• theneverfox@pawb.social
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    9 hours ago

    The overhead on the robot is mostly maintenance, which is a humanoid skill. If the robots can maintain each other, or build each other, someone just won capitalism

    • Archangel1313@lemmy.ca
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      5 hours ago

      Over time, maintenance costs on machines tend to increase. They all have a practical limit on profitability, before that cost exceeds their contributive value. Then they need to be replaced.

      • theneverfox@pawb.social
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        3 hours ago

        And if the machines are the ones building new parts, that, like many other things, goes out the window. They can even recycle and refurbish parts

        • Archangel1313@lemmy.ca
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          2 hours ago

          That’s pure science fiction. It will never happen. Training people to do various manual tasks is always cheaper than using robots. Automation involves dedicated, task-specific machinery that improves on existing (manual) methods. People are always there to fill in the gaps in what those machines are capable of. We provide that required versatility.

          Replacing people with people-shaped robots to do the exact same job that people do, is the opposite of efficiency. There is no improvement involved. It’s literally a lateral shift, with an enormous price tag attached to it.

          • theneverfox@pawb.social
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            57 minutes ago

            I don’t know what to tell you, other than it’s already happening. Once the first robot builds a second, it’s over. You can buy one that can physically do light tasks for $8k, this summer Amazon started using robots for deliveries and has been using them for packaging for longer

            It’s not science fiction, it’s now an engineering problem, one that is progressing quickly