Interesting piece. On converting car factories there’s potentially a lot of car companies that are struggling to profitably switch to electrification, and which may also be hit by Full Self Driving/robotaxi, if that works. I wonder if robotics production would provide an ‘out’ for struggling OEMs. Buy out a robot company and switch product
You could also consider tricks to limit the amount of robotic hardware per unit of labor. For example, rail mounted arms use less parts than humanoids and likely have a longer MTBF and a lower error rate. (by likely I mean 'almost certainly', a humanoid chassis is a lot more joints and a lot less stability)
Factories designed around robots might be an OOM faster and more efficient than sending humanoids to operate current equipment.
The real question is : say you have the initial 1 billion robots. Half of them are sent to go make money to show the investors some revenue. Half (500 million) are send to the bottleneck steps in the supply chain for more robots.
What's the doubling time? How long until the second billion? How long can that billion copy itself?
I was aiming for a rough average figure, to an order of magnitude, erring on the conservative side.
I agree there are some cheaper models already, but they're also not able to do human jobs. Getting there will partly be about better algorithms, but it may also require more expensive parts (sensors, very precise motors etc).
If you want to use a lower estimate as the starting point, then that accelerates the timeline compared to my estimate.
I think that's a slightly outdated view, China moves very fast in robotics and they seem to be solving the precision motor problems currently while the hardware stays around this cheap. I think 100k is an overestimation, I think China will push this down with all the possible motor flexibility to like 10k a robot.
Primary obstacle seems to be software (AGI for robotics basically)
Seems reasonable, though just tbc my main forecast is for the cost to fall to $10k and then probably $1k as production scales – so I basically agree – it's mainly a question of how fast it happens.
Also my estimate is for "humanoid equivalents" that weight 80kg each. If it's possible to use much smaller and/or simpler specialised robots for most purposes, then in practice we could have a larger number of cheaper robots.
How can robots both be cheap and there be a strong economic incentive to manufacture more? I guess they start expensive, suppressing demand, then gradually reduce in cost as more manufacturing capacity comes online, reducing the economic incentive for increasing capacity. How that plays out is probably complicated, and needs proper modelling not BOTECs, but I'd guess economists have studied it.
Some good comments about this post on Less Wrong:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6Jo4oCzPuXYgmB45q/how-quickly-could-robots-scale-up
Another take here: https://medium.com/limitless-investor/elon-musks-more-robots-than-humans-dream-needs-an-urgent-wake-up-call-a71491540bb9
Interesting piece. On converting car factories there’s potentially a lot of car companies that are struggling to profitably switch to electrification, and which may also be hit by Full Self Driving/robotaxi, if that works. I wonder if robotics production would provide an ‘out’ for struggling OEMs. Buy out a robot company and switch product
You could also consider tricks to limit the amount of robotic hardware per unit of labor. For example, rail mounted arms use less parts than humanoids and likely have a longer MTBF and a lower error rate. (by likely I mean 'almost certainly', a humanoid chassis is a lot more joints and a lot less stability)
Factories designed around robots might be an OOM faster and more efficient than sending humanoids to operate current equipment.
The real question is : say you have the initial 1 billion robots. Half of them are sent to go make money to show the investors some revenue. Half (500 million) are send to the bottleneck steps in the supply chain for more robots.
What's the doubling time? How long until the second billion? How long can that billion copy itself?
You sat Humanoid robots cost 100k. But that seems very wrong looking at what unitree is doing? https://www.unitree.com/g1
I was aiming for a rough average figure, to an order of magnitude, erring on the conservative side.
I agree there are some cheaper models already, but they're also not able to do human jobs. Getting there will partly be about better algorithms, but it may also require more expensive parts (sensors, very precise motors etc).
If you want to use a lower estimate as the starting point, then that accelerates the timeline compared to my estimate.
I think that's a slightly outdated view, China moves very fast in robotics and they seem to be solving the precision motor problems currently while the hardware stays around this cheap. I think 100k is an overestimation, I think China will push this down with all the possible motor flexibility to like 10k a robot.
Primary obstacle seems to be software (AGI for robotics basically)
Seems reasonable, though just tbc my main forecast is for the cost to fall to $10k and then probably $1k as production scales – so I basically agree – it's mainly a question of how fast it happens.
Also my estimate is for "humanoid equivalents" that weight 80kg each. If it's possible to use much smaller and/or simpler specialised robots for most purposes, then in practice we could have a larger number of cheaper robots.
How can robots both be cheap and there be a strong economic incentive to manufacture more? I guess they start expensive, suppressing demand, then gradually reduce in cost as more manufacturing capacity comes online, reducing the economic incentive for increasing capacity. How that plays out is probably complicated, and needs proper modelling not BOTECs, but I'd guess economists have studied it.
Suppose their cost of production reaches $10k, but they can do work worth $10/hour. Then demand is really high.
Initially production is limited, so the robot companies charge high prices, and earn large profits, selling a relatively small number.
Eventually production scales up, the market becomes more competitive, and prices drop.