The Quiet Takeover: Humanoid Robots and the Jobs You Don’t Want
How today’s dullest robots will quietly replace human labor, and make Tesla and OpenAI trillions.
Watch a few minutes of this video, it’s amazing, it’s fascinating, it’s an hour long and very very boring:
That is an hour of a humanoid robot doing a relatively simple and monotonous job successfully. To achieve this an incredible amount of compute, training and inference had to happen, each package getting a deliberate individual solution rather than a pre-programmed action. But for as interesting as it may be technically, the job it’s performing is very boring.The human that used to do this job had this to say on the subject:
I remember working at Amazon, I did a job exactly like this. At the top of the factory, all alone, hot, and depressing. They only kept me there for a few hours but it was soul crushing. My whole job was turning the barcode the right way up. Once done another batch would drop down.
Humans, for the most part, hate these jobs. They are draining, soul crushing, and a waste of time and life. But the job has to get done, the barcode has to face the right way otherwise the sorting machine won’t work, and we can’t have that.
The first question you might ask, why a H...
Watch a few minutes of this video, it’s amazing, it’s fascinating, it’s an hour long and very very boring:
That is an hour of a humanoid robot doing a relatively simple and monotonous job successfully. To achieve this an incredible amount of compute, training and inference had to happen, each package getting a deliberate individual solution rather than a pre-programmed action. But for as interesting as it may be technically, the job it’s performing is very boring.The human that used to do this job had this to say on the subject:
I remember working at Amazon, I did a job exactly like this. At the top of the factory, all alone, hot, and depressing. They only kept me there for a few hours but it was soul crushing. My whole job was turning the barcode the right way up. Once done another batch would drop down.
Humans, for the most part, hate these jobs. They are draining, soul crushing, and a waste of time and life. But the job has to get done, the barcode has to face the right way otherwise the sorting machine won’t work, and we can’t have that.
The first question you might ask, why a Humanoid? Why not a manipulator arm bolted to a table? You would be right to ask. There are plenty of cases where a more traditional industrial robot would be preferable to a humanoid robot. In the case of our package manipulation example, if the rate of packages is such that a manipulator arm would never have long periods of down time it might be a more cost effective to install a permanent manipulator arm.
But the key feature of the Humanoid robot is that it can take the place of a Human, it’s backwards compatible with the world we already have. Meaning a human can stop sorting packages and a bot can walk up to take their place. And if the packages stop coming, the Humanoid bot can simply go make itself useful elsewhere, something a permanently installed industrial robot would find challenging.
Right now, several companies are racing to make humanoids practical, here is a very much non exhaustive list of some of the players:
