But all of that is assuming a world where research is being done by humans, or by some mix of humans and something like current LLMs. The bottlenecks would ultimately come down to human judgement and human oversight, and that's a significant limiting factor. Plus, you have to push matter around, which takes time, and you have to extract a lot of information out of limited experiences, which LLMs are bad at.

But if someone is reckless and clever enough to build AIs that can completely replace engineers, or that only need humans as hands, then I don't think we can count on robotics remaining intractable for more than a decade or so. In a wide variety of circumstances, it's possible to make do with worse actuators than the human hand, or with specialized actuators. We can already build incredibly precise motors and specialized sensors. The trouble comes with trying to pack enough of them together to replicate the full generality of the human hand. (I have actually helped build task-specific actuators that did quite well with a single motor and a single visual sensor, before.)

So to put my position more precisely: we cannot automate manual labor robotics without having previously automated creative intellectual labor. But conditional on automating creative research, then I expect worryingly rapid advances in robotics.

To be clear, I think that developing fully-general replacements for human intellectual and physical labor would potentially be the biggest disaster in all of human history.