My prediction is that by the time humanoid robots actually make it to the factory floor, they'll be pretty un-humanoid.

90% of car manufacturing is done by oldschool industrial robots, and I've had people point out that heavy use of industrial robots are basically unique to the car industry.

You might see a robot arm here and there in other industries, but it's somewhat rare, usually its all purpose-built machines or humans.

I remember back in the 90s hearing about a manufacturing paradox. Robots can reduce costs but for them to work you have to carry out extra design for manufacturing that simplifies the required tasks.

The paradox is that now you've simplified the process humans can also do it more efficiently and cheaply. The capital expense of robots doesn't really cost in compared to human production line.

There are exceptions. In the car industry you're moving heavy things with a high requirement for precision. I've also seen robots used for cleaning mouse cages in bioinformatics laboratories. There it's because handling large amounts of hazardous waste safely is inefficient for humans.

I wonder, how long will cheap human labour stay competitive for small consumer products compared to AI driven systems?

Cars are in the intersection where you have large parts that need to be moved around where other things happen with them and large scale of standard designs that is worth automating.

I expect that when we manage to do automated construction, it will use robot arms in several places too. But it's very rare that those two happen at the same time. Usually, large things are not standard.

You reminded me of the hilarious SV pizza making robot startup which has its own robot arm.

In this video you see the unnecessary robot arm move the pizza to the oven: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bN45bTsBUW8

For contrast a How it is Made video of frozen pizzas being created at dozens (hundreds?) per minute: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UrSIOtv8a0

I agree and for me personally this is very easy to see and understand.

Why do you think the vast majority of people fail to see it like this? Guys like Musk obvious hype it up as he now has tied the valuation of the firms he owns and operates to this story.

Vertically upright humanoids have a lot going for them: they don't occupy a lot of floor space, they can pull an object right into their center of gravity to manipulate it, and because they're familiar they're relatively easy to prototype actions for because they're our actions.

People always asser without evidence that humanoid isn't the best design, but there's a paucity of alternatives that don't make some type of tradeoff: humanoid might not be the best at anything, but it's clearly very good at a lot of things.

All of the robot arms where I work are stood idle. Humans are so much more agile, so much more adaptable, so much easier to train, give better feedback, their moving parts last much longer. We focus instead on making the humans as productive as they can be, MES, kitted parts, intelligent tools etc.

Edit: We do have robots btw. But they are not arms. They are super specialised, high precision machines that are designed to do a job humanoids could not

I toured a major US OEM assembly plant recently, and there were a TON of humans working insanely repetitive tasks.

The most kind numbing of all were the easiest (sit in chair and put bolts upright in holder so robot can pick them up) and the highest paid thanks to union seniority.

The UAW will kill all the US OEMs before that let robots replace all the humans.