For most of the history of industrial robotics, the machine and the task were synonymous. A welding robot welded. A pick-and-place robot picked and placed. The intelligence was in the fixture, the jig, the controlled environment — not in the robot. General purpose robotics represents the dismantling of that assumption, and the pace of that dismantling has accelerated sharply. The GAO’s 2026 horizon report frames the shift with the right analogy: robotics is following the trajectory of computers, from single-function devices to general platforms.