alt Hacker NewsI toured Unitree's factory. I'm more bullish on the West
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I don't really follow the logic in the article at all:
The argument is that Unitree's assembly process is currently very manual because there is no incentive to automate, which is because labor cost isn't the bottleneck here, where in the US labor cost are much higher, therefore the US will have incentive to automate more. Those are reasonable so far, until you try to use that as a conclusion that this is why the West will win?
First of all, what does he think the other 92% of the cost of manufacturing is? A small portion of that is materials and electricity, but the biggest part of the remaining cost is assembly tooling/fixtures for the assembly line, and a fully automated assembly line is much, much more expensive compared to a semi-automated or manual production line.
In other words: it's not that Unitree couldn't build fully automated assembly lines if they wanted to, but spending tens of millions of dollars fully automated assembly line that takes up floor space and requires even more labor for manual maintenance for a product that is only being produced by the hundreds to thousands in quantity every month rather than millions simply does not make economic sense to begin with.
Second, why is he assuming that a fully automated assembly line will be cheaper to build in the US than in China, especially since he toured a factory with fully automated assembly lines at BYD in China immediately after? And sure, I would absolutely argue that American software engineering is more efficient than Chinese when looked at as a whole, but the cost of programming an assembly line is a minor portion of the cost compared to actually getting the assembly line fixtures and tooling built.
Third, his cost estimate is way off if he thinks you can get the same product manufactured in the US for only 50% more. From my own anecdotal experience, a more realistic cost for US manufacturing for pretty much anything is minimum 300% to 1000% more expensive if you are to make the in the US, and the lack of a mature parts supply chain in the US is honestly a bigger issue than worker wage.
Some thoughts:
“”” America has run this experiment before. In 1964 about half a million Mexican farmworkers were shut out. In 1965, 20% of California's tomatoes were picked by machine; by 1970 the figure was 99.9%.“””
I honestly had not considered closing down (legal) immigration as a forcing function for automation. Industrial policy as immigration law.
But I don’t think I get the rest …
Higher costs onshore mean machines give us an advantage - i get that. The rest I may be missing
Unitree G1 Supply Chain Visualization: https://robodienst.com/supply-chain/unitree-g1
(I'm not affiliated with the site in any way; I just found it useful and thought I'd share it here.)
In China, products are still made by people, because Chinese policy stipulates that robots must not take jobs away from people. If the U.S. were to switch its production to robots and thereby cause mass unemployment, a revolution would break out in the U.S.
their humanoid robots really creep me out. I've been to a few conferences for work over the past few months and they usually have a booth and then have someone walking them around by remote control.
The conference venues have concrete flooring, so I just suddenly hear loud rhythmic thumping as these things stomp around a corner.
After the initial "huh that's a cool robot thing" thought, it really started giving me the heebeejeebees.
> It doesn't need more. Labour was 8% of what it cost Unitree to make its robots in 2025, outsourced assemblers included, and most of the rest was parts
Ok, but what drives the cost of the parts? I am sure the parts manufacturers spend on labor, and the parts the part makers buy depend on labor. Labor drives all vast majority of the expense if you go all the way down the supply chain.
If we automate more and more of that labor with robots, then it drives down all the costs.
If we get truly autonomous robots that have the mobility and precision of humans, they could replace all of the labor. The 'switching' cost goes way down compared to the machines that do the work today.
Get rid of the cheap hands and the machines win fast…
I’ve really become fascinated by the hypothesis that outlawing slavery supercharged industrialization, and that the global crusade against slavery is why we had this whole technology explosion.
Rome knew about steam power. There’s some tantalizing evidence some ancient cultures played with electricity and maybe even simple forms of electric lights. There’s Greek stories about automatons. But why try to build machines to do real work? Just have a slave do it.
If we’d abolished slavery in ancient Roman times maybe we’d be looking at photos of habitable exoplanets from probes arriving in the Tau Ceti system by now.
"Chinese markets lose trillions as race for AI supremacy with US takes its toll"
"But the demand for robotics is being driven by government agencies and research institutions, rather than everyday consumers, for whom the products are still too expensive and not yet practical for home use. Humanoid robotics and robotic dogs have been popular in the entertainment industry but are yet to be useful in home settings.
Shares in Unitree, China’s leading robot-maker, have halved since they started trading in August."*
I think people underestimate the knife edge China is on, but still, I want these in the West.
I don't see how you can say this with a straight face "[Chinese company] said they'd make a million robots per year but shipped only twelve. [American company] says they'll make a million robots per year. Therefore America will win."
Especially when that American company is… Tesla!
anyone else notice this was written by claude (although its not 100% perfect claude language, im guessing josef tried to prompt claude ticks away and was only half successful).
author
West will outbuild china....
also author
> The next day, at BYD, I saw the other end of this: a car plant where everything I saw was automated.
Note there are no fully automated US car plants.
Stupid thesis considering PRC already installs more industrial robots than RoW combined. There's some validity to PRC tendency to arbitrage cheap labour to defer automation when economical... i.e. why pay for expensive SaaS when you can just throw cheaper brains at problem. But the second something cheaper than bodies, PRC tend to adopt more ruthlessly than west, and with automation replacing actual projected blue collar shortage, absolutely smooth brained hot take to think west will lead in robots let alone making robots.
Unitree makes like 5 digit numbers chassis with high iteration, they use people because these are baby numbers where human iteration maximizes productivity, not lack of capability. They do it because they have this gear that west doesn't. Meanwhile PRC indigenizing all tooling to the highest end of precision. They're not going to use western robots for much longer. Indigenous replacement rate is basically J takeoff, even if we completely ignore that ABB/Kuka/fanuc all have massive assembling and R&D footprint in PRC.
Or take Tesla, one of the more competent US builders... ctrl+c, ctrl+v their model to PRC, a few rapid iteration cycles later, PRC plants > western plants (EU/US). Even SpaceX, forget payload/tempo/operational, PRC industry builds like 2-3x more first stages than US space program including SpaceX, i.e. when they figure out reusable they can put up 2-3x size reusable fleet... and that's basically them barely trying. The industrial lesson by now should be whatever West builds, PRC likely end up doing better, faster, cheaper, frequently pick all 3.
This argument generic copium by now - muh western imagination gap can somehow compete with PRC industrial gap... and robots that build robots is slightly more marketable and feasible than gray goo... until you realize one of PRC's core capability is just doing what west did better anyway.
The Chinese seem to excel at copying (poorly, at first, then polishing) and scaling up. It makes sense they could leverage that approach to robots. What struck me as strange, at a strategic level, is that with a billion and a half warm bodies, and no serious military threat to their homeland, its not clear why theyd have a big incentive to automate away manual labor jobs, or need to massively upgrade military capabilities. Only if I put on a villain's hat, when doing analysis, would it make sense. Human soldiers might refuse unethical orders, or refuse to put down mass civil protest, whereas a robot would not. Then suddenly their robot strategy makes sense.
Why is the focus on scale when no one has ever built a single humanoid robot that is useful for anything yet? One real world Rosie would be more valuable than a million "Optimus" bots.
It is logistically impossible for the West to manufacture robots anywhere approaching the scale and cost of China. They control the materials, the refinement, the advanced manufacturing, the vertical integration, and a cheap labor force, to say nothing of a planned economy that can pivot on a dime to execute any demand there's available capital for. It is laughable to think the West can produce robots that compete with China.
If tomorrow morning we decided to pull a Manhattan Project just to match China's capacity for cheap effective robotics, it would take 10 years. By then China has already found their product-market fit and secured the world as a customer.
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I believe this conclusion is flawed. The author argues:
1) Unitree robots are largely made by hand.
2) Labor is approximately 8% of cost of manufacturing these robots. Because these costs are not prohibitive, there is little incentive to automate.
3) Labor costs are higher in America.
4) Therefore, American companies have higher incentive to automate.
5) Therefore, the West will capture most of the robotics opportunity.
Arguments 1-4 are reasonable, but 5 is a non-sequitur. Higher incentive to automate does not imply a better ability to automate & scale manufacturing.
I believe Unitree is currently assembling robots by hand for practical reasons:
1) Labor is still relatively cheap.
2) Humanoids and robots are evolving rapidly, changing every few months.
3) Custom assembly lines are expensive, and become obsolete when the product changes. It's difficult to maintain an assembly line when the product is rapidly evolving.
4) Tooling is inadequate. Some robotic parts are delicate, complicated, and difficult to automate manufacturing of. American companies have hit the exact same problem: Tesla is assembling the hand/forearm of Optimus by hand because it hasn't figured out how to automate manufacturing them. https://www.theverge.com/tech/1016492/tesla-optimus-robots-p... . Apparently, Tesla has hundreds of handless Optimus robots just standing around, waiting for hand manufacturing to catch up.
5) Demand is still relatively niche, these are not mass market products. Unitree only sold 5,500 robots last year. There is not enough demand to justify massive automated lines.
The author also ignores the biggest counterpoint: the Chinese have already demonstrated mastery in automated manufacturing, and have proven they can run dark factories (factories without humans) at a better scale than the west.
When humanoid robots become a mass market product (they are not ready today because the software side is majorly lacking), Chinese manufacturers are in an excellent position to rapidly automate.