many people still wear wristwatches, and the same type of people who wore watches as status-marking jewelry 20 years ago probably still do today. But wristwatches are no longer necessary for telling time, as pretty much everyone carries a smartphone everywhere they go. For most people the additional convenience of having the watch on the wrist isn’t worth carrying an extra device, at least not all of the time.
I suspect robots are a bit like that. They make very poor substitutes for people. But, they can do a lot of stuff ('dishwashers', for example), that are basically orthogonal to what people do, but reduce workload immensely.
There are so many gains to be made with real robotics.
I put in Prince and Spotify gives me rap. Prince has nothing to do with wrap. I put in Pizzicato 5 and Spotify gives me J-POP. Pizzicato 5 has nothing to do with J-Pop. I put in a dance tune from a popular western pop band and Spotfiy gives me ballads from popular western pop bands when what I wanted was more dance tunes.
I've never had Spotify or Apple Music or Youtube Music work ever.
Even their own playlists don't work. I tried playing "Morning Pickup" and first 2 songs are super depressing.
But in the long term, I think primate tendency toward dominance means that there's a significant market for people who want to boss around things that can be perceived as other people. I doubt many people want robot buddies, but I'd bet there's quite a market for what are in effect robot slaves.
On the one hand, that seems pretty squicky to me. But on the other, if it keeps them from trying to reduce the freedom of other humans, then godspeed.
People have lived with their human-controlled robots for months, some even took them shopping. While some stuff got broken, it can be a very engaging experience.
Where do you get this idea? Decades of TV shows indicate that people would love to have a robot servant.
Much like airplanes are not imitations of birds, its unlikely household robots will be mistaken for human slaves. A lot of time was wasted in the development years of heavier than air flight by trying to poorly imitate birds using machines.
Whereas you never feel bad for making an appliance work 24/7, or to ask your dishwasher to start his work at 11pm.
The problem is I can get a maid that scrubs my apartment 2x a month for under $200/mo, approx $2k/year. So that sets a very harsh price ceiling on assistance robots.
It means I can leave my dirty underwear on the floor without being judged.
Many people pay lots of money for getting rid of personal inconveniences.