It's sort of Tesla's core thesis that they want to attain the world's lowest manufacturing costs, by doing novel things with robotics and AI that automate away humans.

Everyone gets this backwards. Tesla isn't abandoning their low-margin auto manufacturing in order to switch to high-margin robotics tech; they want to capture the margin of robotics for themselves first. If their manufacturing half fails, that means their robotics half also failed at its primary task.

Techworld has an inductive bias towards expecting successful products to be luxury lifestyle products, because so much of past tech successes came from that. Most likely the first successful AI robotics aren't going to be iPhone-like consumer luxuries, laundry-folding novelties for bored techies. They'll rather continue the trend of robotics to focus on industrial processes in controlled settings, capturing value by lowering the costs of doing banal things.

▲

amelius an hour ago | parent [-]

But is a low-margin business really the one where you want to bootstrap your robotics industry?

▲

peri-cl an hour ago | parent [-]

It stops being low-margin if suddenly you can build things much cheaper than your competitors can, and they can't replicate what you're doing.

	▲	amelius an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, but a lot of experience is required in robotics to reach that stage. Maybe the insight is that it is better to first sell the robots (the "shovels") and only later go into the gold business yourself (if ever).