Why do you think humanoid robots are the key to it becoming physical? All they need to do is manage gravity, and crawling avian types would be far superior to bipedal units in almost all measures.
Non-humanoid robots could possibly advance the general intelligence of AIs but the advantage of humanoids is that they can interact with every aspect of the human environment. The human environment has complexities that have been created by a our general intelligence and so present the training data that will cause rapid development. A simple example given above was dealing with an endless loop in the 'SIP' phone system by a physical intervention that involved first pressing 'end call' and then, when this did not work, unplugging the whole telephone system and restarting it.
Why do you think humanoid robots are the key to it becoming physical? All they need to do is manage gravity, and crawling avian types would be far superior to bipedal units in almost all measures.
Non-humanoid robots could possibly advance the general intelligence of AIs but the advantage of humanoids is that they can interact with every aspect of the human environment. The human environment has complexities that have been created by a our general intelligence and so present the training data that will cause rapid development. A simple example given above was dealing with an endless loop in the 'SIP' phone system by a physical intervention that involved first pressing 'end call' and then, when this did not work, unplugging the whole telephone system and restarting it.