The exciting part comes when two robots are able to do repairs on each other.
I think this is the spooky part. I feel dumb saying it, but is there a point where they are able to coordinate and build a factory to build chips/more of themselves? Or other things entirely?
But this still has a massive cost. Replacing or repairing an actuator isn't cheap, in material and in time of unavailability.
To maybe get a little carried away with the sci-fi for a minute, why does the Actuator need to cost anything?
When the tree of costs that make up a product are traced, surely all the leaf nodes are human labour? As in, to make the actuator, I had to pay someone to assemble it and I had to buy the parts. Each part had a materials cost and a labour cost. So it goes for the factory that made the fasteners, the foundry that made the steel, the mine that extracted the ore.
Shudder to think of how to regulate resource extraction in a future where AI humanoid robots are strip mining and logging for free.
> When the tree of costs that make up a product are traced, surely all the leaf nodes are human labour?
What about energy, real estate and taxes?
Even at the extreme end of automation, if you want iron ore, you need to buy a mine from somebody, pay taxes on it, and power the machines to extract the minerals and transport them elsewhere for processing.
I had always assumed that such a robot would be very specific (like a cleaning robot) but it does seem like by the time they are ready they will be very generalizable.
I know they would require quite a few sensors and motors, but compared to self-driving cars their liability would be less and they would use far less material.