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If you look at videos of factories in poor countries that make textiles, trinkets, and other low-margin goods it is extremely labor intensive because labor is s

If you look at videos of factories in poor countries that make textiles, trinkets, and other low-margin goods it is extremely labor intensive because labor is so cheap. Eventually, as the world continues to be lifted out of poverty, robots will be cheaper than labor. But they aren't cost effective for many tasks right now.

gingerbread-man 8y ago
There's another advantage for which human workers that don't get nearly enough much credit: flexibility. When Tesla tried to create the world's most automated assembly line for the Model 3, they learned the hard way why Toyota and others have abandoned the idea: complex automated systems are, perhaps necessarily, tightly coupled and complicated. For Tesla, this led to cascading errors and insurmountable "debugging" challenges. Eventually it became evident to Tesla and Musk that, even at first-world prices, human workers were the better buy. [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-13/musk-tips-his-tesla-cap-to-humans-after-robots-undercut-model-3 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-13/musk-tips...] When you think about it, the work involved in building software systems may only be economically justifiable right now because computers can perform certain tasks many orders of magnitude more efficiently than humans can. In the physical realm, the differences shrink tremendously (or even reverse), making it far more difficult to compete with human workers.
lasereyes136 8y ago
On a trip to India I went to a Zoo where I took a bus to tour the enclosures for the tigers, lions, and bears. Between each species there were a set of gates to make sure the animals didn't mix. There were people who operated the gates rather than having an automated system that did the same thing. To your point, in India it is cheaper to have a human being do that work than a machine, much less a robot. It will take a long time for the economics of robots to catch up on really cheap labor in the developing world.

gingerbread-man 8y ago

There's another advantage for which human workers that don't get nearly enough much credit: flexibility. When Tesla tried to create the world's most automated assembly line for the Model 3, they learned the hard way why Toyota and others have abandoned the idea: complex automated systems are, perhaps necessarily, tightly coupled and complicated. For Tesla, this led to cascading errors and insurmountable "debugging" challenges. Eventually it became evident to Tesla and Musk that, even at first-world prices, human workers were the better buy. [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-13/musk-tips-his-tesla-cap-to-humans-after-robots-undercut-model-3 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-13/musk-tips...] When you think about it, the work involved in building software systems may only be economically justifiable right now because computers can perform certain tasks many orders of magnitude more efficiently than humans can. In the physical realm, the differences shrink tremendously (or even reverse), making it far more difficult to compete with human workers.

lasereyes136 8y ago

On a trip to India I went to a Zoo where I took a bus to tour the enclosures for the tigers, lions, and bears. Between each species there were a set of gates to make sure the animals didn't mix. There were people who operated the gates rather than having an automated system that did the same thing. To your point, in India it is cheaper to have a human being do that work than a machine, much less a robot. It will take a long time for the economics of robots to catch up on really cheap labor in the developing world.