Waldman doubts it:
Frankly, I’ve always been skeptical about the potential of humanoid robots. Sure, it helps us to relate to them if they look like us, but the human body has a lot of limitations. For instance, hands are great, but should a robot have only two? Why not four or six, or eleven? The more hands, the more things you can do with them. And legs are extremely useful, especially for navigating uneven environments where wheels won’t work well, like the rubble of a building that has fallen over, or the stairs in your house. But are two legs better than three or four?
Ted Chiang, in a piece we referenced recently, connects science fiction’s obsession with humanoid robots to slavery:
I think the reason for the convention was that it was a metaphor for slavery. That was the original promise and appeal of robots—that they would be slaves without the guilt. You can call them servants, but they are essentially slaves because they have no options and no real autonomy. I think that is the unexamined assumption of science fiction that depicts humanoid robots or human-like AI. These works are suggesting that it might be possible to have slavery without guilt.
The Dish 