You are right that failure is costly with today's robots. We need to reduce the cost of failure. That means cheaper and more robust robots. Robots that, like a toddler, can jump off a couch and fall over and still be OK.
Tying back to the article, this is the real evolutionary advantage that humans have over AIs. Not innate language skills or anything about the brain. It's our highly optimized, perceptive, robust, reliable, self-repairing, fail-safe, and efficient bodies, allowing us to experiment and learn in the real physical world.
you must be young and healthy because I cannot imagine using any of these words to describe this continuously decaying mortal coil in which we are all trapped and doomed
For example if Robot 0002 learns that trying to move a pan without using the handle is a bad idea, Robot 0001 would get that update (even if it came before)
I know the trend with AI is to keep the scope generic so it can tackle different domains and look more like us, but I believe that even if we reach that, we'll always come back to make it better for a specific skill set, because we also do that as humans. No reason for an AI driver to know how to cook.
If we narrow the domain as much as possible it will cut the number of experiments it needs to do significantly
Edit: I wonder if its even going to be useful to devote so much resources into making a machine as similar as us as possible. We don't want a plane to fly like a bird, even if we could build it.