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by conductr 486 days ago
Yeah I think of it this way. I have an expensive vacuum and an expensive lawnmower. I paid a lot because they have a pretty dumb level of auto (eg roomba). If I could have bought a commodity push vac and push mower this humanoid could operate it. But they could also serve dozens of other valuable services with cheap existing tools for which no roomba equivalent even exists. At some point being surrounded by purpose built robots is not the best strategy even though when you are only focusing on a single purpose a specialized robot seems best.

Someone made a comment about energy efficiency and Bitcoin and AI should tell you everything about how much “we” actually care about energy efficiency, if this robot had infinite learning potential and the physical ability of a human it’s totally going to win out in the race to mechanize the world.