How badly do we need robots? Voice assistants are the first step and while they might be useful for some things they are not widely used. For mundane tasks you have roombas etc, but those fulfill very specific tasks. A versatile robot that can do all your household tasks and complicated things like driving your car are a long, long way off, and i would argue are not even that necessary.
What robots are good at is automation in factories, allowing manufacturers to streamline tasks, perform them faster and save labour, which does drive down prices.
Perhaps with ai the technology to make 'intelligent' robots is finally within sight, but the physical technology is still not there yet, and even if it would be i doubt it would become widely adopted.
We mainly need humanoids to replace jobs with repetitive tasks i.e. harvesting crops or any kind of service related jobs and tasks perofrmed in dangerous environments like mines, disaster zones, war zones etc.
Eventually having a humanoid at home doing the dishes and whatever other tasks we find boring is a byproduct of developing a capable robot for the repetitive and dangerous jobs.
What robots are good at is automation in factories, allowing manufacturers to streamline tasks, perform them faster and save labour, which does drive down prices.
Perhaps with ai the technology to make 'intelligent' robots is finally within sight, but the physical technology is still not there yet, and even if it would be i doubt it would become widely adopted.