alt Hacker NewsI think this is going to be bad for BMW, and bad for the current robotics-summer. I _hope_ that’s not the case, I’d love for robotics to get deployed more widely in manufacturing. But I’m pretty sure it will be. I think the chances of meaningful success would be higher with non-humanoid robotics
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Robots are widely deployed in manufacturing, just not humanoid robots. The biggest benefit of stationary robots is that their behavior is 100% predictable and they are always where the humans expect them to be. There are certain areas in factories which can be nearly 100% automated (pick & pull in warehouses, for example), but there are a lot of areas where, without a human in the loop, there are too many edge cases to reasonably expect humanoid-robots-as-replacements-for-humans to anticipate or react to.
(I have 15 years experience in high tech manufacturing, with most of that building test automation & manufacturing execution systems, and an advanced degree in operations research.)
It would be hard to believe that BMW doesn't have many industrial robots already deployed and in fact they do on a serious scale [1]. Now, to my mind, adding humanoid-robots to the existing mix of standard-robots and people seems not completely terrible.
The article's vacuous AI gloss language indeed makes it seem like they are indeed engaging in, crudely put, baloney. But your own language is weird here, like you don't realize robots are a standard thing in modern manufacturing. I mean, modern manufacturing "succeeds" massively using nonhumanoid robots at large scale.
[1] https://www.bmwgroup-werke.com/spartanburg/en/our-plant.html
This is top-tier vagueposting.