Hi there, author here -- mostly trying to be accessible. And I think in the tech community it is well understood that robotics is hugely difficult, but it seems like general public pretty much equates progress in software AI with progress in robots, which is clearly not the case. We thought it might be helpful to highlight this to people who aren't hugely technical.
That said, I do fundamentally believe that there are some things that the "general public" will never wrap their heads around. Feynman had a great take on this when trying to explain why he can't just describe magnetic forces [1]. I'd be curious to hear your take on that.
I'm an optimist in this area - people like Wait But Why and XKCD (eg - https://xkcd.com/thing-explainer/) - show that most complex subjects can be explained in simple language that most people with an average education can understand. (An aside: I recently wrote an article about the use of D-Wave quantum computers on Wall Street and that experience gave me a sense of how tremendously difficult it can be to simple summarize an inherently technical topic. I estimate it took about five hours of study to be able to write a couple of accurate sentences I felt comfortable with.) Whether the general public has the inclination to take the time to understand this stuff is another question entirely!
