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Comment by michaelbuckbee | Hacker News Reader

After having seen the rise and fall of a number of "robot to make your pizza", "robot fry cook", etc. startups, I've been pitching a new rule that:

There is an inverse correlation between how much a robot looks like a _robot_ and how useful it is in the real world.

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One hundred percent. It is far, far easier to automate something by building it to be automated, than it is to make a general purpose automated system to use a tool.

My favorite thing to say about this is: We know how to make humans, we're good at it and its fun, why make it harder and less fun?

The proposal of humanoid robots is to make a human in less than 25 years for less than a million dollars :P

I understand, for sure. But if there's an effectively-free pipeline running with ancillary benefits of producing humans who want jobs, you're fighting an uphill battle against it.

For structured work, I simply do not understand how making the most complicated machine imaginable is going to outproduce a targeted device made by engineers.

For unstructured work, I simply do not understand how the device can perform at the required level.

There is a sliding structured-unstructured scale, and I'm sure there's a niche there, I'm just not sure where it is.

The particular problem with this is that effectively free pipeline of people is starting to run dry. Japan is on it's way to a population crash. China's population is on it's way to rapidly aging. The US population only grows because of immigration. Eventually the number of people that want to do your freehand task is going to be so low that the cost of building the complicated machine will be cheaper.

If and when we get general intelligence in robots the paradigm changes greatly, the amount of bullshit the capitalists will get out of the robot will, to them at least, be well worth the cost.

and that humanoid robot has the skills of all the robots before it, while not needing those pesky statutory breaks and comforts.

That's a lovely saying, although the main issue currently seems to be that, in the West, we are currently not good at making more humans. See various demographic crises.

Nah, we've just outsourced production to countries with cheaper labour costs.

It's a great deal: somebody else somewhere else deals with changing the diapers, and yet there will be a tax base to keep the country running when I'm retirement age.

This is only a problem if you also restrict immigration. Fertility crisis issues are not generally global. That solution costs effectively $0.

You're just stealing from another pool of limited size. Birthrates all across the world have dropped significantly. You only have so many decades left of people importation.

It is not surprising that the message of "We are facing demographic collapse" correlates strongly with "We need highly capable robotic workers". Especially among certain high profile people. I just don't see it coming together like those proponents say it will.

Any other comments about the truthiness of those statements or the truthiness of the correlation will just get into politics, so I'll stop before that.

There's more to it than that. We're not only bad at making large numbers of humans, we've also become very bad at training them to be useful workers.

This aligns with my thinking about people wanting exoskeletons as well.

Construction workers have all kinds of great speciality machines these days that let do everything from dig ditches to drive piles. The number of various attachments for Bobcat machines alone is crazy. None of them look like the exoskeletons I've seen in sci-fi, yet they're remarkably effective.

Have you seen a human operating a bobcat with attachments? It pretty much is an exoskeleton.

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