Quote:
Originally Posted by Fuzz
We've been doing this for decades in factories. Because some ketamine addled fascist desires a return to the memories of slavery he grew up with in his home, he imagines you need a robot to look as human-like as possible. If slavery is taboo, this is the next best thing. Forget the reality that single purpose robots exist, and are far more practical, affordable, and useful than a human look-alike with MechaHitler for a brain.
This isn't to say human like robots won't be useful for some things, but it's ridiculous to think you'd replace single purpose machines, which is mostly what factories require, with poor imitations of humans, who were replaced by those single purpose robots.
"But my robot will drive me places!" they proclaim, without the faintest though of the redundancy when cars can drove themselves. In sci-fi you see robots sitting behind a counter serving humans. You don't need a robot for that, you need an interface. Most of these use cases turn out to be so impractical and wasteful of the utility of a general service bot that you realize how silly much of the discussion is.
If you want an idea of what this all looks like, Asimov wrote many many stories about the practical and moral considerations we are now all re-hashing. Many of his insights are still valid today, but instead we need to listen to these modern technocratic chowderheads and amplify their slavery fantasies. Which, to be clear, is all they are. Billionaires hate paying people money, and they'll do anything they can to avoid it. Ignore that fact at our peril. The motivation is not to help everyday people, it's to make them redundant.
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A machine that screws tiny screws into an iPhone is more productive at that than a human or a humanoid robot will ever be, but it can only screw tiny screws into iPhones or the like. An assembly line that fills and labels ketchup bottles can do it more efficiently than any human or humanoid robot, but that's the only thing it can do. Ok, maybe it can do mustard and mayo too. (Edit: and yes I realize there are flexible cells that can be reconfigured to do many things, but still only in a specific domain. A flexible CNC setup or a modular car assembly line still can't package ketchup and mayo)
This type of specialized automation is the most cost-efficient and accurate way to do large volume automation tasks. But there are still billions of manual labourers who do multiple tasks on small scale. Many of those manual labourers could be replaced by automation but it may not be cost-effective to do so. Even assembly lines still have operators because it isn't cost effective to automate every last step and the human element adds flexibility to the process. But replacing those remaining humans with robots that can each be the operator and the maintenance guy and the shipper and the parking lot snow plower is a much more pragmatic approach.
Should we automate all of our buses and snowplows and road-sweepers and sidewalk plowers and garbage trucks and c-trains? We could, and maybe over time that happens as older models are replaced. Can we replace in situ house construction with close to 100% prefab construction? Maybe. But in all those cases and a million more you'll get more bang for the buck replacing multiple humans and multiple diverse human roles with a robot that can do proven human tasks.
We've had cameras and telephones and maps and music players etc. etc. forever but now we have a single flexible device that can do all of those tasks. Better than single tools - not always - but generally as good or better and more efficient since to can context switch in a milli-second.
Don't get me wrong, I think Musk is full of it and this kind of multi-purpose robot is a fair ways off, but don't try to conflate them with high volume factory automation. There are many, many other use cases where a human or equivalent is the best option. Like if you want to automate a fire-fighter I'm pretty sure you'll end up needing human-like capabilities at the core.
