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Comment by ozten | Hacker News Reader

This is a superficial article.

The biggest bottlenecks are raw ingredients, power, and factories. Once the automated manufacturing flywheel gets started, units can be produced very rapidly. Specialized machines produce low-level components, while more generalized machines assemble higher-level components as well as products like themselves and other robots.

People don't factor a human's total compensation beyond an hourly wage.

Machines don't need as much breathing room as humans.

Machines can work a 6-day, 16-hour schedule.

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Humanoid robots are notable worse than humans in many aspects that impact productivity. If a humanoid robot is ultimately 33% as productive as a worker in a developing country who gets a wage of $10k USD annually and works 8 hours per day every day, then then robot has to cost less than $10k annually all in to be a good replacement. Assuming a 5 year useful lifespan and $2k in maintenance per year, results in the robot needing to cost ~$40k before it can replace a human's productivity. And that is inclusive of training and setup, and I doubt we'll have robots that are capable of learning as quickly as average humans without dedicated specialists training them... which raises the cost.

In general, you can get a dedicated machine for most human tasks that is easily 10-1000x productivity if you have a few million in capital. There are tasks on the margin where human flexibility and dexterity that having a human operate a $10k sewing machine is going to be very very hard to replace.

Can't machines work a 7-day, 24-hour schedule? That said, humanoid robots strike me as a jack-of-all-trades tool, our environment is full of things that are optimized for human-sized and -shaped users, but if you can purpose-build your robot for a factory, it's going to be more efficient at a narrow set of tasks there.

That is the humanoid robot use case with time for charging, maintenance, and offline during repair. This is just a rough estimate of amortizing those costs and comparing them against a 7-day work week.

Isn't the biggest bottleneck just that they need to adequately and reliably be able to do useful work at a better price-performance ratio than a human ?

And that's just not the case yet?

The biggest bottlenecks are hardware design and software design. Materials science to an extent, particularly battery materials, but we could build robots with currently-available materials and power density if only we knew how to make them work usefully enough.

I'm not against the concept and I agree the manufacturing can be scaled. There just isn't a product yet.

Article calls out demand — so far there has been no demand for large numbers of humanoid robots.

And it is a dumb take. As with any new technology, it has a chicken and an egg problem to overcome. Humanoid robots are developing very rapidly now that AI is progressing the way it is. It is in the same vane as 32k should be enough for anybody.

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