The incentive is definitely there, but right now we physically just don’t have enough rare earth supply to make the number of motors required. So we simply cannot scale that production up to the level where it would be cost effective to displace humans. This is assuming fine motor control is “solved” which it is not currently, but I think LLMs will take care of that soon enough.

I think the company that cracks the mass market robotics puzzle will be the next trillion (quadrillion?) dollar company. I suspect that would require bypassing the dependency on rare earths, but there seem to be no serious contenders out there? All the big shots are focusing on using current technologies because they basically “solve” motors. Maybe the company that does crack this puzzle will come out of left field with an unconventional technology that scales with whatever raw material is abundant, like OpenAI did with ChatGPT and compute.