alt Hacker NewsI took several biomechanics classes as electives back in my undergrad, and in one assignment I remember comparing the energy outputs between the human and robot equivalents of different tasks, whether or not the robot was humanoid in how it was designed. The most impressive think that stuck with me is that humans are incredibly efficient, from an energy perspective, in anything we do, compared to machines. Every time we delegate a task to a machine, we are using several orders of magnitude of energy to do the same thing. For most tasks, it feels wrong, but it doesn't make me any more willing to give up my car. Maybe if I lived outside the US.
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"Every time we delegate a task to a machine, we are using several orders of magnitude of energy to do the same thing."
Might this just be selection bias? I mean, if humans can't do a task efficiently, we're not going to do the comparison with a machine.
Some actions we do seem (to me) very inefficient when compared with machines. For example: grating carrots and brushing teeth.
If you live in most places in the US other than the urban heart of a few very large cities you have to take a huge hit to your ability to get places in a reasonable time frame without a car. I have hope some more cities other than NYC are improving the situation, but as it is the closest I got to using public transit for a commute was when I was going to one of our other offices in a different downtown area I would drive my car to the park n ride to take the train the rest of the way. The train saves time and sanity because traffic downtown is a nightmare, but that drive takes 5 minutes, and it would add 20+ minutes if I had to walk to the closest bus stop so I could take the bus up to the train station.
If you're comparing raw calories to output, yes. Even gasoline has a caloric value, but humans can't drink gasoline. Growing and preparing food for human consumption uses a lot more energy than pumping and refining gasoline, so at the end of the day, human efficiency gains are not that impressive.
> humans are incredibly efficient
Humans cannot fly.
Unfortunately, humans want houses and cars and vacations and such, which makes them very expensive. ;)
> The most impressive think that stuck with me is that humans are incredibly efficient, from an energy perspective, in anything we do, compared to machines.
Humans are efficient, but not across the board. Trivial counterexample: walking is incredibly energy inefficient vs a bicycle or other wheeled conveyances whose primary dissipater is rolling resistance.