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Comment by thro32 | Hacker News Reader

> it costs barely $8 an hour to use a robot for spot welding in the auto industry, compared to $25 for a worker—and the gap is only going to widen.

This is just wrong. Author does not know much about welding or car manufacturing.

- Car welding is a best case for robots. Single task repeated many times exactly the same way. Try different case and you get $1M/hour.

- $25/hour human cost is too low. With pauses, errors, delays... $100/hour would be more reasonable.

- Germany is exactly in this situation, but does not have problem with unemployment.

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And here we see how news written by people without industry experience meant to be consumed by people without industry experience for the purpose of promoting a political idea can use pieces of real information to promote something less than the truth.

Next time you want to see if you trust a certain source for any of your information, pay close attention when they report on a topic where you have a lot of experience. As someone with a professional aviation background, watching CNN cover any aviation topic causes me physical pain.

And this was published under the banner of MIT without 'editorial' or 'opinion'.

This is fact! /s

Reads like another partisan puff piece griping about the election to me, which is a shame because the underlying concept (automation) is interesting to me, but the conclusion (manufacturing is doomed) is hyperbole.

It's quite likely they are quoting the actual costs from 2 different car plants.

(that would make them highly task specific, but it would reflect the difference in welding costs for producing cars on a high volume line)

I checked linked study:

> A human welder today earns around $25 per hour (including benefits), while the equivalent operating cost per hour for a robot is around $8 when installation, maintenance, and the operating costs of all hardware, software, and peripherals are amortized over a five-year depreciation period.

So human cost does not include total cost, just labour. Comparable cost would be around $100

Same thing with automated driving. Open interstate is fine, try to navigate Boston rush hour in a construction zone...

I am sure that Microsoft and Google are racing to have their AI be the first to do that.

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