It seems like we'd need something like off-world colonies, a fertility crisis or environmental collapse to really create a need. I think I'm happy with the status quo on this one.
There are a large number of highly profitible robotics companies in this area.
Fanuc with over $1 billion in net income from about $5 billion in revenue stands out[0], but also ABB ($2 billion in net income from $34 billion in revenue)[1], Omron, Kuka, etc.
They not be as interesting to report on as humanoid models, or the consumer market, but it's an enormous, rapidly growing market.
Here's an interesting fact. Most people think of forklifts as being stronger than people, and that we use them to lift stuff that people can't. That's true. But, what most people don't think about is why it can lift stuff like that. Hydraulic multiplication provides the power to actually do the lifting, but, a human shaped robot with the same hydraulics couldn't. Most forklifts weight about 3x the weight of a car and are mostly filled with lead. The same will go for robots. the form factor of improving human strength doesn't really benefit from changing the strength to weight ratio, it benefits from scaling both.
edit: as context, the average forklift is so heavy that when put on a trailer they exceed the tow rating of 1500-class pickup.
I personally think human form factor robots are a dead end but if the Incredible Hulkbot was as readily available as a forklift then then you wouldn't see so many things being palletized in the first place because you'd just have Hulkbot move them. The reason we have so many fork lifts is because we've settled on the pallet as a form factor and forklifts are good at moving pallets.
It doesn’t matter how strong you are if you don’t have the mass to balance what you’re holding. Mind blown.
Yes, to lift 10t, you need the material and support to lift 10t. But a robot the size and weight of a child is much stronger and faster than any human and can easily kill one with the wrong movement. That's why they often are not allowed to work in the same location as humans.
There are currently exoskeletons developed to bring human strength back on par. But the speed race for anything repetitive is lost.
Once we get to a state where a robot can just take a basket of clothes and fold (and sort) them like a human, I think you'll see an explosion of robot applications. However, I think that time is very far off.
Simpler than that: increase the price of labour such that robots doing menial tasks become profitable. A UBI would achieve this goal without catastrophic change.
That's probably because you're not one of the cheap people.
If so, could they not voluntarily do that now, without robots?
Indeed, that is the only thing here I was questioning. :-)
If they can’t afford to learn a new trade now, how would losing their current jobs to robots help?
Not sure it really makes sense to fix a lack of people with something that's extremely labor intensive (at least up front). Not to mention, getting robots to be cheap requires a really highly advanced society, which requires a lot of people and a lot of time.
That said, it'd be interesting to see at what point or under what conditions a robot's total labor output exceeds it's total labor input (including watching it, debugging, programming, etc)
As a side note, here's a automatic hamburger restaurant from the 50s. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FmXLqImT1wE&t=437s
Two out of three ain't bad, so I think we'll have that need soon enough.