I disagreed, then re-read your post, then re-read the OP, and now I've come full circle to apologize; I think you make a fair point.

I work at a biotech. We spent who knows how much time and money trying to develop a 'lab technician bot' to automate one of our critical assays. Turns out, a 6-figure machine still isn't as economical as my coworker Y, one of the veteran lab-technicians. Sure she takes the occasional sick day but even at our volume (and we do industrial-level, multiple clients batched into a single assay pass) it won't be economical to replace her for a very long time (if we even reach that scale).

But that does follow. The economics working is not some outside factor. If the robot “could do the task” but would cost more than paying a human to do the same task then the robot “does not work”. It is frequently because the robot would be too slow, or not reliable enough, or could only handle certain types of items. But ultimately all of these boil down to cost.

We have seen lab demoes of robotic manipulation for decades. The reason why they stay in the lab (when they do) and don’t become ubiquitous is because they are not good enough. In other words they don’t work. The economics and “does it work” is not two separate concerns but one and the same.

What is the point of humanoid “general” robots then? We already have pretty reliable ways to make and train humans. Humans are cheaper and better than robots. I could imagine robots for some specialised tasks where you don’t want to use a human for eg security reasons, but you don’t need general purpose robots for that

A friend who works at Amazon made the same point: "We don't really need robots in the FCs urgently [other than the Kivas], because it turns out you can just pay people $17/hour"