[kleiba]

The right-wing narrative scattered throughout this article is irritating.

It's also a bit laughable that Germany could stand a realistic chance to top the world's intelligent robot production - as long as we're talking about general-purpose and hence likely humanoid robots. As far as I'm aware, Germany has no history in building such robots while companies from other countries, both Asian and US, have a big head-start.

This article reads more like a more or less desperate sounding attempt to somehow save Germany's former manufacturing glory in the 21st century. Alas, without first class AI software, this isn't going to happen, and in that respect, Germany is more or less irrelevant.

His description of how German politicians have time and again failed to recognize realities and act accordingly seems spot-on, however.

[mertbio]

> Germany has no history in building such robots

Germany was leading in the industrial robots with KUKA until they sold the company to China: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KUKA

[PinguTS]

Germany had many industrial robotics companies. Not only KUKA, like Japan has.

The idea behind selling KUKA is, the very same narrative like in any startup. The robot itself has become a commodity. It was clear, that China will be cheaper in production of this commodity in the long term. The know-how is not in the production of such robots. The idea was to pivot more into integration. But that is very capital intensive. As big company you are limited in the possibilities to raise money. An alternative is to have a bigger company with big pockets to cooperate with or even selling the business and stay somehow as an independent business unit. I have seen this with small companies who needed to raise money. I have seen this with big companies.

BTW, one of the people involved in pivoting was one who in the 1980/1990 made the automation for the KUKA robots as a small engineering office. About a fews years late he got bought by KUKA when they discovered that this small engineering office had the whole knowledge and there was almost no knowledge within KUKA.

[kleiba]

Yes, and I was specifically referring to general-purpose, humanoid robots.

[z7]

> The right-wing narrative scattered throughout this article is irritating.

Without further substantiation such a claim is very low signal. What it tells me is that you think he said something bad or something you disapprove of.

[kleiba]

Have you read the article?