Humanoids bring AI’s creative destruction to the shop floor

{"text":[[{"start":3.75,"text":"Fears of AI cannibalising jobs are rippling through professional and other services. Bigger AI-propelled ructions are fast coming for the world’s factory floors."}],[{"start":14.7,"text":"Humanoid robots are AI made physical, fusing the power to work out what to do with the ability to do it. Once the stuff of science fiction, they are still relatively thin on the ground: at about 25,000 at the conservative end of estimates, there are barely enough to staff a handful of auto factories. By far the bulk are in China."}],[{"start":34.55,"text":"Yet predictions of exponential growth, such as Morgan Stanley’s 1bn by 2050, no longer look quite so heroic. Assuming humanoids are on a par with their human peers by then, that represents a quarter of the global workforce now and a fifth of its projected size come 2050."}],[{"start":52.4,"text":"For one thing, suppliers are stepping up a gear. US and Chinese electric-vehicle makers Tesla, Xpeng and Xiaomi are all hurtling towards mass production, albeit hitting snags en route."}],[{"start":63.599999999999994,"text":"Tech giants, meantime, are taking the lead in integrating AI into the physical world, something Nvidia boss Jensen Huang has long touted as the technology’s next wave. Google’s DeepMind wants to give robots the ability to perform new tasks they haven’t previously been trained for. In China, Alibaba’s latest model has AI not just seeing and thinking, but acting — within all the constraints of the real world — on that intelligence."}],[{"start":89.39999999999999,"text":"Increased supply is helping bring down costs, both upfront and, as they improve, those for running and maintenance. Barclays estimates prices have dropped 30-fold over the past decade to about $100,000 each. That’s roughly the annual cost of a flesh-and-blood manufacturing worker in the US, factoring in social security and other benefits."}],[{"start":116.04999999999998,"text":"Price tags in China are half as much or less: at China’s Unitree, one of the biggest manufacturers, they start at $13,500. Elon Musk reckons his Optimus droid will eventually sell for about $30,000. Longer-lasting, swappable batteries should increase demand and thus decrease price as adoption grows."}],[{"start":null,"text":"

"}],[{"start":137.79999999999998,"text":"There are two spanners in the works. One is supply chains. Actuators, the “muscle” that allows bending, lifting and the like, rely on rare earth permanent magnets on which China has a stranglehold. Given that these make up half of material costs, on McKinsey estimates, that’s a pretty big vulnerability — in terms of availability as much as pricing."}],[{"start":160.39999999999998,"text":"The second is political. Jobs in the heartland of factories and warehouses carry more political clout than those in office blocks. Donald Trump’s push for “reshoring” and backtracking on tariffs shows as much. "}],[{"start":173.79999999999998,"text":"Just as with AI, the anxiety of those whose jobs are at risk won’t be enough to stave off the march of the androids. For now, there is some comfort: the 200 or so jobs Tesla is advertising in the US to work on Optimus shows Homo sapiens have not yet outlived their usefulness."}],[{"start":198.64999999999998,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1780748893_2218.mp3"}