▲ | ozten 2 days ago | |||||||
This is a superficial article. The biggest bottlenecks are raw ingredients, power, and factories. Once the automated manufacturing flywheel gets started, units can be produced very rapidly. Specialized machines produce low-level components, while more generalized machines assemble higher-level components as well as products like themselves and other robots. People don't factor a human's total compensation beyond an hourly wage. Machines don't need as much breathing room as humans. Machines can work a 6-day, 16-hour schedule. | ||||||||
▲ | datadrivenangel 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | |||||||
Humanoid robots are notable worse than humans in many aspects that impact productivity. If a humanoid robot is ultimately 33% as productive as a worker in a developing country who gets a wage of $10k USD annually and works 8 hours per day every day, then then robot has to cost less than $10k annually all in to be a good replacement. Assuming a 5 year useful lifespan and $2k in maintenance per year, results in the robot needing to cost ~$40k before it can replace a human's productivity. And that is inclusive of training and setup, and I doubt we'll have robots that are capable of learning as quickly as average humans without dedicated specialists training them... which raises the cost. In general, you can get a dedicated machine for most human tasks that is easily 10-1000x productivity if you have a few million in capital. There are tasks on the margin where human flexibility and dexterity that having a human operate a $10k sewing machine is going to be very very hard to replace. | ||||||||
▲ | blacksmith_tb 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | |||||||
Can't machines work a 7-day, 24-hour schedule? That said, humanoid robots strike me as a jack-of-all-trades tool, our environment is full of things that are optimized for human-sized and -shaped users, but if you can purpose-build your robot for a factory, it's going to be more efficient at a narrow set of tasks there. | ||||||||
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▲ | didibus 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | |||||||
Isn't the biggest bottleneck just that they need to adequately and reliably be able to do useful work at a better price-performance ratio than a human ? And that's just not the case yet? | ||||||||
▲ | rm445 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | |||||||
The biggest bottlenecks are hardware design and software design. Materials science to an extent, particularly battery materials, but we could build robots with currently-available materials and power density if only we knew how to make them work usefully enough. I'm not against the concept and I agree the manufacturing can be scaled. There just isn't a product yet. | ||||||||
▲ | JKCalhoun 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | |||||||
Article calls out demand — so far there has been no demand for large numbers of humanoid robots. | ||||||||
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