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> Robots becoming 100x cheaper That is DeepMind succeeding on building robots that can build robots.

• lucubratory 3y ago
  Not sure how helpful that would be, I don't think most of the cost of robotics manufacturing is assembly. Precision machining would be part of it, as would actuators and batteries, all of which require their own specialised manufacturing chains that I doubt DeepMind can improve by an order of magnitude. And then of course there's the chips, which are very important and unlikely to drop in cost significantly from anything DeepMind can do. Of course your floor is the cost of materials, which is going to be based on labour and exchange value from mining and refining, particularly of lithium and aluminium, neither of which I think is particularly susceptible to any advances DeepMind is likely to make. If someone from twenty years in the future appeared in my living room and informed me with certainty that robots are 100x cheaper in 2043 and asked me how that could be true, my first guess would be that there are significant energy breakthroughs making aluminium and lithium much cheaper as raw materials, and that robots took off as a very popular consumer product and are now sold in quantities between 100 million and 1 billion units every year, driving prices down through economies of scale. I'm not certain that would be enough on its own to get prices down that far, but it would be my best guess.