Jesus y'all are so cynical, commenting on how these are war bots and gonna automate everything away, I just think it's an engineering marvel that these insanely complex robotic maneuvers can be done so fluidly now
I was born cynical and I'm proud of it, so apologies to Boston Dynamics and others, but these things will absolutely be used as war bots and automation surrogates once the time is ripe.
Even so, yes, these robots are truly engineering marvels and I wholeheartedly applaud the team for their hard work!
I just think that squinting the eyes slightly past the "search and rescue", the war applications of this kind of technology are obvious: the Atlas could do perimeter guard duty even in a muddy, slightly sloped or otherwise difficult terrain, but it could also form hunt and kill squads who need no rest, whereas the hunted person or persons presumably would.
As for automation, it will certainly happen too: the Atlas is humanoid-shaped and once it matures to be more independent and capable with environmental manipulation, it could easily function as plug-and-play automation for many tasks currently requiring a human. Pick berries or fruits, do gardening, deliver things like mail/pizza, and so on.
Do you know how much berry/fruit pickers get paid? or pizza delivery people? It will be a LONG time before it's more economical for a robot to do it I think
Good point. I did not know exactly how much fruit pickers make, I supposed it was not very much. According to Google, the California average is 24 k USD a year, 11.49 USD an hour.
However.
A human must rest after, say, 12 hours, but a robot can just keep going even at night, if the battery charging is swift and smart (e.g. hotswap battery). So a robot could work almost 24 h shifts instead of 12 h shifts. So we get a 2x multiplier here.
A robot can be made to work perhaps twice as fast somehow, maybe it just moves faster or has four arms or can carry more or reach higher faster or whatever. So let's add another 2x.
Now we're at 4x, a single robot doing the job of 4 workers. Now we're at ca. 46 USD an hour for the equivalent of the robot's work.
Would such a robot be hired for, say, 30 USD an hour?
Next, I'll put on an MBA hat (which I don't have) and just pull numbers ouf of thin air; GIGO warning is in effect. Real MBAs please excuse the amateur hour.
Assuming the robot rental shop can keep utilization at 80% and sell it non-stop for a month to orchards, this would be 0.8 * 30 * 24 * 30 = ca. 17000 USD a month for such a robot. Let's say they spend roughly 10% in repairs etc., that leaves about 15 k USD a month. If the robot costs 150 k USD, and it can do fruit picking for ca. 6 months in a year, the robot has paid for itself after ca. two years.
My point was that the fruit orchard pays 30 USD instead of 46 USD for the "same" job (i.e. they get 35% off labor costs).
Also, a robot rental shop in this model actually starts to make profit per robot after two years. This is not such a long time, and the robots might actually become tools like tractors or harvesters are, with similar ownership arrangements, e.g. a farm co-op owns the robots and distributes to members for cheap hourly price.
Although there were many assumptions regarding the numbers, I would not quite agree on robots taking a long time to become economical. Also, the savings at the orchard side would be seen immediately, creating robot demand on that side.
It'll happen very quickly when they're good enough. As you hire more fruit pickers or pizza delivery people the next one costs the same or is more expensive, opposite for robots. Especially since the cost will mostly go into prototypes and research.
As soon as self-driving cars really work as well as Uber drivers for example, they're not going to roll out super-gradually just because the very first cars cost billions to develop and $200k a piece.
If we can provide adequate resources to everyone without anyone doing any work, it would make sense to switch to an economy wherein we provide adequate resources to everyone without requiring them to work.
Capitalism is a very effective economic system when having goods depends on enticing people to produce them. It's not a system that sticks around once goods and services become fully decoupled from labor.
I obviously missed the boat on replying to this in time, but here it is, for posterity.
I think the belief that we'll eventually get to a state "wherein we provide adequate resources to everyone without requiring them to work" is wonderful, but unfortunately, unlikely to happen.
I'm sure this has been thought out by people much smarter than me, but I see two problems.
First, who decides what "adequate" is? At some point, a decision has to be made on what resources to allocate to a person. Here, in the US, we "let the free market figure that out", which, ideally, means that people are free to negotiate and enter into transactions as they wish, but in practice, is just another way of saying that the government doesn't intervene in decisions unless laws were very clearly broken, and even then, justice is not quite blind. In any case, aside from laws and regulations on what constitute a minimum level of support for people, we do not define what "adequate" means, probably because it's actually a really tough question. The communists, in theory, wanted to appropriate resources "from each, according to their ability, to each, according to their need." Except the people in power were ruthless and corrupt and that system wasn't all that great at incentivizing people. Anyway, good luck with defining "adequate" and then getting people to agree with you on that.
Second, and more difficult, is that the people who control the means of production now will be somewhat reluctant to give that up in the future, so I'm not sure how you'll manage to produce adequate resources for everyone without requiring them to work if someone else still owns the means of production. If you seize the means of production, you're back to communism.
So, I think the main thing that utopian visions like this miss is the messy reality of human beings, that they're born with inherent inequalities and that those inequalities persist over time. Someone, or, probably a corporation, will own the robots of the future. That corporation will control enormously powerful means of production. There is nothing requiring that corporation to pay you for anything, nor for them to provide you with adequate resources.
Yeah, but can you really blame us? As incredible as this is from a technical perspective, it rings immediate alarm bells about the future of war. These have speed and agility and can reasonably go anywhere a person could go. And YouTube entertainment aside, what really is the use case of athletic robots outside of warfare? It's not much of a leap to attach a gun and connect to a remote human operator. Now you can wage both air wars and ground wars without domestic political consequences.
It can be an engineering marvel and practically useless in the industry at the same time. I do love the dancing though. And the fact they actually went for boogie-like steps and a choreography rather than a more technical presentation.
Yea, it's very impressive engineering. However there is no intelligence in these machines. It's a clever combination of hard- and software. Takes human intelligence to build it.
Yeah I think that's always been the appeal of BD, they are bleeding edge in terms of mechanics / robotics. The brains are being developed by entirely different companies, but eventually they'll meet one another.
