If humans can teleoperate robots, why don’t we have low-wage workers operating robots in high-wage countries? Feels like a win-win if the technology works, but I’ve seen zero evidence of it being close. Maybe Ugo is a point in favor?
Hmm. That’s an interesting question: If I’m running a warehouse in a high-wage country, why not have people in low-wage countries teleoperating robots to pack boxes etc.? I don’t have a great answer. My guesses would include possible issues with internet latency & unreliability in low-wage countries, and/or market inefficiencies e.g. related to the difficulty of developing new business practices (e.g. limited willingness/bandwidth of human warehouse managers to try weird experiments), and associated chicken-and-egg issues where the requisite tech doesn’t exist because there’s no market for it and vice-versa. There might also be human-UI issues that limit robot speed / agility (and wouldn’t apply to AIs)?
Of course the “teleoperated robot tech is just super-hard and super-expensive, much moreso than I realize” theory is also a possibility. I’m interested if anyone else has a take. :)
There are still HR and legal overhead costs involved if you have human operators.
I think part of the answer is also that the space of things low-wage workers can physically do remotely via teleoperation isn’t that much larger than the space of things that can be fully automated but still much smaller than the space of things a local human can do. It’s a fairly narrow band to exploit, IMO, and the labor cost arbitrage spread is rarely worth the complexity of the extra logistics, capital investment, and maintenance.
If humans can teleoperate robots, why don’t we have low-wage workers operating robots in high-wage countries? Feels like a win-win if the technology works, but I’ve seen zero evidence of it being close. Maybe Ugo is a point in favor?
Hmm. That’s an interesting question: If I’m running a warehouse in a high-wage country, why not have people in low-wage countries teleoperating robots to pack boxes etc.? I don’t have a great answer. My guesses would include possible issues with internet latency & unreliability in low-wage countries, and/or market inefficiencies e.g. related to the difficulty of developing new business practices (e.g. limited willingness/bandwidth of human warehouse managers to try weird experiments), and associated chicken-and-egg issues where the requisite tech doesn’t exist because there’s no market for it and vice-versa. There might also be human-UI issues that limit robot speed / agility (and wouldn’t apply to AIs)?
Of course the “teleoperated robot tech is just super-hard and super-expensive, much moreso than I realize” theory is also a possibility. I’m interested if anyone else has a take. :)
There are still HR and legal overhead costs involved if you have human operators.
I think part of the answer is also that the space of things low-wage workers can physically do remotely via teleoperation isn’t that much larger than the space of things that can be fully automated but still much smaller than the space of things a local human can do. It’s a fairly narrow band to exploit, IMO, and the labor cost arbitrage spread is rarely worth the complexity of the extra logistics, capital investment, and maintenance.