All of which can indeed be automated in my view.
I would say it really depends on where you are though. In the US it probably makes sense quite quickly. But she lives in a small EU country where salaries aren't high, and this is very much a junior position with a lot of students looking for such a job. Her position costs about 25k a year.
The NPV of a $1m investment with a 25k cashflow is negative at normal discount rates. Once you get to replace a $120k salary with a $1m robot, it does make sense.
Further I do still expect there to be some jobs in overseeing the robot (e.g. your average factory manager). That makes sense for large centralised production locations, because you can have 1 human job overseeing many robots. It doesn't necessarily make sense with many small decentralised production locations. And that's the nature of most labs, I believe due to the time sensitivity of a lot of lab work they need to be everywhere and close to customers. But maybe that will change.
Breakfast and lunch are not paid breaks in any EU country as far as I know.
One 30 minute break (lunch break) is paid in Croatia and Slovenia
Most office workers spend an exorbitant amount of time twiddling their thumbs, reading emails, going to the restroom. On average, I'd say knowledge workers are typically productive for about 2 to 3 hours per day. I'd estimate physical laborers range up to 4 or 5 hours.
Assuming 8 hours of full productivity is a strange number to focus on
Again for large scale centralised labs that get sent samples throughout the 24 hour period from all across the world, where timing isn't an big issue, this could work. But most labs are small, close to the customer, time-sensitive, and work with couriers to bring samples because samples need to be transported and stored in specific ways not to go bad.
She works quite long shifts btw (10-12h), but that's more a function of her country/company culture rather than the norm. Probably 6-8 is more common indeed.
I could see demand spreading out more - though I agree it might be closer to 2 than 4 - if the availability of human labor wasn't an issue.
Just a bit lower than what a human would cost.
[1]https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_3yhWjodSNNYlpxkRCPIlvIA...
[2]https://mobile-aloha.github.io/
$7000 for the wheels/navigation module $3500 x2 for the control arms $6000 x2 for the controlled arms
I don't think you need a $7000 navigation module and the arms are also probably overkill. To which extent do we need closed-loop Dynamixel servos when the policy diffusion algo already relies on computer vision driven closed-loop control ?
Also nobody’s academic lab is buying $1m startup lab equipment. A whole core for 30 research groups is buying something, but it will be a piece of equipment that directly leads to publishing, ie, something with history. That is why you don’t have the exact thing you are talking about, which exists, in labs.