As someone that works in robotics/automation, it pains me to see people in creative/office verticals getting all the shit with AI these days while hard labor positions, the one that everyone could be doing a bit less because they take a toll on you (working the fields, farms, hazardous tasks) remain pretty much the same.

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AnimalMuppet 5 hours ago | parent [-]

If you use a computer to do something, training an AI to use the computer to do the same thing just takes the computer, which was there anyway. (Yeah, plus training the model, that's not my point.) But if you do something physical, replacing you takes something physical to be there.

We may eventually manufacture the robots to do all these things. We aren't there yet.

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fragmede 5 hours ago | parent [-]

How long do you give it?

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keeda 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I looked into this (or rather, had Google Deep Research do a 30-page report on it!) and it's still a very long way off. So long, that the AI, or any reference it found, would not even give me a rough timeline, but I suspect it is multiple decades away. The main blocker is a very severe crunch in the supply chain of critical materials, mostly rare earth elements which are essential to make those high power density + high precision motors feasibly.

Today we have a tiny fraction (like 2%?) of the global supply needed to make enough robots to replace all humans.

This is before we get to the other logistics like power and the rest of the materials, but we have a path to scale those up (except maybe Copper, that's another tough one.) Turns out rare earth elements are actually very abundant, but extremely hard to mine, very toxic to extract (which is partially why China has a strangehold on those) and we don't have a good path to scale those up.

All of this could be moot if we figure out alternative technologies for equally capable motors that could be manufactured at scale, but AFAIK whatever promising is on the horizon would still take a very long time to ramp up.

	▲	Borealid 20 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		That doesn't make intuitive sense to me. First, you make a robot that mines rare earth metals. Then construction robots. Then an automated factory for assembling robots. The whole premise is that the robots are faster at these tasks than humans would be. If the robotics are feasible their rise should be exponential, not linear, since each robot built makes building the next faster and helps to remove whatever bottleneck you had.

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carlosjobim 11 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Robots have been used in industry for decades already. Most jobs won't be worth investing in the robot doing it, since human labour is cheaper than the capital investment.

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sceptic123 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

We're waiting for the point that replacing the humans is the cheaper option. Not sure that robot plumbers are in our near future.

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fragmede 4 hours ago | parent [-]

What's your definition of "near future"? 3 months? 1 year? 5? 10? 50? 100?

	▲	layer8 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Not the other commenter, but we won’t have robot plumbers in 10 years. Maybe in 50.

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AnimalMuppet 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

To the start of it? Maybe two years?

To the end of it? Maybe 40?