[marinmania]

It does either get very exciting or very spooky thinking of the possibilities in the near future.

I had always assumed that such a robot would be very specific (like a cleaning robot) but it does seem like by the time they are ready they will be very generalizable.

I know they would require quite a few sensors and motors, but compared to self-driving cars their liability would be less and they would use far less material.

[fragmede]

The exciting part comes when two robots are able to do repairs on each other.

[marinmania]

I think this is the spooky part. I feel dumb saying it, but is there a point where they are able to coordinate and build a factory to build chips/more of themselves? Or other things entirely?

[bamboozled]

Of course there is

[pryelluw]

2 bots 1 bolt ?

[ta988]

But this still has a massive cost. Replacing or repairing an actuator isn't cheap, in material and in time of unavailability.

[jacobaul]

To maybe get a little carried away with the sci-fi for a minute, why does the Actuator need to cost anything?

When the tree of costs that make up a product are traced, surely all the leaf nodes are human labour? As in, to make the actuator, I had to pay someone to assemble it and I had to buy the parts. Each part had a materials cost and a labour cost. So it goes for the factory that made the fasteners, the foundry that made the steel, the mine that extracted the ore.

Shudder to think of how to regulate resource extraction in a future where AI humanoid robots are strip mining and logging for free.

[david-gpu]

> When the tree of costs that make up a product are traced, surely all the leaf nodes are human labour?

What about energy, real estate and taxes?

Even at the extreme end of automation, if you want iron ore, you need to buy a mine from somebody, pay taxes on it, and power the machines to extract the minerals and transport them elsewhere for processing.

[jacobaul]

The same logic applies to energy I think. We don't have to pay money to a wind turbine, or to a coal mine. We only pay money to humans to build the power plants and the grid.

If I were writing a sci-fi novel about this I don't know how I'd handle something real estate (or mineral rights or water rights). You already need permission from the government to extract resources.

As for taxes, why does the government even want the money? What are they going to do with it?

[david-gpu]

Energy, ultimately, requires real estate --and thus property taxes-- even at the logical extreme of automation.

> As for taxes, why does the government even want the money? What are they going to do with it?

There are websites that break down how e.g. different national/federal budgets are divvied up in the real world. Alternatively, I suggest a good book on macroeconomics; I am partial to Steve Keen's "Debunking Economics", but there are many others.