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For autonomous robots to replace the millions of tradesmen and workers, it would require vastly more resources than are being put toward this now. I wouldn’t ex
by keiferski 3y ago
For autonomous robots to replace the millions of tradesmen and workers, it would require vastly more resources than are being put toward this now. I wouldn’t expect human labor to be replaced in this way for a century or two.
- inference-lord 3y agoIt's kicking the can down the road, will still be a problem in 200 years at the rate which our society is progressing, potentially even going backwards if the orange man wins in 2024.
- ben_w 3y agoThe USA isn't important enough to reverse global progress in this area. Slow down, sure, but not reverse.
- j4yav 3y agoPotentially they can use early versions of the automation to accelerate this.
- ben_w 3y agoAlready do. CNC lathes, (GOF)AI designing chips. A "century or two" is a framing so alien to me that I don't understand how anyone can think it would take that long.
- xbmcuser 3y agoIt is not happening in the next decade but the change will come a lot faster than a century. As the tech needed for it is improving rapidly as well as getting cheaper. And I think many people are thinking in all or nothing scenario but long before everything is completely autonomous they will bring in efficiency where 1 person with autonomous helpers will be completing jobs that needed multiple people before.
- keiferski 3y agoThat will still take decades, if not a century. Manufacturing and developing millions of robots that walk around and do repairs (not to mention making them economically affordable) is not something that’s going to happen soon. What’s more likely is that robots replace human factory workers first.
- rjsw 3y agoIf the robots have a longer working life than the humans they replace then they don't have to be cheaper. Doing physical work breaks down your body relatively quickly.
- vasco 3y agoYeah but humans expect return on investment before they die.
- Nevermark 3y agoStock reflects future money flows today. If you can sell stock, or leverage it for loans, then you get access to future profits as soon as there is a reasonable expectation they will eventually show up. Amazon's growth model was based entirely on this effect for many years. No need for profits, company's value skyrocketed as anticipation compounded.
- ben_w 3y agoI think longevity is the one thing humans still beat machines for? Cars, even electric, don't last as long as our bodies. Of course, there's a whole bunch of other differences, like the machines don't need to wait 18 years after construction for physical labour, they don't need to be trained for 21 years for mental labour, they don't sleep, and the "working lifespan" target is about 47 years rather than the full 84 years average human life expectancy at birth in developed nations.
- alx_the_new_guy 3y ago
- duccinator 3y agoOnce you have autonomous robots you can use those robots to build more robots leading to an exponential curve. The day they make the first one, we will reach a million in 2-3 years and a billion in 2-4 years after that.
- keiferski 3y agoThe laws of physics and the material cost of creating robots still exist. Real life isn’t a sci fi movie.
- ben_w 3y agoIf robots actually replaced all human labour and left nothing for humans to be employed at, then the robots necessarily can do their own resource extraction. The current cost of a Boston Dynamics Spot is around a year's income, give or take whose income you're measuring against. If it were able to do any human task at the same rate as a human — and yes, I know it isn't, this is just a anchoring point for the discussion — a group of them would be able to extract and process enough resources in a year sufficient to double their population, all the way from rocks in the ground to a finished deliverable. n years later, there are 2^n robots. Sure, sure, that's a whole 33 years to go from one total to one per human, not the numbers the other person gave which would need a much shorter (but not wildly implausible) reproduction time of 5-8 weeks, but the point is still valid. That exponential stops only when some un-substitutable resource is fully exploited, so I'm not sure what the upper limit actually is, but given we exist I assume 8 billion robots is also possible.
- timeon 3y agoManual labor is not going to be completely replaced that quickly - this process is happening from down of civilization. Office work on the other hand can be replaced much quicker.