Look, the other day I watched a backhoe, barely bigger than a vending machine digging the smallest section of drainage ditch. I'm tempted to just rattle off a bunch of buzzwords and say synergy and 3D printing etc sixteen times.
But the increasing complexity, intelligence and sophistication of computing power, software, sensors and things like servomotors is growing at a... Exponential? (Geometric?) INCREDIBLE rate and at some point, sooner than even I think, ten, fifteen years at the max, humanoid robots will be so cheap that they will, in fact be cheaper than actual humans. At that point the problem isn't how to develop and employ them, it's what to do with the 90% of humanity that can't do any job cheaper than a robot.
The only jobs left right now are.
1: Guy that does a job robot cannot do. Doctor, Lawyer, Scientist, politician.
2: Robot trainer
3: Robot Repairman (See #1)
4: Guy who does a job cheaper than a robot, or a job a robot isn't willing to do. (These jobs suck ass.)
AI, like Watson will continue to shrink categories, 1 and 2, and eventually category 3 will be taken over by robots.
This is the real robot apocalypse, not murderous killbots, but they will have "TOOK R JOBS" and only folks who own the robots will have any realistic way to make money.
The good news, for me, is that I'm kind of old, so it won't crush me. The bad news is that you probably aren't. We need to figure this out, now.