And if you needed it programmable, well an FPGA was still almost as general and far more efficient than a microprocessor.
Guess what won.
It's Moore's law that largely drove what you describe.
Moore's law only applies to semiconductors.
Gears, motors and copper wire are not going to get 10x faster/cheaper every 18 months or whatever.
10 years from now gears will cost more, they will cost what they cost now plus inflation.
I've literally heard super smart YC founders say they just assume some sort of "Moore's law for hardware" will magicallyake their idea workable next year.
Computing power gets, and will continue to get, cheaper every day. Hardware, gears, nuts, bolts, doesnt.
Can you attach it to a humanoid body that isn't wired?
It is those things that are bottlenecking the price of robots.
The price of something tends towards the marginal cost, and the marginal cost of software is close to $0. Robots cost a lot more than that (what's the price of this robot?).
Edit: In fact Figure 03 imply marginal costs matter:
Mass manufacturing: Figure 03 was engineered from the ground-up for high-volume manufacturingOnce software is "done" (we all know software is never done) you can just copy it and distribute it. It is negligiblehow much it costs to do so.
Once hardware is done you have to manufacture each and every piece of hardware with the same care, detail and reliability as the first one. You can't just click copy.
Often times you have to completely redesign the product to go from low volume high cost manufacturing to high volume low cost. A hand made McLaren is very different than an F-150.
The two simply scale differently, by nature of their beasts.
It's not quite startrek replicator but much closer to that than the US view of manufacturing where you have your union guy sitting in front of the machine to pull the lever.