3 ms·

You see this in manufacturing as well. You’d think robots would be everywhere but often, like way more than you’d imagine, it’s cheaper to hire a human to do it

You see this in manufacturing as well. You’d think robots would be everywhere but often, like way more than you’d imagine, it’s cheaper to hire a human to do it.

tuatoru 3y ago
The way fertility rates are going, not for much longer.
opportune 3y ago
Yeah, it's easy to forget that humans themselves are pretty amazing technology. You can program them with relatively vague instructions using natural language, they come with built in general-intelligence so you can delegate things for them to figure it out and expect them to adapt their instructions according to their situation, and they come with amazingly precise and dextrous arms. They generally cost under $150k/unit/year for most manual applications and you pretty much know what you're getting up front vs hardware/software purchased off the shelf, not to mention the capital cost of acquiring one is pretty low because they already exist and just need to be hired.
asdff 3y ago
I think part of that is how these sorts of businesses choose to organize their money. A manufacturer might budget themselves to be quite lean, so lean that for any sort of improvement like automation with robots, they have to hire an expensive consultant to tell them they have to hire an expensive robot company to build them expensive robots with expensive service contracts. So of course in that model the human is cheaper. However, if the manufacturer instead took all that money they would have spent on the expensive consultant, and opened up their own "internal" automating wing that would just look for things within the company to replace with a robot they create and service internally, maybe the math would pencil out another way.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  There's another aspect to it as well. It's really common to see jobs that people are doing that appear to be easy to replace with robots. But if you actually try to develop automation to do it, you very commonly hit a bunch of gotchas that make the automation infeasible. Sometimes this is a systemic thing (you can't effectively automate this without having to change too much of the rest of the process at the same time, which makes it economically a nonstarter), but more often than you'd think it's because there's an aspect of the job which doesn't seem particularly hard or important because humans do it without even thinking about it -- but to computers and robots, it's incredibly difficult.
smokel 3y ago
This has to do with the fact that robots are still pretty bad at basic tasks such as picking items from a container, or handling fabric. Just have a look at the state of the art in garment manufacturing robots. For most tasks, human muscle and sense of touch are way ahead of any robot.
eichin 3y ago
Thus, over time, most people working on commercial robots favor increasing the minimum wage :-)

You see this in manufacturing as well. You’d think robots would be everywhere but often, like way more than you’d imagine, it’s cheaper to hire a human to do it.

tuatoru 3y ago

The way fertility rates are going, not for much longer.

opportune 3y ago

Yeah, it's easy to forget that humans themselves are pretty amazing technology. You can program them with relatively vague instructions using natural language, they come with built in general-intelligence so you can delegate things for them to figure it out and expect them to adapt their instructions according to their situation, and they come with amazingly precise and dextrous arms. They generally cost under $150k/unit/year for most manual applications and you pretty much know what you're getting up front vs hardware/software purchased off the shelf, not to mention the capital cost of acquiring one is pretty low because they already exist and just need to be hired.

asdff 3y ago

I think part of that is how these sorts of businesses choose to organize their money. A manufacturer might budget themselves to be quite lean, so lean that for any sort of improvement like automation with robots, they have to hire an expensive consultant to tell them they have to hire an expensive robot company to build them expensive robots with expensive service contracts. So of course in that model the human is cheaper. However, if the manufacturer instead took all that money they would have spent on the expensive consultant, and opened up their own "internal" automating wing that would just look for things within the company to replace with a robot they create and service internally, maybe the math would pencil out another way.

JohnFen 3y ago
There's another aspect to it as well. It's really common to see jobs that people are doing that appear to be easy to replace with robots. But if you actually try to develop automation to do it, you very commonly hit a bunch of gotchas that make the automation infeasible. Sometimes this is a systemic thing (you can't effectively automate this without having to change too much of the rest of the process at the same time, which makes it economically a nonstarter), but more often than you'd think it's because there's an aspect of the job which doesn't seem particularly hard or important because humans do it without even thinking about it -- but to computers and robots, it's incredibly difficult.

smokel 3y ago

This has to do with the fact that robots are still pretty bad at basic tasks such as picking items from a container, or handling fabric. Just have a look at the state of the art in garment manufacturing robots. For most tasks, human muscle and sense of touch are way ahead of any robot.

eichin 3y ago

Thus, over time, most people working on commercial robots favor increasing the minimum wage :-)