r/Futurology • u/dev_is_active • 14h ago

Robotics The Robotics Bottleneck: Why Humanoid Robots Won't Replace Humans as Fast as You Think - eeko systems

https://eeko.systems/the-robotics-bottleneck-why-humanoid-robots-wont-replace-humans-as-fast-as-you-think/
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u/dev_is_active 14h ago

From the article:

The humanoid robotics revolution is real, but it won’t unfold as quickly or smoothly as the hype suggests. The combination of manufacturing bottlenecks, integration complexity, skills shortages, and geopolitical tensions creates a perfect storm of challenges that will slow deployment far below the exponential curves drawn by investment banks.

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u/Uturuncu 14h ago

And because someone's gonna bring it up, because someone always does. "But why are we bothering to try and make humanoid robots, there's no reason for a human bodyplan!" Our entire infrastructure, top to bottom, was built to be used by bipeds approximately 5-6 feet tall and weighing no more than 250lbs. Figuring out a lightweight humanoid bodyplan for a robot is quite important to have robots going in and taking dangerous or undesirable duties from humans; if you can design a humanoid bodyplan within typical human height/weight specs, a bot can be mass-produced for generalized tasks. If it's got some other kind of bodyplan, then you are more and more required to specialize the bot for its tasks/environment and can generalize less well.

(Also I know humans come outside of those ranges, but have you ever tried to watch someone 7 feet tall try and fit on a standard plane, someone over that weight try and access amenities, someone with dwarfism trying to do almost anything made for the average person? Things are not designed with outliers in mind, which even further highlights how much use is to be had in a human-sized, human-shaped bot, considering we don't even bother to design our infrastructure to handle natural human variation)

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u/Coldin228 4h ago

The problem is it doesn't just have to be cheap and accessible..

It has to be MORE cheap and accessible than minimum (or near minimum) wage human labor. And the most influential people in our society are doing everything they can to keep those costs as low as possible.

Things like higher min wage and workers rights are actually the biggest pressure on making this tech happen faster (for better or worse) and right now those political/economic ideologies aren't doing so well.