Humanoid robots that can do manual labor are going to be make or break for wealthy economies in the next two decades. Aging populations need help, and most successful nations do not have enough young people to do half the work they need done.
They're pretty good at helping themselves. Close to where I used to live in Bavaria we had a pilot project of communal living for the elderly in a community of about a hundred people that included people with quite severe conditions such as dementia.
Medical and care personell routinely checked in but they were largely self sufficient and did a remarkably job of taking care of themselves, maybe most importantly the were happy and quite dignified, something I cannot imagine is the case when your only contact is a humanoid robot.
Of course in an age where every solution is yet another technology rethinking social life isn't very high up the list.
It's also something we could help by getting rid of zoning in cities, of course, because we constantly push low income elderly out to the edges of urban areas where they can afford to live, rather than allowing supply to keep up with demand in dense, walkable, accessible places where people who can't drive can actually have quality of life.
I think AI is what could make humanoids turn from parlor tricks to huge amounts of utility, but we're really going to have to see how it plays out in the next 5-10 years.
This is something people refuse to understand. The shape of the robot changes absolutely nothing about robot intelligence unless it abandons the basic concept of joints and links. Continuum robots are very difficult to control but they are also incredibly niche.
Successful nations haven’t had enough young people to care for the elderly because they’ve all been employed as knowledge workers. Knowledge work is going away rapidly. The only work that will be left are things that require actual human bodies (for now).
In short, jobs like elder care are suddenly going to have an enormous number of new job seekers, since it requires human presence and isn’t taxing physical labor.
Demand for the output of knowledge work can increase while demand for those who produce it falls. “Knowledge work” is not a product with inherent demand, just like you and I don’t go to the store to buy farm labor.
Also, both the pay rates for agricultural labor and the pay for developing agricultural machinery are much higher than the pay for agricultural labor was in the past.
Knowledge work is an ever expanding umbrella, just as agricultural work is.