Mercedes is trialing humanoid robots for 'low skill, repetitive' tasks

Low skill, but higher skill than the automation already in place it seems; it says &quot;like having Apollo inspect and deliver components to human production line workers&quot;, but there&#x27;s less expensive and more reliable ways to do that - like conveyor belts and whatnot.<p>Call me a luddite but it looks like an overly error prone solution looking for a problem to me.

Wouldn&#x27;t wheeled robots be better for flat factory floors, if it is supposed to deliver parts? What is the point of the legs.<p>&quot;Mercedes has started trialing an undisclosed number of Apollo robots at a factory in Hungary. The country has experienced labor shortages for several years as workers migrate to Western Europe, with Audi and Mercedes having both expressed concerns regarding labor supply in 2016.&quot;<p>Raise wages?

I think that at some point AI will enter the domain of repetitive physical jobs, like for example an experienced butcher will train an AI arm that eventually will learn to slice meat correctly since that&#x27;s an activity that normally works with a reasonably standardized product(the animal carcass).<p>Keeping that in mind, honestly for me it&#x27;s hard not to be very skeptical that it would make any economic sense in the next many decades to have an expensive humanoid robot performing tasks with a very low aggregated value like moving boxes one by one. Just because it&#x27;s a robot performing an economic activity it doesn&#x27;t necessarily mean it will be productive or competitive.

Delivering parts? Humanoid carrying single box feels like massive waste. Throw something pallet sized maybe 1,5m high or even higher that has simple mechanics to drop a box and move multiple of boxes. And then make it move multiple boxes at time...

I think Mercedes built expensive humanoid body doubles in Gibson’s “The Peripheral”? Gonna be interested to see if his predictions come true again

Mercedes has really been a dark horse in autonomous tech. First a commercially available level-3 driving system, now this

I wonder what happens if your consumer base has all had their incomes replaced by AI? Who buys your product your now making with it? Does AI just lead to the end of capitalism as we know it?

I bet that robot is amazing at walking down the golden path.

Almost any article on automation has a sentence about freeing highly skilled workers for more valuable tasks. Along with the talk of tight labour supply it comes across as disingenuous when the value is replacing the cost of low skill workers.

I&#x27;ll never understand this fascination with humanoid robots. It smacks of our innate narcissism, which lead to hilariously ironic and pervasive belief systems like &quot;God made MAN in HIS image!&quot; (surely not the other way around!)<p>Meanwhile the whole world already operates on incredibly precise high-tolerance robots doing low skill and repetitive tasks as well as extremely &quot;high skill&quot; tasks like painting&#x2F;manufacturing cars or milling metal.<p>And we have wheeled robots like Autostore.com for other automation tasks.<p>A humanoid robot exists only to tickle our perverse self-centric obsessions, and namely: news sites, news consumers, and executives.

Cool, now we just need to continually redefine &quot;low skill&quot; as whatever AI and robots are capable of doing, and we&#x27;ve got an all-purpose justification for laying people off.<p>Step 3 is &quot;profit!&quot;. While step 4 may be &quot;widespread suffering and social unrest&quot;, we can just redefine our process as ending at step 3, and it&#x27;s no big deal.<p>All problems can be solved by taking the right perspective!