Hacker News Reader

Comment by portaouflop | Hacker News Reader

General purpose robots don’t make sense - humans are infinitely better for this purpose and way cheaper to produce.

Sure the robots could do very dangerous or tedious work that would be “inhuman”, but I would argue that for this kind of work a specialised robot will always be more efficient and way cheaper to produce.

Apart from how science fiction this all is - we can’t even produce a general purpose robot don’t make that does the most basic things like walking or picking up objects in real life (outside of special test environments)

View on HN

I am not an expert, but it is unclear to me. A specialized robot vs general purpose robot is a scale question. I.e. if the task is big enough(i.e there is need for millions of these robots) and there is enough money, than yes specialized robot is the answer. I think for small scale problem it becomes human vs vs general purpose robot. And there really it's capital investment (for robot) vs constant cashflow (for human). There will be some cost point where the human is better, but it really depends on the price.

I agree - right now we are spending billions on general purpose robots that can barely walk or pour a glass of water. This is a long way until robots get cheap enough, imo way too long to solve the problems discussed in the article

> humans are infinitely better for this purpose and way cheaper to produce.

Most of the western world is having demographic issues. We are having trouble getting people to reproduce in sufficient numbers to keep our societies going. This is an ugly trajectory to be on because you have an increasingly big group of old people who need to be supported by an increasingly small number of young people.

I would argue it’s still easier to solve this problem than to build a general purpose robot that has even 1/3 of the capability of a human

Some people thought heavier-than-air flight is impossible.

Some people still think ramjets are possible — what’s your point?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com