I think this is a rather harsh take. Most of the people working on automating it understand how hard it is and are striving through it. You need some of these irrational believers for progress!
It looks like he has contempt for the people trying to automate something. He doesn't realize how hard they are actually working, nor they insight they have into the problem. From his perspective he thinks they are wrong for thinking they are taking on an easy job.
Robots that can identify and pick up things in the environment haven't materially improved since the 60s. What has changed is how factories and warehouses are built, so that the 'environment' and the 'things' are strictly constrained to enable robotic arms to grab and move them. But let one thing get a little out of place, or worse, let a human get between an industrial robot and the thing it's trying to pick up and.. well. RIP.
That simply isn't true - the machines of the past were pretty much blind but safety interlocks are able to detect an approach. The reason for the constraints are efficency in manufacturing is preferrably reducing the process to simple repetitive actions for improved throughput and reliability.
Exactly, and those actions are able to be simple and repetitive because the machines don't have to try to identify objects in the environment, they just reach X meters, open their grappler Y centimeters, close it until it reaches Z Pascals of pressure, move, repeat.
