The question is surely why the goal of robotics is seen by many as a means to replace humans. In my lifetime (I'm 60yo) I've seen millions of jobs replaced by computers and automated machines controlled by computers.
At the same time I have seen human unemployment rise and benefit dependency in the advanced economies, and increasing poverty everywhere else rise.
I ask who needs robotics? Not the majority of the human population who want to work and live in a degree of comfort and security, but the corporate multinational corporations who appear, at every opportunity to grab every development that can replace a human worker with a machine.
Machines don't feel exploitation and lack of opportunity. Machines don't dream of meeting a partner, falling in love and wanting to have a family in their own home. As they grow older they don't think about their grandchildren and what kind of Hell on Earth they might live in, but we do, or should.
All to often advances in technology, like driverless cars, are signed off by politicians who see safety as the only concern. It's much more dangerous than that I believe. Ask any taxi driver for instance.
Robotics is the science of producing the maximum concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the minimum number of people (e.g.robots don't go on strike for more pay), and if the problem of what to do with the rest of us gets too much I'm sure their automated biotech laboratories will come up with a suitably incurable viral solution.
This process has been happening all my life and it can only get worse.