> 3) Transformative technologies succeed by redesigning a task, and usually not by simply trying to reproduce the existing forms of human labor. Paige built an amazingly complex mechanical imitation of the human compositor which attempted to repeat a human worker’s actual movements. By contrast, Linotype simplified the problem by doing something humans didn’t already do.

That would in fact be the main argument against humanoid robots in many (most?) applications.

The counterpoint is that what humans already do is exactly what's needed in some cases, making those cases the ideal applications for humanoids.