4 ms·

And automated systems require babysitters. How long does a 100% robot-controlled factory operate when its supervisors are in quarantine? While it's true that th

• tialaramex 6y ago
  One human maintaining a factory full of robots is obeying social distancing constraints. They can't infect the robots, and the robots can't infect them. Unlike a factory full of low-paid workers this is actually very low risk for the spread of infection. We actually get to see a small model of this on farms. Once upon a time every farm had dozens or even hundreds of workers. Whether planting and harvesting corn or milking cows, it was all done by hand, and it took a lot of people working in close proximity. Today's farmer has a lot of automation, which means far fewer people. One person in a harvester can harvest a field of wheat, maybe a truck drives out to them once in a while, exchanges hand signals, nobody's close enough to get infected. A couple of people can handle milking a herd of cows, they touch the cows but no need to get close to each other. No problem keeping appropriate distances. Not every farm is like that, it's going to be a problem for fruit harvesting for example where you'd usually bring in a lot of temporary workers once a year. But these systems don't have to change everything. If there are six factories in your city, and three of them remain unchanged but the other three just become a bunch of robots, with the only human on site one mechanic and a security guard that's an enormous change.