Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag.(show it anyway)

I'm hanging out for a general kitchen hand. (needs to be waterproof).

John Maynard Keynes was half right.

so slow

He's doing the easy part! I want him to do the mudding and sanding.

Why did they make it humanoid? Seems like an inefficient config for this. Think of how much power must go to just keep it from falling over.

Because it's meant to replace a human. If it's wheeled, or something, then it can't go up stairs effectively.

I mean, it's already shitty enough at the job. Seems to take a long time even with the edits in there, not to mention it seems incapable of installing anything other than full sheets on a perfectly flat wall made specifically to dimensions it was pre-programmed for. It'll be a long time before anything like this is actually taking jobs away in significant numbers.

It doesn't matter if it takes 10 times as long if it's 1% of the cost. This thing can work 24/7 without needing any breaks at all.

I'm in the process of designing and building a house right now (as in, I'm paying an architect and builder, not doing it myself).

If my builder came to me and said "hey, we can drop the labour cost of building by 50%, but your house will take an extra month", I'd sign that so fast his head would spin.

But it's not going to be 1% of the cost for a very, very long time. It probably takes a team of technicians to keep it going right now. 5-10 years from now you can probably get one of those for a hundred grand or so, but maintenance would run you around the same as a full-time drywaller. You're throwing a lot of numbers out there as if they mean something, but they don't. Also, the thing needs downtime to recharge, even once the technology becomes practical and affordable, so 24/7 is not an option. Either you need a worker to replace batteries every few hours, or it needs to plug in to a base station and go offline for significant periods.

Fair points, but this is obviously a prototype.

Ultimately, the price of these will come down and even if you need to swap out the batteries, there's no reason that can't be automated too. Hell, a roomba basically does that now. The point is it doesn't need sleep or meal breaks and it doesn't care about working hours. Or you just leave it connected to a permanent power source (if you can teach it to drywall, you can teach it to avoid the cable).

And yeah, my numbers are obviously estimates, since this isn't commercially available yet, and you'd need to factor in capital investment, maintenance, etc. But you don't have to pay it a salary, it doesn't need medical and it doesn't have to comply with health and safety regs (at least, not for the robots H&S).

I find it difficult to believe that something like this could ever be less cost-effective than a human.

Of course, that's assuming a steady rate of improvement. Bipedal robots (like self-driving cars) have been "90% there" for many years now. It might be that the last 10% is REALLY, REALLY difficult.

My gut feeling is that we will see a tipping point. There will be some really challenging engineering/programming obstacle that stops these going mainstream, but eventually, someone will solve it and then the rate of progress will be exponential.

But you're right in that, that's certainly a few years away yet. I'm fascinated as to how we as a society/civilisation deal with mass automation.

Have you ever seen Mexicans install sheetrock? So fast and so cheap. And very well done. The return on investment for a robot like this would be around 50-100 years.

Yeah, but can it sell meth outta the back of its Chevy?

I won't be impressed until it can build itself.

Yeah, but you better make sure it's stocked up with Nuke

it didn't leave a small gap at the bottom. fail.

They don't even have robots to simply MOVE drywall around construction sites, which would be very useful. This is a long way of from general purpose construction use.