Some perspective on this discussion. Think of looking at the vacuum tube based computers of the 1950s. They filled a room, they took kilowatts to run, all they could do (more or less) was count things from data that had been punched onto cards by humans. When people discussed their future back then, they didn’t even think of the iPhone.
On the optimistic side, now we have iPhones and TVs that play almost all media ever made at a pretty affordable price. On the pessimistic side, it took us about 60 years.
An iPhone is like a humanoid robot. How? Before the iphone we had separate devices for talking to people, taking pictures, navigating your car, buying things, sending written messages. And they all cost less than the iPhone. So why do we all have an iphone and no beeper, no camera, no blackberry, and no Garmin GPS? Because the iphone does all of it, and is small and easy to carry around.
The point of a humanoid robot is not that it will ever replace existing automation. If you have spent a lot of money to build a special case robot to put tail light lenses on a model 3, you are not going to rip that out of the factory and put an Optimus in its place screwing on tail light lenses with a phillips head screwdriver.
BUT… SUppose you are paying humans to clean operating rooms and patient rooms where there is a high chance they will get infected. Train an optimus to push a mop, it can, if you have done your job right, do those things and you don’t have to worry about it getting sick. Have optimuses (optimi?) working around radioactive things. Have optimuses working underwater. Have optimuses working outside space stations. All those things where you currently spend a fortune to try to make it save to have a human do something, that is the some of the low hanging fruit for optimus.
So unloading a dishwasher, that is our test case for whether Optimi are commercially interesting? Were computers commercially uninteresting until 2007 when the smartphone was solved? Computers were NEVER uninteresting. From the 1950s on the applications of computers just grew and grew. Were computers uninteresting commercially until they made it inot the home, or into consumer markets? Absolutely not, they were very interesting when IBM was selling them to companies and governments and R&D institutions around the world to do things that humans had sort of done before, but not cheaply and not amazingly well.
It was the 1980s, maybe even the 1990s before computers made it into the home. 30 years or more from the first computers. So Albaby might be right, might be 30 years before a humanoid robot is unloading the dishwasher for you. But so what? In the 30 years leading up to the dishwasher, humanoid robots would have taken over dangerous, boring, relatively low value jobs more and more as their cost came down and their capabilities went up, at least that’s how it worked with computers. You’ll probaby have an Optimus fixing stuff outside the space station long before one washes a dish or changes an adult diaper.
There’s still no guarantee that TESLA will make a ton of money on humanoid robots. There is no “Wright Brothers Aircraft Company” which raked in a lot of the profits from aviation after 1905. The list of computer companies that have come and gone is impressive. Apple was not a phone maker until 2007, Ou sont les Nokias d’antan?
