"please call the manager, this problem is above my paygrade, I am a robot"

Only one robot?

That's like when people thought having a computer for every person was outrageous.

You'll have dozens of robots. Like you have dozens of computers.

Sometime in the 69s or 70s one of those futurist guys wrote something like "in the future you will have so many computers you'll throw them out because you just don't need them. They'll be in your boxes of breakfast cereal." and you know what, they're in greeting cards. They're sometimes even in your breakfast cereal. The computer in your mouse that lets it talk USB is more powerful than any desktop computer in the '70s or early '80s.

Robots are going to go the same way.

But they're not going to be your plastic pal who's fun to be with, humanoid robots. They're going to be roombas, and dog walkers, and washing machines, and they kind of already are with your internet of things oven that sends bluetooth messages to your cellphone when it thinks it needs to be cleaned. Except it'll be sending those messages to a cleaning robot.

You won't even think of them as robots, like you don't think of the desktop-class computer in your optical mouse (which actually has two desktop class computers if you count the DSP that does the motion tracking) as a computer.

My point with referencing the specific tasked robots is that the mechanics are there and proven.. Wasn't talking just about them. You keep going back to how humans are special and can't be replicated. Mentioning things like sensors and inputs.

My only point there was we don't need more mechanical technology than we have already to build a working biped general robot, just intelligence.

For the AI side:

Now, we have image identifiers, LLMs that can tell you how to check an egg, 3d world generators, and object manipulation done in the AI industry and robotics. We are not far from combining everything we've learned and establishing a system for a robot.

AI is taking leaps and bounds in the last few years of development, I see no technical reason this wont be happening in a few years.

What price point are you basing this all on? Because there's a threshold there, is there not?

Humans absolutely have work limits that companies would love to exceed but they don't because lawsuits and work injuries cost them.

Also, the robot can work 168 hours a week - few hours for maintenance.

So human working on production costs:
(I'll be rounding up here)

40k a year in wage.
5k+ in worker taxes the company pays
facilities, parking, etc = unaccounted because same can go for robotics, to a smaller degree imo but i'm not going to write a research paper on reddit.

Robot:

50k Upfront

Power:
250w(=16.8/week @ 0.40/kwh, 873.60/year)
500w(~1750/year)

Maintenance = 20% / year of purchase price seems like a strong number
10k/year

= 12k/year

And with mostly robots, you need less managers to manage the humans. Smaller HR department, less legal issues, less workplace investigations, less PR over how you abused your workers. Then to top that, you can get more work per year from a robot that can do 50% the speed of a human.

So lets calculate total work hours for a human doing quad shifts (we'll combine 4 people into one here)

45k/year for 40 hour weeks, 160 hours for 4 people.

The human cost: 180k / year + unexpected
The Robot Cost: 12k/year at 500w

Even if you absurdly increase the robot cost, we're talking huge savings.

The even trade point here over a worker, the robot would have to cost almost a million dollars(900k), with that 20% maintenance rate. So, spending 180k / year to repair it.

Humans are expensive, we have yet to learn the productivity rate of any specific robot yet, and that'll be the determining factor, but we can calculate how much it has to cost to be worth replacing humans if it's 1:1 productivity rate.

Thank You for your comment. You are right we have robots for very specific tasks. I thought we are discussing here general humanoid tasks. Working in my kitchen for example is more complex than all of the working environments of all Tesla plants combined. Nothing has a very specific place. Food is packaged differently all the time etc. A robot will need world knowledge and human touch and feel capacity to master the extraordinary challenge to find an egg, check whether it still good, find a pan and create something eatable out of it. There is a reason why humanoid robot dev is going on for so many years and billions of USD. It is the most complex challenges of all we have faced so far.

The machines of the robots are proven to work, they can do the jobs, we just need the right movements.

Most robots wont have to run,
most wont have to feel,
most wont need toes.

What do you mean there's no evidence? We have robots doing parkour and picking up objects. We have machines that do just that in factories today.

What we do have is robots that do factory work in a very specific controlled environment. We have robots that can walk and move. There's no mechanical issues here. It's all part of the AI and code that we need to get to complete.

Evolution hasn't optimized us, it's guaranteed our survival. We're horribly inefficient at a number of human things.

It's absolutely absurd to say a robot would need all the capacities of a human to do, say house work.

We have hearts and lungs, we have organs, we biological functions to worry about. Robots just maintain battery charge, breakdowns, etc, but that's all been done before with traditional coding.

A robot is magnitudes more simple than a human.

>There is no evidence at all for your statement.

You're gonna need to be more specific this time.

A robot can't be coerced into a destructive effort to go beyond it's limit.
The thing about biologic employees is that biologic creatures have so much buffer you can destroy for that extra bit of profit.
While a robot already gives exactly 100% and has zero buffer to go beyond because then it catches fire and needs to be repaired by the owner while an human gets sick and because it's not your property, can be fired and replaced by the next human you lied to about the working conditions.

Humans are a hilariously cheaper workforce then robots.

Intelligence needs the ability to generalize, narrow AI can barely generalize within the learning space. Emergence of understanding is demanding exponential resources. Any general robot needs a world understanding to be successful. This is also the challenge for FSD, there will always be situations that you can react on if you have world understanding, but fail if you are just an dreaming professor chauffeur.

No evidence for this

What makes you say that? There is no evidence at all for your statement. The only working prototype to do human like general work is us. As evolution has optimized us many times it is very save to assume that another solution shall have the same level of complexity, as complexity is the only source of emergence. The same holds true for AGI btw. The number of neurons and the necessary compute for GPT X=8 will also be very close to projected human capacity.Xm years of evolution did obviously not such a bad job.

I think the issue there arises when you have to train a new AI to use suction cups instead of one that knows how to manipulate it's hands for any task... Like holding on to suction cups.

Purpose built robots require more labor and training than designing one that can do nearly everything, you also got a much larger market.

Also, just being cheeky here, but

>The people upvoting you and downvoting me are limited in their thinking.

doesn't sound like cheeky, it sounds like condescending and arrogance.

I feel you're a little absolute on that, but the point I wanted to bring up is most of these robots are designed with people working with robots in mind. People like humanoids on a psychological level, especially inside their homes.

For industrialization reasons, you can do all that with a non-humanoid I agree, but I will say it'd have to be similar to a humanoid with height and hand size for workstations to say the same.

So robots can't do the same tasks because they're not human, AND they don't have the same sensors as a human.. They're not trying to be a human. Vision and tactile feed back for main points is enough. Combined with internal sensors like motor encoders and the like.

They walk and hold on to things, the only thing left is the intelligence to manipulate well. We're not building a human, and humans don't need all that we have to function well. You have many people with 1 arm or leg, or can't feel pain, or many things. It makes human life harder, but would be indifferent to a robot.

Wouldn't greed demand they employ robots instead of people?

Everyone will not just have one. first the wealthy, then the rich, then those with connections. And over decades everyone else

I don't think free is impossible. Might take some fudging of the definition... But like with the possibility of Fusion energy... The idea here is that electricity would become so cheap, it would be more costly to bill customers.

I can see a similar scenario happening with food, and the state power would have to take over production because if the profit goes away or becomes so minuscule that companies are dropping out of the agriculture business, it'll need to be bolstered somehow.

Either, A) State ran, free for everyone within reason. B) More farming subsidies. C) ??

we always get the "BuT tHaTs NoT fReE", so here: No but its free for the consumer to consume.

Then, not to mention, this will be happening to nearly every industry across the world.

We're already inches from a massive war, Democracy is already at risk. Completely upending the economy with autonomous robots and AI is going to make countries take some extreme measures 'for the better of the people'.

My bet is there's going to be 1 or two countries actually transitioning well, the rest are gonna be chaos as people find what jobs are left as they gradually get rare.

I'm thinking <10 years chaos will come, 20+ years before things see something they can call normal.

If a robot can do all my housework and yard work (lol i don't got one), it would be well worth the payments, even at 50k+.

Cooking for me would pay for it's self alone.

I volunteer for that battle.

Alright, thank you, that answered my question a bit.

Born in 1991 for reference

When I was a kid, there was more or less no internet as we think of it today. It existed, but only tech nerds used it for much: images took time to load and were poor resolution, videos you can forget about, and forums were the main thing

People watched TV, read books and went outside much more

The internet slowly gained more features. When i was in middle school, the first social networks (myspace) started to appear. At first these were not full of "rage bait" stuff because the attention economy was only just beginning. YouTube was born around this time, and it was the first time the internet went from being weird nerds to being "most people"

Early devices like iPods and flip phones would become smartphones by the time I was in college. YouTube went from blurry videos that took forever to load to something like it's present form, with lots of videos and ads and things

Most of the early internet was spread across 100s of forums and fun sites like ytmnd, but by the time of the smartphone it consolidated around "the five websites" that exist today

The culture changed a lot around this. The early internet was more anarchic, and felt separated from society, but soon the two would become more integrated.

Since then, well, you'll be old enough to know what occurred

This problem, which is very easy to fix, is they need inexpensive, reliable energy.

Currently a large portion of the privileged in the world, people in western countries, stop this from being available.

Climate change!!! Stay in your poverty stricken lane you lesser people the weak and easily frightened people shout.

Huh, interesting.

Homelessness is a tech as well as a political problem because it can be addressed with advanced robotics. The cost of housing will decrease when much of construction is automated.

Well the biggest one that comes to my mind that has changed everyone's day to day life, is the fact that practically everybody has an internet capable super computer in their pocket, for better or worse. Smart phones are pretty fucking sci-fi if you were born pre-1990.