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fragmede • today at 2:31 PM • 4 replies • view on HN

How long do you give it?


Replies

keeda • today at 4:33 PM

I looked into this (or rather, had Google Deep Research do a 30-page report on it!) and it's still a very long way off. So long, that the AI, or any reference it found, would not even give me a rough timeline, but I suspect it is multiple decades away. The main blocker is a very severe crunch in the supply chain of critical materials, mostly rare earth elements which are essential to make those high power density + high precision motors feasibly.

Today we have a tiny fraction (like 2%?) of the global supply needed to make enough robots to replace all humans.

This is before we get to the other logistics like power and the rest of the materials, but we have a path to scale those up (except maybe Copper, that's another tough one.) Turns out rare earth elements are actually very abundant, but extremely hard to mine, very toxic to extract (which is partially why China has a strangehold on those) and we don't have a good path to scale those up.

All of this could be moot if we figure out alternative technologies for equally capable motors that could be manufactured at scale, but AFAIK whatever promising is on the horizon would still take a very long time to ramp up.

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sceptic123 • today at 3:19 PM

We're waiting for the point that replacing the humans is the cheaper option. Not sure that robot plumbers are in our near future.

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carlosjobim • today at 7:01 PM

Robots have been used in industry for decades already. Most jobs won't be worth investing in the robot doing it, since human labour is cheaper than the capital investment.

AnimalMuppet • today at 3:39 PM

To the start of it? Maybe two years?

To the end of it? Maybe 40?