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by nightski 3771 days ago
I think you vastly underestimate how expensive that robot would be to manufacture and maintain. Of course, costs could come down over time but it's going to take a lot of work to make it economically viable for the types of jobs you are considering replacing.
1 comments
elsewhen 3771 days ago
it seems that it might be close to doing what a low-skill laborer would do in a factory setting. remember that it should be able to work for longer hours, and not require benefits etc. i suspect that companies would start to purchase such a device at $100k. that price seems achievable, probably within a few years. as quantities increase, i suspect that the price will fall dramatically thereafter.
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whitegrape 3770 days ago
As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, it's generally a lot simpler to redesign your workspace to take advantage of a simpler robot design than it is to get a bunch of more general robots like this that still aren't quite there anyway. Amazon's warehouse robots come to mind in every one of these conversations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quWFjS3Ci7A

The hardware is almost there, at least, for general tasks. I'm not sure about software. Is there anything recent showing machines reading human-targeted instructions to accomplish some task (change a tire, set up a desk) and then fulfilling the task, without having been programmed or trained on that task already? That would be impressive.

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Moshe_Silnorin 3771 days ago
The rule of thumb is you have to recoup capital costs in 2 years to make it worthwhile.
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knowaveragejoe 3771 days ago
Given the above assumptions that seems doable to me. 2 years of working nearly 24/7 with virtually no costs(compared to wages/benefits) would more than pay for itself. But I don't think the above assumptions are necessarily correct, that sounds a bit too cheap to me.
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nightski 3770 days ago
It may be doable, I am not trying to be overly negative. It's just that I probably wouldn't target minimum wage workers with this robot.

Also you say "no costs" but do you honestly think these would be maintenance free? There would probably be a fairly significant cost to keep a fleet of these robots running as they are incredibly complex as compared to say an amazon warehouse robot.

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knowaveragejoe 3769 days ago
Oh yes, I didn't mean there are no costs, just that beyond the initial expense they are much cheaper than human employees.
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