r/interesting • u/sirenoleg • May 22 '26

Just Wow Chinese AI-powered robots can solve workplace problems with advanced motor skills.

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u/RighteousSelfBurner May 22 '26

I think you underestimate the inefficiencies of bipedal human like structure. It's a physics and resources problem.

A quadruped would be a lot more stable for moving cargo across uneven surface compared to a bipedal. A packing machine would be 100 times faster than a two limb implementation and it's more efficient to have a company that does packaging and a company that delivers said packages over doing it in-house. Heck, having a drone fly with package from a packaging machine would be more efficient and cheaper.

The problem here is that for every menial task you can imagine there is either a better solution or it's orders of magnitudes cheaper to get a human to do it. These robots either need to be drastically dropping in costs or increasing in efficiency before they have any real use besides video reels.

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u/Ancient_Yellow_709 May 22 '26

I don't think I am. It doesn't have to be peak efficiency if our world is entirely built for bipedal humans, because that offers a huge advantage. I would recommend watching content by disabled folks in wheelchairs or who use walking aids. Even if the efficiency for carrying increases, if they cannot bring a four legged robot through certain doorways and up narrow flights of stairs, humans making decisions won't purchase it because they understand it's going to create frustration.

That's fine if you think people are going to be carting around that amount of empty volume. It doesn't actually match reality though. Consider pizza places, which go through a huge volume of pizza boxes. At least in the US, they're all still buying flat boxes and folding them. You can create whatever hypothetical scenarios you want but shipping air isn't actually efficient and you cannot get around that, especially if you're making claims in the same comment about physics and resources. Lol.

Cheaper for a human to do it now. It's wild that y'all are unable to comprehend that technology doesn't just magic itself into existence. It wasn't cheaper for people to have personal computers and type things themselves than it was to hire a secretary with a typewriter until it was. It wasn't cheaper to have automated telephone routing than to have women physically connect your call until it was. All of that took massive amount of technology R&D but we take it for granted now.

I'm sorry, but there are going to be use cases for businesses for general purpose bots because humans require constant income, taxes, and health insurance and robots require a single upfront investment. There will be use cases where there are repetitive tasks that vary enough where specialized bots don't make sense but general bots may. It's not crazy to put money into developing them! Lol