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Comment by Seattle3503 | Hacker News Reader

Trades could dry up quickly when as we develop effective robots, and there seems to be a lot of energy dedicated in that direction.

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I thought of that too and looked into it. (Or rather had an AI look into it! ;-)) Fortunately, there are extreme physical constraints on how quickly manual labor could be replaced, especially anything requiring dexterous work. Mainly, supply chain constraints on rare earth elements, which are required to make these motors feasible.

By some estimates, today's global supply is like 2% (or was it 0.2%?) of the total amount required to enable such widespread deployment of robots. Until we can scale that up (or figure out how to bypass that dependency) there is a very hard constraint on how fast they can be deployed.

I have a hard time believing that won't be overcome or surpassed when you compare it to the cost of producing an adult human capable of skilled trades.

The incentive is definitely there, but right now we physically just don’t have enough rare earth supply to make the number of motors required. So we simply cannot scale that production up to the level where it would be cost effective to displace humans. This is assuming fine motor control is “solved” which it is not currently, but I think LLMs will take care of that soon enough.

I think the company that cracks the mass market robotics puzzle will be the next trillion (quadrillion?) dollar company. I suspect that would require bypassing the dependency on rare earths, but there seem to be no serious contenders out there? All the big shots are focusing on using current technologies because they basically “solve” motors. Maybe the company that does crack this puzzle will come out of left field with an unconventional technology that scales with whatever raw material is abundant, like OpenAI did with ChatGPT and compute.

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