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That was not a real statement, I just meant that it made contradiction in my mind, not speaking on short run, but in my country and european countries, you need

That was not a real statement, I just meant that it made contradiction in my mind, not speaking on short run, but in my country and european countries, you need to pay a lot of money to hire someone that includes health insurance something similar to US 401K beside so many things, so it seemed to me like on the long run, robots are much more cheap.

potatolicious 11y ago
> "so it seemed to me like on the long run, robots are much more cheap." Yes, in the very long run, assuming relatively unchanging tasks and capacity demand. But most jobs aren't like that - industrial robotics are dominated by robots that are purpose-designed with a singular task in mind, with a narrow envelope for deviations. A human can be re-trained to do something completely different than before, whereas a robot would likely have to receive completely new hardware. A welding robot cannot become a precision fan-balancing robot, but a human can be retrained from one task to another. It's cheaper to train a large group of humans to do something different than it is to upgrade the hardware & software on the same number of robots. This means that some jobs (see: automotive manufacturing) lend themselves easily to robotics - the throughput is steady, the capacity requirements are stable (i.e., you don't suddenly need 5x more cars in July than in March), and even between different models the general process is the same. Other jobs (see: warehousing, shipping) do not lend themselves to robotics easily - the job changes regularly as processes evolve, the capacity requirements are chaotic (i.e., you need to scale to 10x your normal throughput during Xmas), and there is significant variation in process requirements (e.g., Japanese retail warehouses that run vertically instead of horizontally). Robots are also still astonishingly expensive and largely made-to-order with long lead times. This means that it takes many years to break even on a robot (whereas you can fire the human when you don't need them), and you can scale easily with humans (it's much quicker to find a human than it is to order and receive a robot).

potatolicious 11y ago

> "so it seemed to me like on the long run, robots are much more cheap." Yes, in the very long run, assuming relatively unchanging tasks and capacity demand. But most jobs aren't like that - industrial robotics are dominated by robots that are purpose-designed with a singular task in mind, with a narrow envelope for deviations. A human can be re-trained to do something completely different than before, whereas a robot would likely have to receive completely new hardware. A welding robot cannot become a precision fan-balancing robot, but a human can be retrained from one task to another. It's cheaper to train a large group of humans to do something different than it is to upgrade the hardware & software on the same number of robots. This means that some jobs (see: automotive manufacturing) lend themselves easily to robotics - the throughput is steady, the capacity requirements are stable (i.e., you don't suddenly need 5x more cars in July than in March), and even between different models the general process is the same. Other jobs (see: warehousing, shipping) do not lend themselves to robotics easily - the job changes regularly as processes evolve, the capacity requirements are chaotic (i.e., you need to scale to 10x your normal throughput during Xmas), and there is significant variation in process requirements (e.g., Japanese retail warehouses that run vertically instead of horizontally). Robots are also still astonishingly expensive and largely made-to-order with long lead times. This means that it takes many years to break even on a robot (whereas you can fire the human when you don't need them), and you can scale easily with humans (it's much quicker to find a human than it is to order and receive a robot).