Comment Re:Obituary for human menial labor is premature. (Score 1) 92
A robot does fine at packing uniform objects into uniform packages, but good luck finding one that can pack your shipment from Amazon.com, or do basic construction work, or pull the ingredients for 50,000 gallons of Coca Cola off of shelves in a warehouse and mix them all together for you. There is still a lot of dull, brain-killing, menial work for humans to do. If you work in an office and have never set foot in any kind of industrial operation, you'll probably be surprised at how much stuff still needs to be done by humans.
There are already automation systems for warehouses, for instance robotic forklifts http://www.inro.co.nz/
Humans are great at packing odd shaped stuff. But when you have a lot of regular objects, look out for robots. This is just a matter of low hanging fruit - why make a flexible robot when simple robots are cheaper and the market is still huge and unsatisfied.
Grabbing large quantites of ingredients is a large scale logistical exercise. There are very few "moves" and a lot of small difficulties. Humans make sense here.
Construction is moving more in the direction of prefabed portions, where the tree was cut robotically by an operator assisted machine. The frames assembled in a factory under robot control. Humans on the job site are doing less and less of the raw, repetitive framing work - again we are well suited to decision making.
I like to think that Robots are doing all the boring stuff so we can do the fun stuff.