Comment by GabeIsko
5 hours ago
This is exactly why I didn't want to work for Agile when I was invited. This stuff is going to get crushed in the market by cheap AGVs and good systems integration.
It was very sad to watch the ambitions of excited robotics researchers turn towards making what are essentially digital slaves. I am not saying that manufacturing or logistics couldn't, or even shouldn't be automated. But the true factories and distribution centers of the future will have to fundamentally rethink what productivity and coordinated work looks like, including having a greater imagination about work and employment.
Mimicking the human form inelegantly is not going to cut it, let alone reduce labor costs. I am all for the research, but the dream of replacing bin pickers with humanoid robots is cynical and hopeless.
> making what are essentially digital slaves
The distinction between these and a laptop or a car is just form factor, from a "slavery" point of view.
This is like calling a child's doll a cloth slave.
No, the reason why I called them digital slaves is because it is a business pursuit to directly replace workers with unpaid labor automatons. That part is folly. I guess I was baiting a bit. I am not talking about the work itself, or the ethics of using tools - actually in this sense a digital slave would be on it's face ethical because an automaton is a machine, and not a person with rights etc.
I specifically used that term to point out the folly of replacing the human form as a business exercise. It get that it is a very simple business proposition - retrofit existing workspaces designed for humans around digital atomatons that mimic humans and eliminate your labor costs. Theoretically you are eliminating the messy step of systems integration. However, systems integration is a process that you simply can't get away from - you will have to figure out charging stations for these robots, issues will pop up, you will have to maintain them etc. It is not the exchange of money for labor between 2 parties - one is fundamentally a machine and it requires operations and maintenance to keep in working order.
Trying to mimic the human form then starts to undermine the very point of owning a site of business in the first place. While I think that understanding more about our bodies and replicating the motion and control of biomechanics is a very noble research aim, in egineering applications it is a very impractical one. These robots would be much better suited if they were on wheels for instance.
The distance between the pratical applications for these kinds of robots and the imagination that provides them their research and development funding is too much of a gap - it facilitated me leaving the industry to work in software. I found that there was a fundemental mis-alignment. Researchers want to explore motion, business want to solve practical problems. This platform is a compromise that does neither very well.
So the point is that the digital slave term was very intentional, and you actually grokked it pretty well. I wouldn't call a laptop a digital slave - a digital slave would be a human robot that you could program to use your computer for you while you were away from your desktop workstation. That would be a really dumb invention.