Sanctuary AI has some superior capabilities like handling mailing labels and ziploc bags. If I were Tesla, I would buy SanctuaryAI now. If not then Amazon will.
Amazon has about one million robots (pallet bots) speeding up the movement of goods at warehouses.
Amazon has its own robotics research and manufacturing.
Amazon by itself or by purchasing or guaranteeing a million humanoid robot order will likely emerge to compete with Tesla and its Teslabot.
Google is developing its Googlebot.
I think SanctuaryAI-Amazon would be the strongest competitor to Tesla. Amazon also owns Wholefoods and has cashierless checkout at Amazon Go stores.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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In 2007 economist Stuart Elliott wrote a paper detailing the impact of this kind of stuff on jobs by 2030.
He came up with 30% to 60% of what he called ‘occupational displacement.’ That may still be on target.
The question is, will all those people in displaced occupations going to find new jobs? Of course they won’t. Many will be undereducated, inflexible, and untrained. Plus, while there will be new opportunities for humans, there probably won’t be nearly enough for everyone who needs a new job.
The question then becomes, what sort of dole–I mean UBI–will we be implementing. With productivity up, one has to assume we could afford it, providing we adapt to change. But just giving money to people has never worked out, so what are they going to have to do to earn it?
I could see a lot of us becoming George Jetson. Spacely Sprockets is fully automated. This is because, let’s face it, George’s robot maid, Rosie, could do his job a hundred times better (he presses a button for three hours a day, three days a week). So why does Spacely keep hiring George back? And why does his competitor, Cogswell Cogsworth, keep trying to steal him? It’s because Spacely gets tax advantages in exchange for keeping George employed, tax advantages worth far more that the cost of George’s salary, benefits, and office.
And the government itself is full of make-work positions, like the inspectors who make sure Spacely is making George come to the office and do ‘work.’
This way, George remains a proud bread-winner for his family, and a staunch advocate for the status quo. That’s as opposed to constant dissatisfaction with a government dole where he might occasional riot and flip over aircars and burn them (not hard when they are folded into briefcases).
Depends how fast will they be able to speed up these slow robots to normal speeds.
Even if humanoid shape robots look the most natural, it is probably more efficient to build different shapes for different usages. For example robots with tracks or wheels instead of legs.
Sanctuary AI’s teleoperated robot is cool, but mostly useless. Only great for hazardous environments (nuclear related or space). But it needs to have AI, to be truly great.
Tesla won’t buy them, no point, by the end of the year they will likely be ahead of Sanctuary AI.
I think the current leader in practical humanoid robot workers, is Agility Robotics with Digit. But another cool one worth mentioning is Apptronik’s Astra.
I think it counts especially if it’s a basis of data collection for NN training. For Tesla it’s analogous to their whole business plan of getting customers to buy into being allowed to giving them big training data for FSD and pay for the privilege. A single remote operator might do tricky parts of a job for several robots until they learned them well enough themselves. It allows switching back and forth easily from NN in training and human trainer.
For many companies it’s valuable free publicity that they are using leading edge tech.
woah, a zillion trillion dollar robot to open a ziplock in half an hour… jobs threatened, progress!
It appears that one of the dexterous telerobots is being teleoperated. That doesn’t count. It would consume the time of a human on a 1 minute : 1 minute basis only 8 hours a day and is unable to perform activities anywhere as quickly as just a human. So, it would be a net inefficiency and cost more than just employing a human. But, at least it is a humanoid form into which AI could be placed.
Yes but if there were enough tasks an AI could perform and some a human would be needed for the human could switch between different work venues to complete the human tasks, thereby keeping several bots at several locations having access to human level competence temporarily while functioning at robot level the rest of the time.
Sort of like how those voice recognition systems strive to deal with some helpline requests so that fewer of them need to go straight to a human. Though that may be a bad example because I’ve never had a call to my bank get dealt with without going through a human yet. Bank voice recognition and AI isn’t using these new ChatGPT things yet.
My point is that telepresence doesn’t have to be an all or nothing thing. When a supervisor is training a new cashier first they explain things and have them watch, then they stand with them while they do it, eventually they can go away and come back when there is a question.
Re: voice recognition systems for helplines.
I find that for doing things by an automated system I want to fill in blanks on a web page. If that doesn’t work I want to go directly to an actual human.