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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   2885 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 16, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I see an opportunity to replace certain human labor at my workplace with humanoid robots. For background, I am an equipment engineer at a Fortune 100 manufacturing company and think my job is somewhat low-risk of getting automated soon.

Pros:

  • Good for my career at the company
  • Improves my skillset in case I ever want to switch jobs. I predict humanoid robots will become much more common as more companies adopt them and their skills widen and improve.

Cons:

  • I am putting people out of a job. This would likely substitute for people instead of complement them. The company recently laid off 100s of employees and soon thereafter announced using a robot dog for some of their tasks. Is this just a form of natural selection?
  • Can look bad on me if the robot isn’t as good as promised. There are ways to temper expectations that I plan to do during my pitch to management.

What are The Motte’s opinions on this in regards to:

  • My career development
  • The moral implications of putting low-skilled people out of work
  • Anything else

You can start by thinking about how you might be able to complement the existing workers. Is there a way that the machines could be made useful for them, instead of replacing them? Is there other work, other bottlenecked parts of the process that might be able to use more labour? I know you said no, but perhaps with a little more ingenuity you'll see something.

Also, for my own personal satisfaction, could you indicate what humanoids you're interested in? I'm on record as being very down on humanoids for maintenance/controllability reasons, is there something new I've missed?

I grossly misspoke in my original post: I think complementation would happen first, then eventually substitution. I am unsure of exact timelines here and venture to say 10+ years with low confidence. My immediate “moral concern” is that the complementation benefits would be enough to justify firing workers sooner because now everyone is X times as productive.

I haven’t done substantial research, but the Figure AI robots seem promising. And while I suspect their press releases are overhyping their results (much like BD’s Atlas hasn’t been widely implemented to my knowledge despite being introduced many years ago), they have actual production units in factories doing simple work, which is a plus in my mind. Open to any more thoughts you have!

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