In natural ecosystems, nobody beats the apex predator directly, and nobody beats the hyperspecialized niche critter at their own game. The new species has some advantage that’s different than what is there.

If a humanoid robot is slower dumber human that is expensive, requires power, can’t get wet, falls over, and doesn’t understand stairs. Is not sleeping and being radiation tolerant enough of an advantage to be worth it?

They already are, the problem with humanoid robots is that people think that adding legs to the robot will somehow fundamentally make it more intelligent.

People see a robot arm attached to a stationary platform and understand it requires integration work to perform a single task.

But when those same people see a humanoid robot, they think they can just talk to it like a real human and it will do what you told it to do.

They don't think about the fact that the humanoid robot has to be programmed exactly the same way the stationary robot arm has to be programmed and that programming the legs in addition to the arms is a much more challenging problem.

Funnily enough, cars have their own way of pooping and dying of a heart attack.

Cars can stop working suddenly in many many ways, for many reasons.

    > when I can pay people from the third world

C-suite has been saying this for 30+ years. They never tire of it. Ask yourself: At this point in time, why aren't all programmers working from low cost jurisdictions?

I dunno, I worked in an Amazon Warehouse for a year part-time (and a couple of weeks full-time when in-between jobs) --- on one occasion, I pulled up to a bin full of non-descript cardboard boxes near where a group of trainees were working their way through, grabbed one box, spun it around for the six-sided box check, scanned it, confirming it was the right one, and before I could move on to my next pick, a trainee asked, "How did you know that was the right box?", which required a several minute explanation of how the item description and the slight differentiations of the boxes led to that conclusion.

The big win would be training the folks doing stowing to not create such situations and to put markedly different things in each rainbow bin.