From a technical perspective it is very hard to prove that robotics isn't possible. It is even much harder to show, that AI is limited to certain level which can't be over jumped in the future. Also it is impossible to slow down the progress or reverse the development. There is no such thing like a frame to control the development of Artificial Intelligence. What is possible instead is to ignore the future and take a look into the past which is much easier to understand.
The major advantage of the 1990s compared to the situation in the now is that in the past robots weren't invented yet, also the amount of books about the topic was little. That means the 1990s were a time in which the problem of AI upraising wasn't there.
The 1990s were the decade before the upraising of the internet. The dominant media in this time was the television for the mass and the printed book for the educated scholars. The amount of information was small and no search engine were used. From the perspective of AI the situation was also in a very early stage. A robot like honda asimo who is able to walk upstairs wasn't invented. A company like Boston dynamics wasn't there and in the beginning of the 1990s the worlds strongest chess player was a human but not a computer. Also the subject of deeplearning wasn't invented. The only thing what was available were normal perceptrons with not more than 20 neurons. These systems were realized in software for the windows operating system but no useful application was known.
Self driving cars were also not invented in the 1990s because of many reasons. What was available instead were lot of movie related robots like the K.I.T.T. car, or the Data android in Star trek. And the perhaps most surprising fact is that the people in the 1990s were not convinced that Artificial intelligence wil become possible one day. A widepread believe was, that simple biped robots will be available in around 300 years in the future or they won't be possible at all. The underlying theoretical concept to prove this assumption was the np complete theorem. NP complete says basically, that all the AI problems can't be solved on a computer because of the large state space. A similar idea was introduced in the highlight report in the 1970s.
A widespread philosophical interpreation of Artificial Intelligence in the 1990s was, that since the beginning in the 1950s the AI researchers has promised many things but none of the goals were reach. So the rational understanding was, that AI is too complicated in general and it is not possible to build such machines. Nobody in the 1990s were able to disprove this assumption so it was equal to common shared knowledge.
So we can say, that the 1990s were the last real AI winter. AI Winter means that the subject was seen as impossible to realize and that the research towards the subject has stopped. What the computer scientists have done instead is to program normal software for example games, operating systems and very important network protocols for the upraising internet. That means, AI in the 1990s was an esoteric discipline not recognized very much.
Suppose a person from the year 2021 travels back into the 1990s and explains to the audience which sort of robots are available in only 30 years. He will say that biped robots are possible, that kitchen robots can be build, that self driving cars can be realized with neural networks and he will explain that the sourcecode for tetris playing AI Bots is distributed as open source to everybody. The audience won't believe any of these words. The audience will say, that it is impossible. If the time traveler would like to give the details and explain how these software can be realized the audience will leave the room because it is outside their horizon. It would be too much for a person of the 1990s to hear what reinforcement learning is about or that chess software can beat a human player.