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gavinsyanceytoday at 9:46 AM1 replyview on HN

Factory work that can be straightforwardly automated by robots generally already is, by special-purpose factory robots. The remaining tasks are generally:

* Tasks where poorly-paid humans are cheaper than expensive factory robots. Humanoid robots are more complex / fiddly so will be more expensive than existing factory robots. No help here.

* Tasks where human dexterity has an advantage over state-of-the-art robot actuators (e.g. sewing fabric panels into garments). Better robotics could help here, but the advancement needed is better actuators, not AI and a humanoid form-factor. And if you solve this you'd be better off putting your new end-effector on an existing 6dof platform.

* Supervising robotic equipment and handling exceptions. But then you get to "handling poorly-specified unfamiliar tasks in the physical world" which is not currently a solved problem and there's no guarantee just throwing more compute at it will be sufficient to solve this. So far all humanoid robot demos have either been either known tasks in a tightly-controlled environment, teleportation, or so poorly-functioning as to be obviously not fit for purpose.


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