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Comment by honr | Hacker News Reader

That would only be a minor marker. A major marker would be whatever the Chinese equivalent(s) of Amazon are (Alibaba? etc.) going that route successfully. From academic / industrial conference presentations it appears Chinese services are banking on automation far more than an entity like Amazon does.

That being said, I don't know what exact state the industrial automation technology is there and I can only extrapolate (or do websearch, which didn't lead to enough details; I only found things like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnUGgc8R3ng).

When something like https://www.allegrohand.com is mass produced and used industrially, I bet the last mile (meter?) would change a bit, and full automation would be easier and less finicky.

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Not sure about that. Labor costs are lower in China and the CCP is strongly incentivized to keep enough jobs around for humans to maintain their own hold on power.

Labor costs are lower, but rising, and already high enough that automation can be appealing.

The Chinese government is also pretty good at finding things for people to do, so I doubt that's a factor. Go to any big park in a city and see how many people are sweeping up leaves, or guarding a building/area that isn't particularly secure.

The CCP is also well aware that it's facing a dramatic demographic contraction so they better prepare for that.

Labor being cheap is more of a locale dependent condition in China now, their well developed cities and industries have had rising wages for 2+ decades now and the labor discount is small enough to be more like a side-benefit to already manufacturing in China, rather than a driving force to outsource to China. China has itself started outsourcing certain productions to chase cheaper labor prices.

That labor costs are rising and are now significantly above poorer countries like Bangladesh or Myanmar doesn't mean they're anywhere near high-income countries or above the cost of automation for low-volume tasks like last-mile delivery, which drivers do for under a dollar per trip: https://archive.ph/SizjZ

Automation can make sense even with low labor costs if it enables higher volume. Like nobody is paying humans to chisel individual screws by hand, because machines can do it quicker and better, and therefore cheaper.

But you can't substantially increase the volume of last-mile delivery by replacing the human with a robot, because the robot would have to move faster, and moving faster would be dangerous. So robotic automation of low-volume tasks can be expected to happen in high-income countries first.

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