>>6318488>meet with Neura Robotics...Upon first glance, the advantages of robotic labour appear obvious: whereas a human might be capable of at most anywhere between 40-60 hours of labour a week, a robot can work 168 hours, week after week excluding minor downtime for maintenance and repair, requiring none of the extended facilities of kitchens, toilets, relaxation and socialisation / gathering areas that human comfort demands.
But there are other, more subtle countervailing difficulties. The robot demands a structured environment, with the greatest efficiency gain from repetitive, high-frequency tasks; the more repetitive and monotonous the routine, the better. The famous observation of Moravec's Paradox, how robots excel at computational tasks that human's struggle to learn, such as chess or arithmetic computation, yet robots equally struggle at tasks which a human child finds trivial, such as walking or climbing around obstacles, owing to the millions of years of evolutionary learning that culminate into the attainment of these innate human sensorimotor instincts. Some studies indicate that accidents increase in a joint human / robot working environment, eg an AMZN warehouse.
There is yet another invisible constraint that governs the application of robotic technology: the tradeoff between the marginal efficiency of capital against the marginal product of labour, observed only through proxy variables, such as revenue generated per employee. Consider the revenue per head generated by 1/ a supermarket checkout employee, scanning groceries barcodes, against 2/ an investment banker, producing an M&A slide deck, and you quickly understand the pricing difference between supermarket point-of-sale cashier terminals by Nixdorf, and Bloomberg financial terminals and analytics for traders. Likewise for robots - the revenue generated by human labour per head constrains the application of costly, advanced capital intensive technologies; robots are derived demand from often cyclical manufacturing industries or lower value-add end markets, and given the massive capital expenditures and upfront sunk costs, the hurdle for robotic adoption becomes far greater than one might expect.
And with robots, the purpose of a thing resides in its name; nomen est omen. A robot is a drudge, or slave.
Addendum: in the supermarket POS terminal example, obviously automated self checkout exists, which is sort of like a "robot". Nonetheless, this is only made viable as the customer supplies their own labour (scanning items, bagging groceries etc) at the station; if you had to create a self-checkout terminal with robot arms to do this, it would likely not be a commercially viable proposition. The idea behind crowdsourced / teleoperated customer supplied labour on an aggregated platform is why a lot of ventures consider RaaS robots-as-a-service etc as the most likely course for sustainable recurring profitability of any robotic labour infrastructure service
