I'm actually pretty bullish on humanoid robots like the Tesla bot - combination of LLMs, cheap batteries/motors/controllers from cars and vision research should be able to come together in useful and cheap ways in a few years, say 2030.
$35K for a robot that can putter around the house doing basic stuff is just not that high of a bar. With a 10 year life span, that's $3.5k/year, or $10/day. Doing 1 hour of useful minimum wage work around the house is just not that high of a bar - doing laundry, cleaning, tidying up, weeding, wiping surfaces down, taking out the garbage etc. If it can do some combination of those, it would make sense for basically every household. And it doesn't need to be able to do the crazy parkour of Boston Dynamics to achieve this. Our world is generally designed to be operable by all sorts of people - disabled, old etc. Crazy athleticism isn't required to do useful work.
Agreed on the big value of robotics in the near term, but Tesla won't be the company to do it. Tesla will make an "affordable" humanoid but will struggle to get useful and robust autonomy out the door for the entirety of its offering.
They thing to keep in mind about the "Boston Dynamics approach" is that in order to solve the hardest real world problems, you need to do one of two things:
1) Overshoot the capabilities of the system so that it is robust when actually deployed subject to the uncertainty of the real world (e.g. motivating athletic intelligence).
2.) Grossly constrain your environment so that uncertainty is not a factor. This is (and has been) happening in warehouses and factories for decades.
$35K for a robot that can putter around the house doing basic stuff is just not that high of a bar. With a 10 year life span, that's $3.5k/year, or $10/day. Doing 1 hour of useful minimum wage work around the house is just not that high of a bar - doing laundry, cleaning, tidying up, weeding, wiping surfaces down, taking out the garbage etc. If it can do some combination of those, it would make sense for basically every household. And it doesn't need to be able to do the crazy parkour of Boston Dynamics to achieve this. Our world is generally designed to be operable by all sorts of people - disabled, old etc. Crazy athleticism isn't required to do useful work.