[jnurmine]

I was born cynical and I'm proud of it, so apologies to Boston Dynamics and others, but these things will absolutely be used as war bots and automation surrogates once the time is ripe.

Even so, yes, these robots are truly engineering marvels and I wholeheartedly applaud the team for their hard work!

I just think that squinting the eyes slightly past the "search and rescue", the war applications of this kind of technology are obvious: the Atlas could do perimeter guard duty even in a muddy, slightly sloped or otherwise difficult terrain, but it could also form hunt and kill squads who need no rest, whereas the hunted person or persons presumably would.

As for automation, it will certainly happen too: the Atlas is humanoid-shaped and once it matures to be more independent and capable with environmental manipulation, it could easily function as plug-and-play automation for many tasks currently requiring a human. Pick berries or fruits, do gardening, deliver things like mail/pizza, and so on.

[vncecartersknee]

Do you know how much berry/fruit pickers get paid? or pizza delivery people? It will be a LONG time before it's more economical for a robot to do it I think

[jnurmine]

Good point. I did not know exactly how much fruit pickers make, I supposed it was not very much. According to Google, the California average is 24 k USD a year, 11.49 USD an hour.

However.

A human must rest after, say, 12 hours, but a robot can just keep going even at night, if the battery charging is swift and smart (e.g. hotswap battery). So a robot could work almost 24 h shifts instead of 12 h shifts. So we get a 2x multiplier here.

A robot can be made to work perhaps twice as fast somehow, maybe it just moves faster or has four arms or can carry more or reach higher faster or whatever. So let's add another 2x.

Now we're at 4x, a single robot doing the job of 4 workers. Now we're at ca. 46 USD an hour for the equivalent of the robot's work.

Would such a robot be hired for, say, 30 USD an hour?

Next, I'll put on an MBA hat (which I don't have) and just pull numbers ouf of thin air; GIGO warning is in effect. Real MBAs please excuse the amateur hour.

Assuming the robot rental shop can keep utilization at 80% and sell it non-stop for a month to orchards, this would be 0.8 * 30 * 24 * 30 = ca. 17000 USD a month for such a robot. Let's say they spend roughly 10% in repairs etc., that leaves about 15 k USD a month. If the robot costs 150 k USD, and it can do fruit picking for ca. 6 months in a year, the robot has paid for itself after ca. two years.

My point was that the fruit orchard pays 30 USD instead of 46 USD for the "same" job (i.e. they get 35% off labor costs).

Also, a robot rental shop in this model actually starts to make profit per robot after two years. This is not such a long time, and the robots might actually become tools like tractors or harvesters are, with similar ownership arrangements, e.g. a farm co-op owns the robots and distributes to members for cheap hourly price.

Although there were many assumptions regarding the numbers, I would not quite agree on robots taking a long time to become economical. Also, the savings at the orchard side would be seen immediately, creating robot demand on that side.

Edit: typo and formatting

[sidibe]

It'll happen very quickly when they're good enough. As you hire more fruit pickers or pizza delivery people the next one costs the same or is more expensive, opposite for robots. Especially since the cost will mostly go into prototypes and research.

As soon as self-driving cars really work as well as Uber drivers for example, they're not going to roll out super-gradually just because the very first cars cost billions to develop and $200k a piece.