I have to disagree with that. Most positions in factory jobs exist because human labour is very cheap, especially in terms of flexibility. I doubt there are many positions where a robot with a less humanoid shape wouldn’t do a better job than a human or a humanoid robot. It’s just often cheaper to employ these workers because you pay them a salary, either on a hourly basis or on a monthly one, yet don’t have to worry about maintenance. With robots you have less hourly costs, but a much bigger overhead, as you now have to hire qualified technicians to perform regular maintenance on those machines, and also semi-regularly order replacement parts. These costs will rise alongside the complexity of these robots. And humanoid robots are much, much more complex than industrial robots, especially as they need to incorporate a lot more sensors that most industrial robots just won’t need. Sensors that might be very sensitive or require regular calibrations to ensure they work properly. That doesn’t come cheap.

Even when we look over the costs, humans will always be more versatile than robots. Give a person a book on how to do a job and they will perform it with the help of the books, and develop their working style to even work more efficiently. In contrast, robots would need a much more thorough training in order to work properly. This could be done traditionally by hardcoding the logic, or by using neural networks, which would be more intuitive, but are prone to create undesired results if one doesn’t have a good eye for the involved factors. And this process would need to be repeated for each job, and again if jobs would be fused together. And of course one would have to adhere for hardware limitations. A processor can only work so fast, and there are limitations on storage space, data transfer speed and reliability that also come to play when it comes to saving the training data.

Then what niche will they fulfill? What work requires a humanoid form?

I’m sceptical with Windows, considering that most programs are installed via EXE files, so the outcry will be huge. But I’m not saying it can’t be a possibility.

With Ubuntu there would only be a chance of it happening if they also make their distro immutable. That way the user could not as easily install packages the traditional way. But even then there might be ways to disable this immutable mode for troubleshooting. However, this, in my opinion, would cause a mass exodus as Canonical does not have the same advantage as Microsoft or Google have: Windows and android are, to an extent, closed off ecosystems. Thus switching to another system is very hard, as not every software is available on every other system, so potentially subpar alternatives and comparability layers, whose functionality mostly depends on whether the company behind the original system is actively fighting against these tools or not. Ubuntu on the other hand, is a Linux distro, so you cab make it like Theseus and recreate this distro more or less with the sum of its parts, if need be.