Comment by torginus
7 hours ago
My prediction is that by the time humanoid robots actually make it to the factory floor, they'll be pretty un-humanoid.
90% of car manufacturing is done by oldschool industrial robots, and I've had people point out that heavy use of industrial robots are basically unique to the car industry.
You might see a robot arm here and there in other industries, but it's somewhat rare, usually its all purpose-built machines or humans.
Cars are in the intersection where you have large parts that need to be moved around where other things happen with them and large scale of standard designs that is worth automating.
I expect that when we manage to do automated construction, it will use robot arms in several places too. But it's very rare that those two happen at the same time. Usually, large things are not standard.
You reminded me of the hilarious SV pizza making robot startup which has its own robot arm.
In this video you see the unnecessary robot arm move the pizza to the oven: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bN45bTsBUW8
For contrast a How it is Made video of frozen pizzas being created at dozens (hundreds?) per minute: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UrSIOtv8a0
The difference is they can be put into environments that do not allow for purpose robots. I don't think it is a bad idea that spaces are still made for humans for when something goes wrong. A frozen pizza factory is trying to solve and sell something different.
I agree and for me personally this is very easy to see and understand.
Why do you think the vast majority of people fail to see it like this? Guys like Musk obvious hype it up as he now has tied the valuation of the firms he owns and operates to this story.
I don't disagree with the general utility of humanoid (or other multipurpose) robots, just not in a factory setting.
I think automating stuff in the factory makes zero sense - its a controlled environment with purpose designed tooling where anything that makes sense to automate has been automated. All the extra work will only result in marginal gains.
It's automating the stuff that goes on outside of the factories - for example construction imo is about almost as labor intensive as it was a century ago, the marginal gains were offset by more complex building techniques and higher expectations.
Housing is also just about the most valuable thing that exists in every country.
Because so much infrastructure is in humanoid form. If you can make something that can manipulate two hands on arms that are positioned and moved like human arms, you could just put that torso into a lot of situations to replace a human without a lot of retooling. That's the dream I think.
Installing humanoid robots in a factory is like using regexes to parse data.
It makes sense if it's a one-off but there are better solutions.
Maybe it does make sense for small scale businesses that need just a little automation? Like a humanoid robot could restock shelves and do inventory in a grocery store at night, and you wouldn't need to retrofit anything to be able to do that.
Large scale factories seems like the wrong use case for humanoid robots.
I personally think humans make the mistake of thinking that we must create objects that emulate oneself. Imagination is tough, I know.
Does the computer 'memory' behave identically like human memory? Of course not. Does it look like the 'memory' of a human? Again, of course not.
Vertically upright humanoids have a lot going for them: they don't occupy a lot of floor space, they can pull an object right into their center of gravity to manipulate it, and because they're familiar they're relatively easy to prototype actions for because they're our actions.
People always asser without evidence that humanoid isn't the best design, but there's a paucity of alternatives that don't make some type of tradeoff: humanoid might not be the best at anything, but it's clearly very good at a lot of things.
I toured a major US OEM assembly plant recently, and there were a TON of humans working insanely repetitive tasks.
The most kind numbing of all were the easiest (sit in chair and put bolts upright in holder so robot can pick them up) and the highest paid thanks to union seniority.
The UAW will kill all the US OEMs before that let robots replace all the humans.