Earlier quoted context omitted.
I 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 tim…
"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.
I read efficiency as "Energy inputted to accomplish a task", in which case, biological systems are far more efficient than current-day mechanical ones. It's a tradeoff.