I think in a lot of task areas, the cost of maintaining a mechanical device to perform the task will never be lower than paying a human to do it.
Making robot arms that assemble cars is doable because the parts of the car are solid and reliably the same shape, size and weight for every assembled car on that production line. By contrast, the laundry-folding robot and hamburger-making robot are both worthless dead products. A machine can be made to do these tasks, but the cost of operating and maintaining the machine and the amount of downtime it suffers due to mechanical complexity makes it infeasible compared to just paying a human to do the same job.
I think in a lot of task areas, the cost of maintaining a mechanical device to perform the task will never be lower than paying a human to do it.
Making robot arms that assemble cars is doable because the parts of the car are solid and reliably the same shape, size and weight for every assembled car on that production line. By contrast, the laundry-folding robot and hamburger-making robot are both worthless dead products. A machine can be made to do these tasks, but the cost of operating and maintaining the machine and the amount of downtime it suffers due to mechanical complexity makes it infeasible compared to just paying a human to do the same job.