51 ms·

To me, there's only one metric that matters for humanoid robots: Can it earn its keep? A $30K robot with 10 years useful lifetime, and a 10 year 5% mortgage is

To me, there's only one metric that matters for humanoid robots: Can it earn its keep? A $30K robot with 10 years useful lifetime, and a 10 year 5% mortgage is $10.40 per day. Minimum wages range from $7 to $15, so the US national average would be around that. If your robot can do 1 hour of minimum wage labour per day, people will buy it. This is a pretty low bar. Light cleaning (dusting, wiping down surfaces, vacuum), loading the dishwasher, doing laundry, tidying up after kids, etc. These tasks don't demand AGI, agility, adeptness, speed, accuracy, etc.

graypegg 3y ago
Do keep in mind that a comparison like that doesn’t suppose the null case, where someone dusts their own home for free, loads the dishwasher, and trains the kid AI to clean up their own messes with thoughtfully deployed apple-sauce-snack-based positive reenforcement training. I do agree these tasks don’t demand AGI. I don’t really want my “robot that walks around and does 11$ worth of tasks I don’t want to deal with” to feel emotions.