Comment by MarcusBrutus

I propose that they go fishing and wait it out till there's some game-changing breakthrough in some underlying technology. I'm not sure which are the right underlying technologies in much the same way as Babbage's critics couldn't identify "integrated circuit" as the missing enabler. Could be advances in materials, nanotechnology, even biotechnology. What I know for sure is that when these breakthroughs do happen, all 20th and 21st robotics "pioneering" work will become obsolete and will not serve future practitioners. Robotics is not like mathematics where you can lay a foundation that'll still be relevant and useful to people 10 or 20 centuries down the line. If Babbage instead of fussing with mechanical cranks and gears had invented the Turing machine his life's work wouldn't have gone to waste.