I think we can do even better so it’s interesting that we decided our bodies were the pinnacle of biology and technology.

It’s not that we think the human form is the optimum, it is simply that we don’t want to have to modify human accessible areas for robots, partially because this increases the cost of automation and also partly because we need the environments to still be human accessible. In environments where you will only have robots, then the robots have freedom to be whatever design we want, but a general purpose robot needs to exist in a human-built environment, an environment with things like stairs, lips on curbsides, and boxes with handles designed for human hands. There are videos out there with the spot robot trying to do something simple like open a door with its weird giraffe neck arm thing, it’s not graceful and it’s not quick, because it is interacting with an object that was not designed with it’s body shape. It is much easier to build a human-shaped robot than it is to redesign all doors to have an interface to allow a robot of any arbitrary shape to operate it.

Also aesthetics do matter, if humans are going to be interacting with these robots they need to look like something that’s at least sort of friendly, if it looks like a multi limbed weird techno spider no one’s going to want to interact with them.