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At first, humanoids will not be used for these inflexible, old-style mass manufacturing factories. Humanoids can automate where flexibility is needed. E.g. a ba

by 317070 2y ago

At first, humanoids will not be used for these inflexible, old-style mass manufacturing factories. Humanoids can automate where flexibility is needed. E.g. a baker baking 5000 breads a day for a local community cannot afford the capital expenditure to automate every step in his pipeline with these ABB machines. He could afford to automate with one of these new humanoids though, as the same machine first does step 1, then step 2 all the way to the end of the recipe, in a kitchen which is already there. Same idea with individual production. A toyota factory builds you one exact copy of a car in any colour you want (as long as it's black). But we might go back to a more individualised default in manufacturing, where for example tailor made clothes become affordable to most people again.

berkes 2y ago
> to automate every step in his pipeline with these ABB machines. That's still too much "inside the box" thinking. That baker doesn't need "automate everything", in fact, no-one does. What "that baker" needs, is to rank work on effort, cross sectioned with "costs to automate". And then automate the top item or items only. The baker needs a machine to knead the dough. Special tools to cut the dough of twenty cookies at once with minimal waste. Trays and tools that can be cleaned in a dishwasher. A bread slicing machine. A bakery that can be mopped in one go, rather than a fully automated humanoid mopping machine. This is an analogy for all automation: we don't need to cover 100%, be fully autonomous, 100% flexible. We need to automate the hardest part, even if that's boring tech. Then the next hardest part. And so on.
- blargey 2y ago
  Those top items were already automated long ago. What remains is a fractal scattering of irregular tasks that would be excessively costly to automate with single-task machinery that is 0% flexible. -100% flexible, considering most machines require the process itself to be bent around its limitations, and the costs trickle all the way down to the features and properties of the final output. An omnitasker that can emulate a significant chunk of "all the stuff you just give up and have a human spend an hour on" is precisely what the baker (and countless others) need after hitting that threshold.
- mordymoop 2y ago
  Whenever I think about automation, I, of course, think about having toddlers in the house. Toddlers are a transient disruption to the household logistics operation. They induce novel challenges. Their clothes are have different form factors, and may be dirtied in novel and interesting ways. Their nutritional demands are only partially-overlapping with the preexisting household diet. They introduce hundreds of small toylike objects into the environment. Even their dishware is smaller, flimsier and more numerous, disrupting any existing dish-washing workflows. And the development (or purchase) of permanent solutions to these problems is in some sense wasteful because the toddlers will stop being toddlers before too long, and you will have to pivot again. The holy trinity of washer, dryer, dishwasher solves a relatively high percentage of household labor but the tail is very long. The purpose of the above digression on toddlers is to illustrate that some household labor disruptions are transient and really not worth developing specific solutions to permanently resolve. This household example is both a true example of the problem and a metaphor for this type of situation which occurs in all human environments. There is always a long tail. There are always changes to processes with knock-on effects that leave gaps in preexisting workflows. And the solution of final resort has always been human manual labor. There are always transient solutions that require transient workarounds. And this long tail is where it will be enormously helpful to have humanoid form factor robots. This is true for exactly the same reasons that a young parent would appreciate having a humanoid robot in the house, to pick up clothes off the floor and fold clean ones, gather up toys and put them in their appropriate storage bin, and clean the table and floor and nearby walls (and possibly ceiling) after meals.

by 317070 2y ago

berkes 2y ago

> to automate every step in his pipeline with these ABB machines. That's still too much "inside the box" thinking. That baker doesn't need "automate everything", in fact, no-one does. What "that baker" needs, is to rank work on effort, cross sectioned with "costs to automate". And then automate the top item or items only. The baker needs a machine to knead the dough. Special tools to cut the dough of twenty cookies at once with minimal waste. Trays and tools that can be cleaned in a dishwasher. A bread slicing machine. A bakery that can be mopped in one go, rather than a fully automated humanoid mopping machine. This is an analogy for all automation: we don't need to cover 100%, be fully autonomous, 100% flexible. We need to automate the hardest part, even if that's boring tech. Then the next hardest part. And so on.

blargey 2y ago
Those top items were already automated long ago. What remains is a fractal scattering of irregular tasks that would be excessively costly to automate with single-task machinery that is 0% flexible. -100% flexible, considering most machines require the process itself to be bent around its limitations, and the costs trickle all the way down to the features and properties of the final output. An omnitasker that can emulate a significant chunk of "all the stuff you just give up and have a human spend an hour on" is precisely what the baker (and countless others) need after hitting that threshold.
mordymoop 2y ago
Whenever I think about automation, I, of course, think about having toddlers in the house. Toddlers are a transient disruption to the household logistics operation. They induce novel challenges. Their clothes are have different form factors, and may be dirtied in novel and interesting ways. Their nutritional demands are only partially-overlapping with the preexisting household diet. They introduce hundreds of small toylike objects into the environment. Even their dishware is smaller, flimsier and more numerous, disrupting any existing dish-washing workflows. And the development (or purchase) of permanent solutions to these problems is in some sense wasteful because the toddlers will stop being toddlers before too long, and you will have to pivot again. The holy trinity of washer, dryer, dishwasher solves a relatively high percentage of household labor but the tail is very long. The purpose of the above digression on toddlers is to illustrate that some household labor disruptions are transient and really not worth developing specific solutions to permanently resolve. This household example is both a true example of the problem and a metaphor for this type of situation which occurs in all human environments. There is always a long tail. There are always changes to processes with knock-on effects that leave gaps in preexisting workflows. And the solution of final resort has always been human manual labor. There are always transient solutions that require transient workarounds. And this long tail is where it will be enormously helpful to have humanoid form factor robots. This is true for exactly the same reasons that a young parent would appreciate having a humanoid robot in the house, to pick up clothes off the floor and fold clean ones, gather up toys and put them in their appropriate storage bin, and clean the table and floor and nearby walls (and possibly ceiling) after meals.