I have been secretly hoping Tesla to buy Boston Dynamics and revolutionize autonomous manufacturing. One day, a Starship fleet will send an army of robots to Mars and build out a city.
Hyundai Robotics is a much bigger chance for this, particularly considering they've rather concrete plans for it already trough their HGZN partnership [0].
Makes much more sense than with Tesla, all Tesla can offer on that front is battery tech, which is kinda useless for autonomous manufacturing as everything there can be easily powered trough a line.
[0] https://roboticsandautomationnews.com/2020/04/21/hgzn-and-hy...
All jokes aside, Hyundai can probably do much more with Boston Dynamics than Tesla. Tesla has already failed to automate, using the exact same method as Ford in the 80s. Doubt that throwing more advanced tech at it solves a fundamental logistics problem.
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/04/experts-say-tesla-has-r...
It's quoted, along with a bunch of other articles from 2018, here:
https://www.iqsdirectory.com/resources/teslas-big-problem-ex...
I saw a video, years ago, when Tesla was installing/setting up/showing off the robots. The demonstrated method and tool to 'program' the robot arm was terrible, and the resulting arm motion was excessive.
My takeaway was Tesla needed experienced staff to optimize the arm path.
>[1980s GM quote] As Hamtramck's assembly line tried to gain speed, the computer-guided dolly wandered off course. The spray-painting robots began spraying each other instead of the cars.... When a massive computer-controlled 'robogate' welding machine smashed a car body, or a welding machine stopped dead, the entire Hamtramck line would stop. Workers could do nothing but stand around and wait while managers called in the robot contractor's technicians.
This seems like a solvable problem.
If you eliminate one kind of job, then another, then another, and then implement general purpose job elimination, where does it end?
Is it not an axiom of the world that there simply isn’t enough knowledge work to go around all seven billion of us?
By taking away jobs what do those of us who aren’t programmers, architects, novelists or day spa wait staff have left to do?
(Thank you for your comment, it really made me think.)
Normally we dread this coming from the supply side, “will we end all possible work through automation?”
But if you think it from the demand side, people will always need something like “work”: structured schedule, socialization, ways to differentiate yourself from others through “achievements” that not everyone can do, etc.
Even in an utopian society where all material needs are covered and wealth redistributed, people would create and consume art, “fight” for relevance, create petty politics... and gladly “pay” for part of that. So we will end up inventing new jobs in any case, so we can keep on using the same old concepts and social structure, just not for food acquisition.
If you think about it, this sophistication has been happening for some centuries already.
I could talk about this for days, but: the more we automate below us on Maslow’s pyramid, the higher we raise our baseline.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: you've already been breaking the site guidelines quite a bit with this account. Can you please not? Comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25333233 are particularly not ok here.
Furthermore, in the linked comment, the person I was replying to did, in fact, completely miss the point of my comment and make an entirely non sequitur resposne. Will they be getting warned too?
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
Re the other person: I'd don't know which specific comment you're referring to, but it's not against the site guidelines to miss someone's point, or to say something incorrect. Such rules would be impossible to impose and would wipe out half the discussion anyhow (I'm being generous with "half"). People are allowed to be wrong.
If they broke the guidelines then we probably should have moderated it too, but that runs up against a different issue—we can't see everything that gets posted here, or even come close. We often don't read the threads in linear (depth-first?) order either, so a comment that appears adjacent to a normal reader might escape our attention.
If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. You can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
Anything disruptive attracts this kind of attention and even if you don't think they will succeed it's hard to argue they are not disruptive.
And they say capitalism isn't broken.
Have fun holding those bags I guess.
I swear this is the logic of a small child. Dangle some candy in front of them and they'll follow you anywhere.