The majority of work that can be done by simple arm robots has been replaced with simple arm robots.
The humanoid robots are not going to fulfill that niche.
The majority of work that can be done by simple arm robots has been replaced with simple arm robots.
The humanoid robots are not going to fulfill that niche.
Blemgo@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
Then what niche will they fulfill? What work requires a humanoid form?
Wander@sh.itjust.works 15 hours ago
All the work done by humans right now.
Tends to be either stuff that is difficult to automate or work that is so short as to not be cost effective to buy a robot that only does that one job.
Humans aren’t good at doing most thing. But they are very very good at doing a lot of things.
Flexibility is the main thing that employs people in factories right now.
Blemgo@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
I have to disagree with that. Most positions in factory jobs exist because human labour is very cheap, especially in terms of flexibility. I doubt there are many positions where a robot with a less humanoid shape wouldn’t do a better job than a human or a humanoid robot. It’s just often cheaper to employ these workers because you pay them a salary, either on a hourly basis or on a monthly one, yet don’t have to worry about maintenance. With robots you have less hourly costs, but a much bigger overhead, as you now have to hire qualified technicians to perform regular maintenance on those machines, and also semi-regularly order replacement parts. These costs will rise alongside the complexity of these robots. And humanoid robots are much, much more complex than industrial robots, especially as they need to incorporate a lot more sensors that most industrial robots just won’t need. Sensors that might be very sensitive or require regular calibrations to ensure they work properly. That doesn’t come cheap.
Even when we look over the costs, humans will always be more versatile than robots. Give a person a book on how to do a job and they will perform it with the help of the books, and develop their working style to even work more efficiently. In contrast, robots would need a much more thorough training in order to work properly. This could be done traditionally by hardcoding the logic, or by using neural networks, which would be more intuitive, but are prone to create undesired results if one doesn’t have a good eye for the involved factors. And this process would need to be repeated for each job, and again if jobs would be fused together. And of course one would have to adhere for hardware limitations. A processor can only work so fast, and there are limitations on storage space, data transfer speed and reliability that also come to play when it comes to saving the training data.
Wander@sh.itjust.works 10 hours ago
It seems to me we agree on everything except scale.
You don’t see humanoid robots being good enough and cheap enough to replace humans in any job. I do. I think it will start slow and progress overtime. Same how robotic arms started slow and then reaching more factories and more types of work.
The price people are saying these robots will cost is way less that what it costs to keep humans around.
The reason a humanoid robot will be used over a robotic arm is the same reason humans are used over a robotic arm that’s flexibility. The reason a humanoid robot will be used over a human is cost.