You still might be able to. There are a lot of considerations for having humans around that robots don't need. Bathrooms, HR, qualms about unemployment, bad P

You still might be able to. There are a lot of considerations for having humans around that robots don't need. Bathrooms, HR, qualms about unemployment, bad PR from treating warehouse workers poorly, parking spaces, aisle space to allow humans to pass each other, etc, etc. A huge part of the gains come from completely eliminating humans, and getting rid of all the niceties that come with human labor. I strongly suspect that it will come down to the opex to maintain the robots than the capex to buy them. If opex is lower than hiring humans, companies will buy in. You can get tax breaks on the capex for the robots as you devalue them. Robots also shield your opex (right now), because nobody is clamoring that the robots should get paid more. Your labor costs for humans could double at any point; even $15/hr isn't keeping pace with inflation if you look back to the 50's or 60's. > Lots of comments about the limitations of the suction grabber, but I wonder if anyone here has an educated guess as to how far we are from the robotic hand dexterity needed for near human-level manipulation of relatively simple objects like boxes. We already have have the means to do human-level manipulation like that, it just doesn't use a hand. I have a buddy that works in the space and have seen their robots go. If you want your box up on it's side, the robot will do that for you. I don't think we're likely to see a big push towards human hands. Hands are great generalist manipulators, and are good when you don't know what kind of stuff you'll have to handle. That doesn't really apply to robots, though. There are almost always more specialized designs that are cheaper to make, cheaper to repair, and better at handling the item in question. Just thinking about boxes, for example, a forklift seems infinitely better at handling boxes with potentially weak bottoms than a human is. Our hands cannot support the full length of the box. Looking at surgery, almost the entire point of human hands is to manipulate tools which were designed to be manipulated by human hands. Just attach the tool directly to an arm on a platform that can spin and angle itself like a wrist. No need for overly-complex fingers that might drop a scalpel on someone's face. I don't see human hands being a useful design for a robot until we get general artificial intelligence. If I can ask the robot to go perform a novel task, then it makes sense to equip it in a way that it can handle any kind of generic object. Until then, the robot was designed for a purpose, and it makes sense to choose specialized manipulators.