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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   11393 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 7, 2026

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It's not currently true in any sense whatsoever. The biggest robot industrial deployments are highly constrained trial runs on EV/robot factories, arguably PR stunts. (That's if we are talking of humanoid/other general purpose robots, obviously industrial arms are very productive and have been for decades now). I'm very optimistic about robots but we're not here yet, and certainly the US blue collar work is all done by meatbags.

I know that they're working on getting robotic welders at shipyards - I think the Philly yard is one of the first to try it out. I would say it's not yet replacing the welders they've been unable to hire, but it is more progressed than just a PR stunt.

Robot welding has been used for a while in detroit, hasn’t it? It’s clearly a mature technology that they just hadn’t figured out how to deploy to this particular application.

Starship switched from human to robotic welding years ago, around 2020 or 2021 IIRC. This was shortly after 3 embarrassing cryo test failures, 2 of which looked like structural flaws, and the only such failures since then look to have been related to test misconfiguration or (non-welded) COPV failures, so it was way more than a PR stunt, it was basically a necessity to get the program off the ground.

This is still "industrial arms are very productive" territory, though, and although it's "blue collar" work it's not even close to being cheap unskilled labor. The goal for humanoid (or semihumanoid; hands are way more important than legs) robots isn't "with a year of engineering work you can migrate this specific expensive manufacturing process", it's "you can just tell the robot what to do and it'll go do it, and even after amortizing the cost it's cheaper than just telling a person".

Aerospace welding has enough precision going into it that "we spent tons of money automating it to reduce process variation" (structural flaws caused by human tolerances) has long been on the table, regardless of the financial efficacy. Even literal amateurs have been building automation for this for quite a while.

The real jobs to watch are the ones that are cost-sensitive and sufficiently-varied to make automation difficult. I'd watch industrial textile sewing, fruit-picking, or things like that.

You don't need a fully humanoid robot to start replacing a lot of sedentary blue-collar labor like sewing or assembling electronics. Just two arms and a head, mounted on a basic swivel.

Legs aren't the hard issue anymore. The hands and manipulation policy is the current bottleneck.

Robot arms are still 99% using preprogrammed motions only. In all seriousness, even controlling two arms independently is considered a serious problem because your solver needs to account for the motion of each arm independently and plan trajectories that don't move the arms into collision. That means every movement takes significantly longer to plan. Such robots exist but are generally considered a gimmick.

sewing

If you have invented a robot that can do complex manipulation of cloth at speed with a 99.9% success rate, you can get 100,000,000 dollars of investment tomorrow.

If you have invented a robot that can do complex manipulation of cloth at speed with a 99.9% success rate, you can get 100,000,000 dollars of investment tomorrow.

As far as I know, there are data harvesting operations going on in sweatshops right now to train ANNs on. Someone (like Aliyun) is already spending these millions of investments.

I know. I'm not saying it's unsolvable, but it's very firmly not solved at the moment and that's before you get into actual economic implementation.

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