Imagine I give you a perfect roadmap to build that robot...
Responding to your edit, none of those things strike me as any more challenging than the control software.
That trash picker may never compete with a human. There's no reason to assume it will.
edit:
> none of those things strike me as any more challenging than the control software
Maybe the difficulties of motors and batteries are not intuitive. Look at their improvement rates over time. It's a far cry from transistor counts or FLOPS. And look at the performance and efficiency of humans and other animals. We are absurdly strong, light, efficient and cheap to maintain. The gap is huge and not closing quickly.
If it's not C3PO it's a Boston Dynamics dog with a couple appendages, better software, and automated manufacturing.
iRobot, the company that shipped the most robots in history because they focused super hard on finding a cost-effective subset of cleaning tasks, failed to scale up to other even closely related tasks, went bust and was sold off.
But yeah, it's probably straightforward, right?
I didn’t make any claims about the relative difficultly.
Advanced robotics would need to become quite cheap for them to become more affordable and convenient than a minimum-wage employee. And physical fields like materials engineering are known for moving quite slowly and at their own pace, so I'm not sure how much automation could help there.
That's the last barrier we have right now that prevents the total obsolescence (and therefore destruction) of the common worker.
1. The discussion setup where you imagine a counterfactual is given by magic does not entail that magic can do any other thing you choose.
“Imagine I give you $100, what do you spend it on?”
“A McClaren, since you could have given me $300K”
2. Taking your question directly: because these are not closely related problems.
My question was a sincere ask to define, in this scenario, what is prohibiting that other magic?
Do you have relevant experience in any of those fields?