this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2024
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Humanoid robots are awfully expensive to maintain and a silly idea for factories. The team of robot experts you’d need to run this operation would cost much more in the end. You‘d be better off just building fully automated factories that use conveyor belts and wheeled robots. In other words, this is just Amazon propaganda to discourage unions and keep wages low. Robots are not on the way to replace us but rich fucks have every reason to make us believe so.
You're correct, however if you've ever worked in a distribution center you'd know that single-operation dumb bots have limited usefulness. There's plenty of times when the product picker's task is: go to location, open case, take out product, place safely on pallet/wire rack/belt so that it won't get wrecked or dropped, scan data into needlessly complicated proprietary software that's not compatible with anything else, clean up after yourself (out the last guy), repeat.
There's a shocking amount of manual labor required in the industry that requires something like a person to do in distribution, just because it's too complicated and multifaceted for current machines to handle. My example didn't even cover half of the job.
Oh of course. My point wasn‘t that there‘s already easier ways to replace all workers. It was more about that humanoid robots sure ain‘t it. The upkeep cost and fail rates are way too high to be cost effective and we won‘t see more of them than small test facilities that only exist as a bad proof of concept to pressure employees.