First think about the practical, legal and PR challenges of putting self-driving vehicles on public roads.

Putting autonomous robots in amongst humans is that problem, on steroids.

Edit: there’s a reason why industrial robots all have a hazard zone marked around them, and some even have transparent safety screens or cages

In my opinion the hardware isn't there yet for general purpose robotics and the cost of training the AIs to do the work is still too high. Maybe if the AI bubble pops we'll see GPUs going for cheap so robotic AI training will accelerate.

First of all, it's extremely expensive. It's cheaper to use biological robots (us). And automation simply isn't feasible in every field.

It's machine learning.

The process looks good for code and maths, but code has a fast feedback loop starting with "does it compile" and "do these unit tests pass?". It's OK to train models which start off with compiler errors 99.99% of the time and keep improving until it's >0.1% and it can just read and correct when those remaining errors happen.

Do that with a CNC milling machine, and it will drill through its own robotic arms a billion times before it gets good.

Remember: Tesla's fleet has about a trillion miles of real-world experience at this point, and yet the cybercab is extremely geofenced.

Its economics, I'm not going to pay $100k for a robot to empty my dishwasher. I won't even pay $1k to purchase a robot vacuum.

There's no ROI for it at this point in time for consumers. Robots have been automating various things in factories for decades, its not new. Making the robots look like humans and act like humans doesn't really provide value does it?

For example how is a $100-200k robot cashier better than self-checkout or having a teenager get paid $12/hour?

A lot of it is general complexity. A lot of situations require not only complex behaviour that's quite tricky to program into a robot, but the ability to deal with situations outside of their control. Like on a production line, that's not an issue. There's no weather, there are no humans or other animals in the nearby environment, the parts all get transported at the same pace and in the same state, etc.

The robot can basically run a macro that goes from the same few motions over and over again.

Now think about a self-driving car. They're a lot closer to being practical now, but they still have a lot of challenges to deal with that the robot arms in factories don't.

They have to worry about legal issues if they make a mistake. There are other vehicles on the road, including both human driven ones and ones by other companies. There might be pedestrians nearby, or wildlife. Weather has an effect on how they drive, since even a machine can't react as well to flooded or icy roads as normal ones. There may be natural disasters, or ones caused by human/robot mistakes. The programming for this sort of system can't just follow a simple routine, it has to accounts for dozens or even hundreds of possibilities.

Same situation in many other places robots could be used in. Shops and restaurants, construction sites, on the street doing law enforcement and traffic work, etc. Unless you have an incredibly well-designed, incredibly flexible machine that can deal with unforeseen circumstances, it may be cheaper, easier and less legally risky to have a human do the work.

The easiest solution to this is to retool the layout of the space the robot will occupy to fit the needs of said robot. So, a shop or restaurant would be designed in a way that the automated setup would be closer to an oven or dishwasher and the process wouldn't interact with humans beyond the ordering and receiving aspects.

But that's expensive and time consuming to do, and in a lot of cases may hurt the business needs of the company. I don't think a lot of people want to get their food from the equivalent of a vending machine at a high-end restaurant, or have it delivered by a glorified roomba.

Unless humans become extremely expensive to hire and robotics becomes extremely cheap, that probably won't be worth the hassle to change.