I like that this has serious arguments and not "humans are magical" stuff which one sees in discussions of possible limitations of AI reasoning. (The author specifies that it's about humanoids of today and not humanoids in principle.)
This in particular shocked me a bit:
> No sense of touch. Human hands are packed absolutely full of sensors. Getting anywhere near that kind of sensing out of robot hands and usable by a human puppeteer is not currently possible.
This stands in contrast with e.g. self-driving cars, which are already superhuman at the sensor level.
Touch sensors are a thing. A spin off[1] of a company I used to work for uses pressure sensors embedded in rubber to get a pretty robot and sensitive sense of touch, though the granularity is low and it doesn't do lateral force.
[1]https://www.takktile.com/
Yes, quickly skimming your linked site, I saw Pressure, Force, and Vibration sensors, but as you mention no mention of lateral force, nor of temperature.
Thinking briefly about the sensations used in manupilating tools or checking a surface, both lateral and temperature are hugely important.
And, of course the insane density of sensors built into human fingers relative to anything built by humans.
It has a looong way to go
I don't know if it's playing sports my whole life and watching a lot of nature documentaries, but it really seems to me that certain types who spend 95% of their waking hours sitting at a desk don't appreciate just how capable, and frankly maybe even "magical," animal bodies really are. Someone is in these comments talking about how their muscle car can accelerate faster than a cheetah. Sure, but can it turn like one, jump onto and off of rocks, stop on a dime, time its acceleration to match the exact moment it needs to pounce on prey to knock it off its own feet while avoiding getting crushed or kicked itself?
Humans have swam across the English channel, have swam from Cuba to Florida, from Alaska to Russia. Humans have run across the Sahara desert. We've scaled 2000 foot vertical rock walls with our hands. We've walked to the summit of every 8k mountain on the planet. We can go places like the top of Everest, the middle of Death Valley in the summer, deep wildnerness in thick forest or jungle, places that are so dangerous in part because rescue vehicles like ATVs, snowmobiles, and helicopters can't get there, but humans on foot can. And yeah, we can also thread nuts onto bolts, handle locked doors, do tre flips and impossibles on skateboards.
Ultimately, we and all other animals are still just machines, and there is no reason in principle that machines built from engineered planned rather than grown from evolved plans can't do all of the exact same things and even more, but it's a harder problem than many seem to appreciate. Even when I was in a tank brigade in the late 2000s, we always went to Afghanistan as infantry, because our trucks and tanks were completely useless in the rocky, steep mountains, but there is no terrain anywhere that a sufficiently well-trained human can't traverse.