I work with robots in a factory.
A robot is finicky, fails constantly, performs slower, and requires me to fucking babysit the piece of shit all night to deal with faults and errors. Theoretically the robot does the entire job of welding and bending and etching, but in practice they need me to make sure it doesn’t shit itself.
I’m sure, at some point, they can replace me. We aren’t there yet.
Not OP, but I’m an industrial field tech, my two cents:
“Robot” is a very wide term used for a bunch of different stuff, but mostly for industrial automation devices, which, unfortunately, at the moment are still very dumb. Industrial automation improves output, if your robot really is slower than a human, somebody messed up very badly.
What it doesn’t improve, and instead reduces, is adaptability; humans can perceive and reason on a vastly superior scale to a machine, and they can adapt their actions to changing factors in a process much better than a machine can, and they don’t need to be programmed for every single possibility.
It’ll take a while before machines can replace humans in non-repetitive tasks, but in those task they excel, provided they are properly designed, built and maintained.
Oh it’s “faster” but constantly fucks up and needs to retry the same job over and over, so it averages out to being slower than me just manually putting parts into a welding press. Also, constantly down and needs maintenance to come troubleshoot because it’s angry that a fixture got stuck sideways in an aperture or whatever.
I suspect they’re not actually properly maintained, because the company decided it would be better if there weren’t manuals for the robots. They don’t want us wasting time reading!
I bet it’s just running scripts though. It won’t have any actual intelligence.
When people talk about robots taking over human jobs they’re talking really about AI powered robots. Ones capable of at least some actual thought processes rather than just blindly moving around based on what some unchanging computer code tells it to do. Ones that are capable of adapting to new situations and error handling on their own.
Companies don’t really have those robots yet.
Comparing current industrial construction robots to AI robots of the future is like comparing a spinning wheel to a 3D printer.
Robots are a different discussion from AI, because as soon as AI can replace human labor basically all desk jobs will vanish almost overnight. Manual labor will take longer to replace because it’s not just a matter of programming, but installing and engineering the robotics necessary to do the work.
And even then, humans might still be cheaper since we’re just disposable meat lol