Sure, but I'm not sure humanoid robots is the best form factor for this. E.g. something with a wheeled base makes movement calculations a lot easier since you don't need to deal with balance while moving.
They can sell “employees” who don’t require salaries, onboarding, healthcare, 401k, benefits, etc and then leave after two years of being lazy and try to sue you. (This is how it will be marketed)
Economies like South Korea and Japan have a drastic population deficit that means there are simply not enough people around to perform many kinds of manual labor tasks.
(Fwiw, >20 years ago RethinkX correctly projected the exponential cost declines of solar and batteries, when everybody else was drawing straight lines.)
> Humanoid robots will enter the market at a cost-capability of under $10/hour for their labor, on a trajectory to under $1/hour before 2035 and under $0.10/hour before 2045.
I dont see it, unless this is an expectation that a robot will work for 50 years without maintenance at capex.
Why doesnt a comparable tool, like an excavator, work with this math? Why arent they 100 times cheaper to run than 20 years ago? Excavators can cost 50 - 100k pa in maintenance and fuel costs.
Why does creating a multifunction tool, with even finer tolerances, working in human safe workspaces cost less?
Because supposedly they would repair themselves or be repaired by other robots, and energy would cost less and less, anything would cost less and less if work is increasingly done by robots than can be improved year after year.
It reminds me of predictions for the cloud, that someone would just write a perfect cloud formation script and then be able to sack all of their employees. But instead it just updated a lot of System Engineers to Cloud Engineers and Devops positions.
The direct implication is that not only will robots definitely be allowed into human spaces, and definitely be able to use generalised hardware to perform fine detail technical work but also contain only servicable/replacable parts.
I dont see any of that as proven. I think its far more likely that a very limited subset of robots will be allowed to be near humans at all, and insurance for them is going to be extremely expensive. I think if I had a look at Australian law they would be considered Plant, guaranteed if they have any pressurized components or strong lift capability. Maintenance, is going to cost an arm and a leg, and the units themselves will be largely proprietary, so you are looking at ongoing maintenance via the vendor, much like what the tractor industry is working on.
But this logic applies to all machinery and technological progress. In the end it boils down to cheap energy and materials. The shape of the machine is actually irrelevant here.
Your "Fwiw" feels meaningless and hollow. The fact that there are stupid people out there, doing stupid things does not make you a savant just because you didn't make the same mistake.
This person clearly hasn't spent much time educating themselves how high volume manufacturing works, nor have they spent much time on flexible manufacturing systems either.
The entire article boils down to "Humanoids! Humanoids! HUMANOIDS!"
All current jobs have human input and output interfaces. If you want to sell new technology then it will be easiest to accommodate the already existing infrastructure.
Sex bots and disposable police. This is basically the future in every dystopian SciFi these politicians and oligarchs grew up watching. This is just living out fantasy.
China: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f8/Populati...
Japan: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2e/Japan_po...
South Korea: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4a/South_Ko...
United States: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c9/US_Popul...
Europe: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/86/Europe_p...
Also the technology carries over to defense purposes
And then there’s the fact that tremendous investment is going into all things AI, and now hard tech