Humanoid robots still address a narrow, incremental market: places built around the human body, yet too irregular for a purpose-built machine to navigate easily. Their promise lies in entering those unstructured environments without first requiring the environment itself to be redesigned.
Specialized machines will continue to do most individual jobs better. Yet the sensors, actuators, control systems, and commercial lessons developed for those machines can also become the modular foundations of more general-purpose platforms. Progress may therefore move in both directions: specialized robotics lending maturity to humanoids, and humanoid research creating new demand for better specialized components.
Specialized systems are unlikely to disappear, especially where performance, reliability, or cost matters more than adaptability. In that respect, the relationship between humanoid and specialized robots resembles the relationship between AGI and vertical AI: breadth is valuable, but it does not make depth obsolete.
I remain skeptical of both humanoid robots and AGI, particularly of the assumption that generality will arrive at an acceptable cost. A machine capable of adapting to nearly every human environment may be possible long before it is economical.
Even so, the possibility that these two lines of research might one day meet — and produce something recognizably like embodied AGI — remains difficult not to contemplate.