A short look into the modern world shows, that robots are seldom used. Most cities and companies look the same like 50 years ago. That means, 100% of the cars are operated manually, and pick&place operations in a warehouse are also done by humans. The reason is not located in the technology itself. With robotics hardware and software everything is alright, the problem is to push the technology into the market.
Let us give a motivational example. From a technical point of view, a cheap and highly productive pick&place robot contains of a delta robot which provides the robust basis and a software. The software works with a convolution neural network to identify the objects and controls the robot gripper. The gripper is not working with mechanical parts but with air together with a soft gripper of plastic. The combination of modern hardware plus state of the art software results into a working robot who can do the given task with maximum performance. The robot won't make any mistakes, it will operate at low costs and helps to increase the productivity drastically.
How many of these robots are used today in reality? It's a rhetorical question because even in the united states no such robots are installed and there are no plans in doing so. Not because something is wrong with the technology but because most people don't understand the technology.
Before a modern robot can be activated the first time, the surrounding humans have to be prepared. The employees have to be trained, the consumers have to asked and the universities have to educate the students. This kind of preparedness is missing on the global scale. That means, at the university, robotics isn't in the curriculum, and the employees in the company are not trained in programming a robot. On the one hand powerful technology is available and at the same time, the society collectively resists in using it. If no intervention will take place the robotics revolution will become obvious in some decades. In 40 years from now, somebody will discover today's technology and thinks it would be good idea to install one or two of the devices. The people in 40 years will have less fear of robots. That means, they will use the same hardware and software invented today, but the only difference is, that they feel more comfortable with it.
Most technical issues in artificial intelligence are already solved. Self-driving cars were demonstrated in the past, self-driving drones are flying robust and even household robots are ready for the market. What is missing is some kind of techno-optimism which asks for these inventions and is bold enough to install the robot in a production task. The question for the coming 40 years in Artificial Intleligence research is not how to improve neural networks or create better expert systems, but it has to do with training humans in using existing technology which is available but not understood quite well.
From a technical point of view, the combination of a delta robot plus a convolutional neural network is some kind of low tech automation project. It doesn't contains of quantum computing, it doesn't try out new programming languages and it was tested in the laboratory many times before. What is new is to introduce this kind of machine into the workplace for daily usage. Most humans are in fear of computer related innovation, and especially if the idea is that the machine is thinking by it's own, they will reject it. Even if the robot is able to increase the productivity by 300%, the employees are ignoring the device because they imagine a dystopian future in which their work is monitored. And the fear makes sense, because the hidden agenda of introducing Artificial Intelligence at the workplace is to create a surveillance system of an omnipotent machinery while the humans gets indoctrinated and manipulated.