4 ms·
As a hardware engineer I hear this a lot from software/electrical folks. It's Moore's law that largely drove what you describe. Moore's law only applies to se
by iancmceachern 1y ago
As a hardware engineer I hear this a lot from software/electrical folks.
It's Moore's law that largely drove what you describe.
Moore's law only applies to semiconductors.
Gears, motors and copper wire are not going to get 10x faster/cheaper every 18 months or whatever.
10 years from now gears will cost more, they will cost what they cost now plus inflation.
I've literally heard super smart YC founders say they just assume some sort of "Moore's law for hardware" will magicallyake their idea workable next year.
Computing power gets, and will continue to get, cheaper every day. Hardware, gears, nuts, bolts, doesnt.
- lugu 1y agoThink about cars. Their manufacturers work really hard on efficient (cost and performance). And what people do with them is a very different story. It could see the same happening with robots.
- iancmceachern 1y agoI dont follow
- tim333 1y agoThe nuts and bolts won't change much but the software/compute controlling the thing likely will.
- iancmceachern 1y agoBut the nuts and Bolts need to be paid for and manufactured for each robot. The software needs to be done once and then they can just click copy.
- 542354234235 1y agoIt is not the gears, motors and copper wire that are bottlenecking robots. It is the software and computing. We can already build a robot hand that is faster, stronger, more dexterous, etc. than a human hand. What we can't do right now is make the software to perceive the world around it and utilize the hand to interact with it at human levels. That is something that needs computing power and effective software. Those are things that get, and will continue to get, cheaper every day.
- boppo1 1y ago>We can already build a robot hand that is faster, stronger, more dexterous, etc. than a human hand Can you attach it to a humanoid body that isn't wired?
- robocat 1y ago> It is not the gears, motors and copper wire that are bottlenecking robots. It is those things that are bottlenecking the price of robots. The price of something tends towards the marginal cost, and the marginal cost of software is close to $0. Robots cost a lot more than that (what's the price of this robot?). Edit: In fact Figure 03 imply marginal costs matter: Mass manufacturing: Figure 03 was engineered from the ground-up for high-volume manufacturing
- iancmceachern 1y agoYes, but the two (software and hardware) scale very differently. Once software is "done" (we all know software is never done) you can just copy it and distribute it. It is negligiblehow much it costs to do so. Once hardware is done you have to manufacture each and every piece of hardware with the same care, detail and reliability as the first one. You can't just click copy. Often times you have to completely redesign the product to go from low volume high cost manufacturing to high volume low cost. A hand made McLaren is very different than an F-150. The two simply scale differently, by nature of their beasts.
- aeternum 1y agoChina has shown that they don't scale all that differently. Yes the tooling is hard to build but after that you hit go and the factory makes the copies for you. It's not quite startrek replicator but much closer to that than the US view of manufacturing where you have your union guy sitting in front of the machine to pull the lever.
- iancmceachern 1y agoThis isn't true. They've showed that slave (or nearly) labor is cheap or even free.