Comment by ObviousScience | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ObviousScience | Hacker News Reader

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If you look at a $30,000 robot for flipping burgers, and imagine it replaces one person working for a cost to the company of $8 per hour around the clock, you'd pay for it within a year.

Assume that it's not perfect, and you have about 2 weeks of downtime a year, plus 2 additional days of down time a week, just for service, small issues, etc.

So you'd have to buy a few to make it work, so their downtime didn't too significantly overlap, but that's $8/hr40hrs/wk50wk/yr*3shifts = $48000 per year.

So if it essentially does the work of 3 people (120 hours per week), then you can come out ahead on replacing one station with a robot (assuming you have 3-4, so downtime doesn't totally kill production).

Edit: I was thinking of something like this - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baxter_(robot)

You are leaving out a lot of the total cost of ownership. $30K is the sticker price. You should be calculating the EAC(Equivalent Annual Cost) of the robot. Things like, insurance, energy, maintenance, eventually upgrade/replacement. Remember the labor to fix a robot is much more expensive(probably around 10x with tools and other overhead) than the labor the robot is replacing. I wouldn't say it's definitely cheaper with human labor, but it's far from an obvious difference.

Don't forget to add the cost for Obamacare on the human side.

I was including that in my calculations: I based the robot price at $30k, but that leaves room to include another $18k in yearly expenses ($1500 a month or $50 a day).

This may of course be on the low side, but I also figured in only working 250 days of the year. It's likely that uptime of a commercial product would be somewhat better than this.

My main point was that we're surprisingly close to the point where it's cheaper (in just a wage-versus-cost-of-ownership sense) to have robots replace more general purpose workers.

> If you look at a $30,000 robot for flipping burgers, and imagine it replaces one person working for a cost to the company of $8 per hour around the clock, you'd pay for it within a year.

You're comparing the one-time acquisition cost of the robot to the ongoing cost of the worker; you are ignoring both the acquisition costs of workers and the maintenance costs of robots, and comparing unlike components of the robot and workers total costs as if they were the total costs of each.

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