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Comment by p-e-w | Hacker News Reader

> We'll know this works when it starts replacing Amazon pickers in quantity.

That doesn’t follow. There are plenty of tasks that can be fully and reliably automated but aren’t, for the simple reason that human labor is dirt cheap compared to advanced robotics.

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I disagreed, then re-read your post, then re-read the OP, and now I've come full circle to apologize; I think you make a fair point.

I work at a biotech. We spent who knows how much time and money trying to develop a 'lab technician bot' to automate one of our critical assays. Turns out, a 6-figure machine still isn't as economical as my coworker Y, one of the veteran lab-technicians. Sure she takes the occasional sick day but even at our volume (and we do industrial-level, multiple clients batched into a single assay pass) it won't be economical to replace her for a very long time (if we even reach that scale).

Absolutely. I worked at a gene sequencing company and I led the software side of making a robotic product[0] to automate the 20-30 minutes of sample preparation time. It's great for lots of uses, but for anything outside the exact thing it automates, it doesn't cover it. For that you need an expert human.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20250919140427/https://nanoporet...

Thanks for the story! Was this company similar to Plasmidsaurus in terms of industrial-scale sequencing?

No problem! It was probably the most fun product I've ever had the pleasure of leading the software dev of.

The company is one of the few in the world that makes gene sequencing technology - actual chemistry, biologics, protocols, hardware and software. Plasmidsaurus is a customer[0] - they use our devices and have built an incredibly successful service on top of them!

[0] https://nanoporetech.com/blog/plasmidsaurus-redefine-the-gol...

Cool!!

What is the point of humanoid “general” robots then? We already have pretty reliable ways to make and train humans. Humans are cheaper and better than robots. I could imagine robots for some specialised tasks where you don’t want to use a human for eg security reasons, but you don’t need general purpose robots for that

If robots ever do get cheaper than humans for it, though?

In natural ecosystems, nobody beats the apex predator directly, and nobody beats the hyperspecialized niche critter at their own game. The new species has some advantage that’s different than what is there.

If a humanoid robot is slower dumber human that is expensive, requires power, can’t get wet, falls over, and doesn’t understand stairs. Is not sleeping and being radiation tolerant enough of an advantage to be worth it?

You forgot a big one in your description of the hypothetical advantages:

No free will

The nature comparison doesn't work on a fundamental level because you're only getting a fraction of the human's power based on how much they're happy to sell.

They already are, the problem with humanoid robots is that people think that adding legs to the robot will somehow fundamentally make it more intelligent.

People see a robot arm attached to a stationary platform and understand it requires integration work to perform a single task.

But when those same people see a humanoid robot, they think they can just talk to it like a real human and it will do what you told it to do.

They don't think about the fact that the humanoid robot has to be programmed exactly the same way the stationary robot arm has to be programmed and that programming the legs in addition to the arms is a much more challenging problem.

Robots are good at things that are "simple" but where human precision is not good enough, or where people would get bored and make mistakes.

technology gets cheaper over time. If they were always going to cost the amount they do now, you might have a point. But they'll eventually get much cheaper.

Robots can be optimized for tasks and if they are, their benefits are greater. When cars replaced the horse, it was because they didn’t poop, and because a car designed only for transport would not suddenly have a heart attack and stop working.

Funnily enough, cars have their own way of pooping and dying of a heart attack.

It’s far less frequent, is at least recoverable, and of course there’s no immediate public sanitation issue the way poop and dead horses attract flies and disease.

I thought it’s more because they go hundreds times faster than horses and don’t need rest, so you don’t need to change horses all the time on long journeys. Plus you can easily haul tons of stuff

Cars can stop working suddenly in many many ways, for many reasons.

But at far less frequency and severity than a temperamental horse.

In Manhattan in 1900, 400 horses would die a day, and a rotting horse carcass is a far bigger sanitation problem than a broken down car, which you can tow and fix up.

A friend who works at Amazon made the same point: "We don't really need robots in the FCs urgently [other than the Kivas], because it turns out you can just pay people $17/hour"

Mechanical picking has been too slow. It's not a problem with the robot mechanics. Here's 300 picks/minute from 2012.[1] The parts are all the same, so the vision problem is simple.

But picking arbitrary objects from fulfillment bins is still running at a few picks per minute.[2] As the speed picks up, humans become less necessary.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RKXVefE98w

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2X4CU3jmw-g

That's the point of the test condition. When running a robot becomes more economical than paying full-scale humans $17/h, something important about robot abilities will have changed.

I dunno, I worked in an Amazon Warehouse for a year part-time (and a couple of weeks full-time when in-between jobs) --- on one occasion, I pulled up to a bin full of non-descript cardboard boxes near where a group of trainees were working their way through, grabbed one box, spun it around for the six-sided box check, scanned it, confirming it was the right one, and before I could move on to my next pick, a trainee asked, "How did you know that was the right box?", which required a several minute explanation of how the item description and the slight differentiations of the boxes led to that conclusion.

The big win would be training the folks doing stowing to not create such situations and to put markedly different things in each rainbow bin.

This would be a more convincing take if reasoning LLMs didn't already exist. Given the growth in capability over the last few years alone nothing about your description "several minute explanation of how the item description and the slight differentiations of the boxes" seems beyond an artificial intelligence to solve by the time humanoid robots would be ready to physically traverse a warehouse.

Your last point is also interesting given perhaps a robot is more amenable to such instruction, thus creating cascading savings. Each human has to be trained, and could be individually a failure. Robot can essentially copy its "brain" to its others.

Or likely more accurately, download the latest brain trained from all the robot's aggregate experiences from the amazon hivemind hq

The "Markedly Different things" in each bin was a big Amazon Warehouse advance in warehousing. Traditionally - things that were "alike" were put on shelves/bins - but (according to Amazon) it was far more efficient for pickers (at least back in the day - may have changed since then) to have random things on shelves located near each other to allow for equal access to popular items by pickers.

Yeah, my emphasis should have been on _successfully_ training the folks doing stowing, in such a way that they actually work that way.

I was thinking this week that AI token costs are probably going to get so expensive soon that bright spark CEOs are going to realise “why am I paying for such expensive coding agents when I can pay people from the third world to code!?!” and announce outsourcing like it’s some kind of stunning and innovative revelation.

    > when I can pay people from the third world

C-suite has been saying this for 30+ years. They never tire of it. Ask yourself: At this point in time, why aren't all programmers working from low cost jurisdictions?

I think you didn’t grok the hidden punchline - this is the stage after they’ve replaced all their third world coders with AI agents, until one day a C-suiter has the revelation that humans are cheaper and better, and the company then starts toting its humanistic credentials all over LinkedIn.

But that does follow. The economics working is not some outside factor. If the robot “could do the task” but would cost more than paying a human to do the same task then the robot “does not work”. It is frequently because the robot would be too slow, or not reliable enough, or could only handle certain types of items. But ultimately all of these boil down to cost.

We have seen lab demoes of robotic manipulation for decades. The reason why they stay in the lab (when they do) and don’t become ubiquitous is because they are not good enough. In other words they don’t work. The economics and “does it work” is not two separate concerns but one and the same.

It's a continuum, not binary. The same robot that doesn't financially "work" for replacing a manual scavenger sorting garbage in an African slum might be quite cost-effective sorting recycling in Switzerland, and would likely have a niche regardless of price if used to (say) sort biohazardous or radioactive materials. And there are already millions of robots out there assembling cars etc.

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