The plan has always been to build the robots together with the better AI. Robots ended up being much harder than early technologists imagined for a myriad different reasons. It turned out that AI is easier or at least that is the hope.
Actually I'd argue that we've had robots forever, just not what you'd consider robots because they're quite effective. Consider the humble washing machine or dishwasher. Very specialized, and hyper effective. What we don;'t have is Gneneralized Robotics, just like we don't have Generalized Intelligence.
Just as "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic", "Any sufficiently omnipresent advanced technology is indistinguishable from the mundane". Chat GPT will feel like your smart phone which now feels like your cordless phone which now feels like your corded phone which now feels like wireless telegram on your coal fired steam liner.
No, AI is tremendously harder than early researchers expected. Here's a seminal project proposal from 1955:
"We propose that a 2 month, 10 man study of artificial intelligence be carried out during the summer of 1956 at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. The study is to proceed on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it. An attempt will be made to find how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves. We think that a significant advance can be made in one or more of these problems if a carefully selected group of scientists work on it together for a summer. “
GP didn't say that AI was easier than expected, rather that AI is easier than robotics, which is true. Compared to mid-century expectations, robotics has been the most consistently disappointing field of research besides maybe space travel, and even that is well ahead of robots now.
I am not working in that field, but as an outsider it feels like the industrial robots doing most of the work on TSMC's and Tesla's production lines are on the contrary extremely advanced. Aside from that what Boston Dynamics or startups making prosthetics came up is nothing short of amazing.
If anything software seems to be the bottleneck for building useful humanoids...
I think the state of the art has gotten pretty good, but still nowhere near as good as people thought it would be fifty years ago. More importantly, as of a year ago AI is literally everywhere, hundreds of millions of regular users and more than that who've tried it, almost everyone knows it exists and has some opinion on it. Compare that to even moderately mobile, let alone general, robots. They're only just starting to be seen by most people on a regular basis in some specific, very small geographical locations or campuses. The average person interacts with a mobile or general robot 0 times a day. Science fiction as well as informed expert prediction was always the opposite way around - robots were coming, but they would be dumb. Now it's essentially a guarantee that by the time we have widespread rollout of mobile, safe, general purpose robots, they are going to be very intelligent in the ways that 20 years ago most thought was centuries away.
Basically, it is 1000x easier today to design and build a robot that will have a conversation with you about your interests and then speak poetry about those interests than it is to build a robot that can do all your laundry, and that is the exact opposite of what all of us have been told to expect about the future for the last 70 years.
Space travel was inevitably going to be disappointing without a way to break the light barrier. even a century ago we thought the sound barrier was impossible to penetrate, so at least we are making progress, albiet slow.
On the bright side, it is looking more and more like terraforming will be possible. Probably not in our lifetimes, but in a few centuries time (if humanity survives)
