Mercedes is trialing humanoid robots for 'low skill, repetitive' tasks
theverge.com
theverge.com
Call me a luddite but it looks like an overly error prone solution looking for a problem to me.
It looks like starting with a small, manageable problem before expanding the robot’s scope of work.
Edit:
I saw a video a few days ago from Figure where it was putting dishes onto a dish rack at relatively high speed and that was genuinely impressive, possibly the best object manipulation I've seen. But that's still closer to dropping objects in boxes than to the welding and wiring work that I've done.
E.g. government grants/loans, subsidies, or allowing workers to preferrentially buy out bankrupt businesses. And that's not even getting into the more radical ideas like mandating worker ownership for businesses beyond a certain size/age/revenue. Compared to the kinds of subsidies and preferential treatment that already exist for certain industries and businesses, these aren't exactly radical, they just lack a powerful lobby and donor class.
There are side quests like abolishing or curtailing intellectual property restrictions, which concentrate wealth in the hands of the few and make the rest of us dependent on them. (I have a whole philosophy about this but the takeaway is, no intellectual property restrictions don’t do what you think they do, and the economy and investment would work fine and actually much better without them.)
For discussion of the need for cooperatives, see any of many talks or books by Richard Wolff. This is a fine place to start:
There’s also the strategy of building new economic tools that aren’t owned by anyone, via open source. That’s why I work on open source farming robots now. Building technology that can help people lift themselves up can reduce our reliance on the owners of the economy. When they put up roadblocks to our independence we protest, fight them in the courts, and build more tools to get around their control.
It’s a battle that never ends. There is no triumphant moment when everything gets solved - we need to educate, work, fight, and build. Philosophers have been writing on subjects of our collective economic well being for hundreds of years, and we haven’t achieved their dreams yet. But we can make progress one step at a time.
Machinists used to require skill. Now they LITERALLY just screw the part into a machine and press a green button. And the pay went from 100k+ to $45k. And the technology went from $75k to $1m. But it's still cheaper to pay a human to push a cart then it is to develop the rest of that technology.
But this is the investment that next level requires. Look at the progression (Google search this) from a Bridgeport, to a Mazak Nexus 6800, and then look at a Mazak Pallettech robot.
The first machine is completely manual. Most have retrofit digital displays and some have retrofit powered axis, but you still have to know what you're doing. The second one is semi automatic, you just need a human to set it up and an even dumber human to run it. The last machine is a robot that you bolt onto the second machine to get rid of the dumb human operator.
Mercedes are probably looking at final assembly for this technology, which is the most labor-intensive stage by a large margin, mainly because you've got to fit awkwardly-shaped parts into awkwardly-shaped places. A humanoid robot can potentially do useful work in this area without having to completely reimagine the final assembly line.
If it's general enough, but does simple tasks, that's still a win over 'this is a nutcracker that work only with this precise nut +-1 mm at a rate of _exactly_ 1 nut per hour +-0.1 seconds.' which may be some of the types of machines out there.
"Mercedes has started trialing an undisclosed number of Apollo robots at a factory in Hungary. The country has experienced labor shortages for several years as workers migrate to Western Europe, with Audi and Mercedes having both expressed concerns regarding labor supply in 2016."
Raise wages?
Yeah but publishing videos of humanoid robots is proven to pump your car company stock to the moon. If Mercedes can also buy a cryptocurrency and a social media platform they're golden.
>Raise wages?
No no, you see we need open borders and visa free uncontrolled migration so companies have the upper hand and get to pick and choose whatever they want from the world labor pool until they find complacent workers on their terms, instead of having to pay locals competitively. Otherwise it's considered a labor shortage.
Hungary is in Schengen. Their workers left for higher-paying jobs. The company can’t move as easily because they already plopped down a plant. (Hungary is also one of the EU’s most migrant-sceptic members.)
Secondly, Mercedes moved to Hungary for cheap labor a while ago, and now that labor has fucked off to greener pastures Mercedes is now bitching that the cheap labor they came here for is no longer as cheap as they want it to be. If it wants to reattain those factory workers in Hungary they should pay competitively similarly to how they're retaining workers at their fabs in Germany. Why haven't they?
It's not a labor shortage, it's sucker/exploitable worker shortage.
>On the other hand, Hungary’s strict international migrant policy appears to weakening labour’s hand by encouraging automation.
Do you see what you're saying here: "If labor doesn't agree to be exploited as their masters demand, then they'll have to be replaced by robots if they can't be replaced by cheaper immigrant workers".
The workers' rights and benefits we enjoy today in the west, especially in Europe, didn't come from labor bending over to the demands of the business owning class, it cam from confrontations and labor sticking to their guns.
What is the difference? If Schengen were extended to the world, wouldn’t one describe that as uncontrolled movement?
> now that labor has fucked off to greener pastures(probably to Germany
What effect do you think that had on German wages? The analogy is Germany:EU::EU:world.
> labor doesn't agree to be exploited as their masters demand
You don’t find it curious that the automation is happening in the low-cost plants first?
There are a number of policy differences between Germany and Hungary, from collective-bargaining to legal stability. What’s interesting is how this case lets us isolate how Hungary’s migration policies undermine their workers in an unexpected way.
> didn't come from labor bending over to the demands of the business owning class, it cam from confrontations and labor sticking to their guns
We agree. My point is a collectively-bargaining Hungarian auto workforce would benefit from automating repetitive tasks (or giving them to non-Europeans). This shouldn’t be a conflict or confrontation. It’s turned into one due to Hungary’s politics redirecting anger at virtually non-existent migrants [1].
[1] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/economy/article/2023/11/29/in-a-hu...
If you don't understand(or intentionally choose to ignore) the difference, rules and impact between hiring EU workers and non-EU workers, you are not arguing in good faith (against HN rules) and I will have to end the conversation here.
>What effect do you think that had on German wages? The analogy is Germany:EU::EU:world.
Germany and Hungary are EU members with equal rights. If Germans didn't want this they had the chance to veto Hungary's EU membership a long time ago, and unions in Germany could have also have a word on this, BEFORE it happened.
>My point is a collectively-bargaining Hungarian auto workforce would benefit from automating repetitive tasks (or giving them to non-Europeans).
How would that benefit Hungary? If nobody in Hungary wants to work for those jobs Mercedes has, it means they must be shit as workers there have better options. How are you fixing this by importing even more desperate and low skilled people willing to low-ball themselves to take shit jobs? How does that benefit society?
We're not talking about importing caretakers, teachers, doctors, nurses or builders, professions that society actually needs. We're talking about cheap exploitable workers for someone else's factory. Businesses wanting that can fuck off.
Automation is way better than importing unskilled desperate migrants willing to lowball themselves for crappy jobs. Automation builds valuable knowledge and skilled well paying jobs (look at Switzerland). What Mercedes wants here, being a perpetual sweatshop dependent on having the cheapest possible labor is not a good strategy for a western economy.
It’s clearly intended to do more.
> Raise wages?
They have been [1], though not enough [2]. That said, it’s unclear whether the problem is ongoing emigration or past depletion.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/hungary-labour-carmakers-idU...
[2] https://www.hungarianconservative.com/articles/current/the-g...
I'm betting that the 'undisclosed number' has exactly one digit, and the robots doing actual work is not part of the reason why Mercedes is doing this
I think if the choice is between spending money now for r&d that enables future free labor or spending more now and forever on human labor it's obvious what choice a capitalist system incentives.
We are rapidly approaching an inflection point where the rules of capitalism don't work anymore. The road bifurcates there and I'm not sure that we are capable of getting the good ending.
What are you talking about exactly? Can you elaborate?
I assume this is a reference to a technological singularity [1].
At the point capitalism breaks down, virtually every other social institution does as well. Until we know what that future looks like, and what the new constraints are, it is impossible to put in place a better system.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity
This is clearly a pet project or from the marketing budget.
Keeping that in mind, honestly for me it's hard not to be very skeptical that it would make any economic sense in the next many decades to have an expensive humanoid robot performing tasks with a very low aggregated value like moving boxes one by one. Just because it's a robot performing an economic activity it doesn't necessarily mean it will be productive or competitive.
I think it will do well at performing economic activities that don't have real hard time constraints, but just require labor. Ex. moving boxes around from one storehouse to another...leave the last bit of sorting and packing to humans, but now you don't need someone doing the boring work.
Cutting meat in practice is an activity that's more complex than it looks and for sure carcasses vary a lot, but even taking in account all their variation they still follow a pattern. At some point I'm sure we'll have robotic AI arms that will be trainable just like chatGPT is, so after being trained by a profession with thousands and thousands of hours, the hypotetical intelligent robotic arm eventually learns to do the job just fine 99.99% of the time and that's enough.
Which is the easiest possible scenario. Slow speed, highways only (no intersections, no pedestrians)
This reminds me of Marinetti predicting electricity will usher in a post-scarcity world [1]. (Like, students will be hooked up to outlets to learn faster, electricity in the ground will make crops grow faster, flying cities will make land scarcity a thing of the past, et cetera.)
For example, automation may increase worker productivity but that doesn't benefit the worker but the owner: the worker may actually be worse off because the owner will now likely fire workers due to the reduced labor need and the resulting reduction of available jobs suppresses wages. On the other hand, some jobs where workers would outperform automation will be underpriced to the point that it's not worth paying someone a livable wage for the quality advantage over an automated process at a fraction of the cost so those jobs go away too.
Or for food production we may be producing an abundance but as the total need is limited, instead of reducing prices because of the increased supply, we end up instead importing out of season produce from the other side of the world, min-maxing convenience food for appeal/addictiveness and destroying unsold goods to avoid lowering the market price.
Or for drugs we literally value the sanctity of patents over the lives of people in underdeveloped countries who couldn't afford the medicine in their lifetimes (cf. the refusal to suspend/discount COVID vaccine patents for poorer countries to allow them to produce generics to vaccinate their populations).
Absolutely. AOC became an elite before she became wealthy. Same for J. K. Rowling and most academics at the top of their fields.
0: https://president.columbia.edu/news/hillary-rodham-clinton-j....
Every one that achieves cultural relevance or an administrative post absolutely is. Some of those are born into it. Most are not.
You’re still confusing wealth with power. Plenty of people who never need work again are not elites, e.g. Steve Wozniak. And plenty of elites don’t have enough saved to survive extended periods of not working, e.g. many in television or politics.
> don't know too many university presidents / deans / provosts who personally control enough wealth to have the power to change the direction of their society
Larry Summers.
They don’t wield wealth as power. They wield influence. Same as how a U.S. Senator need not be wealthy to be powerful; if anything, they wield their power to produce wealth.
If the AI's can truly replace humans to the point where there is nothing useful for your humans to be doing, then it would cease to matter whether or not the rulers produce and distribute the things the consumers need/want. You'd need good enough AI security to handle any unrest which ensues, and protect any natural resources that might be important to you.
If you no longer can utilize any of the labor of your consumers, then the only products you need to make are: 1) The things you personally want, and 2) The things needed to maintain sovereignty against any other similarly advanced groups. Category #1 would be a very small volume, but Category #2 might be industrially more than the entire world's current production of everything, just for your fiefdom. It would be unstable until someone conquered the entire globe, and would likely only need to provide for about 500-5000 people in their "court" to provide for the rulers own selfish social needs.
My electrician is highly skilled. He still has to drive himself to the job site and unpack his tools there, which is low-skill labor.
An electrician is in most cases already not doing that well (otherwise those apprenticeships would be full).
Replacing them will be terrific for people employing electricians like you. Not for electricians trying to accumulate their own capital through labour.
We aren’t a decade out from electrician robots.
> electrician is in most cases already not doing that well (otherwise those apprenticeships would be full)
My electrician takes his family on ski vacations in Japan. In many communities, young people simply don’t want to go into the trades.
> Not for electricians trying to accumulate their own capital through labour
Agree. But at the point we have electrician robots we have also eliminated a lot of other tedious (and dangerous) labour. A house full of servants becomes lower middle-class reality.
Google says there are a million electricians earning an average of 60k in the US (I guess mostly not going on ski trips to Japan on that salary). That’s 60bn a year on the table for anyone who can automate that work. How long would you bet it will be before it’s automated? I’d say not ten years but I’d be surprised if it were not done in fifty.
This is great for anyone who has sufficient capital to afford housing, food, and energy. Long term decreases in real salaries means people are more dependent on state / company / family gifts. People without access to this have bad lives. Question is how generous the gifts will be.
Meanwhile the whole world already operates on incredibly precise high-tolerance robots doing low skill and repetitive tasks as well as extremely "high skill" tasks like painting/manufacturing cars or milling metal.
And we have wheeled robots like Autostore.com for other automation tasks.
A humanoid robot exists only to tickle our perverse self-centric obsessions, and namely: news sites, news consumers, and executives.
The world we've built for ourselves is for humans. If you need a robot to flip a hotel room for the next guest it may not need real legs but its probably gonna be column shaped with some arms. That's humanoid to me.
Not trying to single out a hotel maid as low skilled, just trying to use an example of a common task in a very human environment
It would also be super ugly (potentially) to have those specialized robots.
this means it's seen as the holy Grail for a / the generic helper.
You build it once and replace any human manual laber task.
Basically you show the robot what it does by just doing it a few times and than the robot takes over.
Specialized 'robots' are closer to an assembly line someone needs to plan and design who knows how to do so and knows how to think like this.
Easy for an engineer hard for a normal human.
And when you look at.the progress it's not far fetched that this idea is close to become reality in the next 10-20 years.
Making humanoid robots, while vain on the surface, does kind of make sense. If it's humanoid, it can be a drop-in replacement for a lot of human tasks using systems designed for human hands and feet. It's just a matter of training for the tasks.
You wouldn't task an ED-209 with cleaning an office building. You'd end up with dirty stairwells.
Step 3 is "profit!". While step 4 may be "widespread suffering and social unrest", we can just redefine our process as ending at step 3, and it's no big deal.
All problems can be solved by taking the right perspective!
I like to quip that the most complex nanotechnological products in existence are all created by unskilled labor--not that I want to devalue your mother's nine months of work. :p