Why humanoid robots won't catch up to human workers any time soon

Why humanoid robots won't catch up to human workers any time soon
understandingai.org

The real reason it’s hard to assess where we’re at with industrial robots is that some of the people who’ve gone hardest at it are secretive, and also believe in power law scaling. So, the first 1,000 robots will only be used to build the next robot factory, which also will be used to build the next really big robot factory. When we see humanoid robots actually out in the wild for sale at retail, they are going to come very very quickly, at scale.

Figure and Boston Dynamics sold out next year’s production runs almost instantly sometime last year; I think it’s just incredibly hard to overestimate the impact humanoid robots are going to have on the global economy.

This is one of the dumbest ideas I've read here. Seriously; do you honestly believe, that we will be able to linearly scale all of the materials that go into robots?

You can't have a factory without motors, aluminum, steel, copper, quality control, CNC manufacturing, precision bearings, ball screws, harmonic drives, semiconductors, batteries, and skilled people to design, install, and maintain all of it. Every one of those is its own supply chain with its own bottleneck, and almost all of them are already constrained and at risk.

If anything, I would bet you $500 we will not be able to jump to the robotics age because we don't have enough skilled humans on this earth, due to the excitement about not training them because of their imminent replacement. That's before geopolitics - do you think China, if we actually built working humanoid robots, wouldn't immediately claim all supply for themselves and lock down the supply chain? Of course they would, it would be stupid not to. In the event of a working humanoid robot, every single dependency needs to be onshore, or it's not scaling.

edit: realised there's a part 2: https://generalrobots.substack.com/p/benjies-humanoid-olympi...

Secondly I think robot butlers are a bridge too far. The article explains pretty well why the spatial reasoning is problematic but so would things like battery life. And there'd be zero margin for error. The first time a robot steps on someone's cat or, god forbid, baby there will be a massive backlash. They have to be perfect. We accept LLMs hallucinating once in a while but a physical robot in your home cannot ever be wrong.

I think if we want to pilot autonomous robots it will be factory floors and other rote tasks. Maybe installing solar fields or something. Let them achieve a perfect safety record in someplace with more risk tolerance then take the next step.