What form factor would be better at going up and down stairs? Reaching to a high shelf? Getting between the refrigerator and counter to grab a key?

Because human work is designed for humans. If you want a drop-in replacement for human workers, humanoid robots are your best bet.

That doesn’t even remotely follow. Human work is designed for humans so if you want human work done you need a human to do it.

If you want to replace the human the best bet is to redesign the work so that it can be done with machine assistance, which is what we’ve been doing since the industrial revolution.

There’s a reason the motor car (which is the successful mass market personal transportation machine) doesn’t look anything like the horse that it replaced.

Sure but robots don’t join unions or ask for a pay raise or benefits.

<HN voice>Technically, the motor car replaced the coach. A more accurate and enjoyable analogy would that car engines don’t look like horses.

hence horseless CARriage

I don't think that it's human work this would target, but instead work in shared human spaces.

We already have robots that work in shared human spaces, and our experience in that domain has shown that you need to put a lot of thought into how to do this safely and specifically how to prevent the robot from accidentally harming the humans. Ask anyone with a robotic cnc machine how they would feel about running the machine without its protective housing for example. I expect they will start to throw up just a little bit. Flexibility is exactly the opposite of what you need until we have a CV and controller combination that can really master its environment. I could forsee a lot of terrible accidents if you brought a humanoid robot into a domestic environment without a lot of care and preparation for example.