Unlikely in the long run. In virtually every field that once used human labor, once a technology arrived that replicated the human labor it ended up being both far more powerful and efficient. There comes a point where you're just pointlessly using human labor.

The slave labor situation in the antebellum south demonstrated both sides of that to a degree. The cotton gin was an amazing labor multiplier for processing cotton providing a labor factor of about 50X (1 person doing the work that 50 used to do). On the other hand, that created a huge demand for the other parts of the process, i.e. growing and picking the cotton in the first place. That had not been automated, so suddenly the demand for human labor exploded and that was satisfied with slave labor. So the device that made one task far easier resulted ultimately in more human labor. It took about 150 more years for an automated cotton picker to be invented. When it was though, it was hundreds of times faster than a human.

Of course, the processes used with slave labor were still pointlessly labor intensive. Simple innovations could have provided a multiplier for human labor. Things like not having the worker carry a heavy load of cotton in a bag around their neck the whole time. Methods to keep the worker closer to ground level where they could pick the cotton without needing to bend down or kneel, stand, bend down, and repeat over and over. There would have bean lots of ways to reduce the workload and treat the people doing the work more humanely in the process.The problem was that the cruelty was the point and pointlessly using human labor was practically a religion.

Anyway, the whole process for cotton is much less labor intensive now. Agriculture uses vastly less labor than it used to and the various tasks that still take human labor are being picked off one by one. All the picking that now often requires migrant labor will eventually be done by machines, it's just a matter of time. The machines will cost a lot more than a human worker up front, but will do the work of hundreds of human workers. Once the technology is good enough, it just won't be a contest.

Remember, John Henry "beat" the machine, but not really because he died in the end (also, he loses and dies in some versions). That story hits a lot differently today than I think it did back then. All I can think is that John Henry died to preserve a way of life where, no matter how much of a mythic hero he was, he would have been a broken, arthritic old man in his mid forties or sooner. Also the modern machines that replaced both him and the machine he competed against are many, many times faster than both of them put together.

I am probably rambling too much about this, but the basic point is that human physical labor pretty much never beats a specialized machine on performance and, eventually, not on cost.

I think you missed my point. I wasn't saying that robots can't or should not have articulated limbs for locomotion. What I was pointing out is that there's no reason a robot can't have the best of both worlds. After all, humans ride bicycles or use roller skates. Heck, I am betting that virtually all, if not all, of the athletes in a typical marathon are wearing shoes. We can do a lot with our feet and our hands, etc. but we're tool users and we use tools and/or vehicles and machines because they're better at various tasks than just using our hands. So the point is that a bipedal robot is fine, but there's no need for an obsession with robots that strictly adhere to a human model. Hence, wheeled feet, because running a half-marathon is fine as a demonstration, but if you just want your robot to go 13 miles for practical purposes, wheels are a lot faster and a lot more efficient. So you can build it with both integrated, or you can have swappable parts, etc.

I also did not just say wheels. I pointed out snow shoes, which certainly go places where wheels have a great deal of difficulty, but so do regular feet.

I made no such claim. They're perfectly viable. I was simply pointing out that, in the race to create machines that do things the way that humans do them, we have to remember that humans very frequently build devices so that humans can use the devices to do things in ways that humans can't do them.

The average human household is full of such devices. How does a human peel a potato or other vegetable? Nibbling with their teeth (which kind of defeats the purpose), scraping with their fingernails maybe. Or, if they use a tool like a potato peeler. Maybe a grater. Maybe a high pressure steam oven that heats potatoes rapidly, superheating the water under their skin so that when the pressure is suddenly released, the superheated water boils instantly and blows the skins off.

Ultimately, humans have spent thousands of years developing a repertoire of tools and machinery specifically to do things that the human body can't do on its own, or at least doing things better than the human form could. It would be pretty ironic if our ultimate act of invention was a machine that simply imitated what the human body does, but maybe a bit stronger or faster. Naturally, an advanced enough humanoid robot could also use all the tools a human can use and that's fine. But I can't help thinking about all the things that are only designed the way they are to accommodate human anatomy. If we're just having machines do the work, do we actually need things that are designed for humans so that our human form robots can use them.

Here's a classic from lots of science fiction. The robot chauffeur. Why? I mean, the cachet, sure. A chauffeur is a symbol of opulence, etc. In practical terms though, it's just wasting a seat in a car that a passenger could use. Have the car do the driving and have the robot fold itself up in the trunk or on a rack on the back of the car or something. There's a lot of wasted space in most cars on top of the dashboard between the window and the front of the dash. I mean, sure human drivers need that for the whole "seeing with the eyes in their head" thing. When you don't need that, you could put the robot storage rack there.

Should the humanoid vacuum be doing the vacuuming? Or should the vacuum just do it? Something I can't help thinking about is that even quite a lot of people who could afford it don't have human servants any more like rich people would in the old days. One of the reasons for that is all the modernization that has reduced the amount of human labor it takes to run a house. Most people don't need to chop firewood and maintain the fire, for example. Or go around lighting and dousing candles. I will also note that people who have rugs don't seem to take them out and beat them as much. Part of that is because of vacuum cleaners of course. Honestly though, most people's rugs are probably dirtier than people who had a housekeeper to beat the rugs back in the day. A lot of modern house cleaners won't even do that of course, at least probably not as often. Maybe with the humanoid robot the rugs would be beaten once a week, just for something to do. In general though, here's just so much less labor that needs to be done by an extra humanoid in a household.

So, I do actually think a lot of people might well buy these. It's just not clear that it would be any more popular than a completely non-humanoid, non-animal-like robot or a collection of them that performs the same tasks that the humanoid robot could.

Honestly, from what you're saying, what I'm getting is "gentrified neighborhoods". Similar to the geographic isolation one I mentioned. It's similar to the geographic isolation variant usually called "tourist trap". Basically, it's charging what the customer will bear because they are a captive market. In your case though, the captivity was more about price vs. convenience and a market full of people more willing to pay extra than deal with the inconvenience of saving money through arbitrage. Possibly also an element of local lifestyle elements For example, people living in apartments and condos where they don't have garages/sheds/basements where they can store a whole bunch of gas cans.

So, I get your point, but I still question the relevance to the original example. That was about coming gas prices. From what I can find in Oct 2022, peak average gas prices in San Francisco were $6.49 per gallon. Peak average national price at the time was $3.91. Currently average San Francisco price is $5.69 per gallon and national is $4.02. So, given those numbers, all else being equal, the prices where you were in Oct 2022 should be expected to be about $9 again. Meaning that gas prices there should definitely be already above the $6 per gallon from the original post.

With prices that high it's insane that people aren't all using EVs there. Even with the electricity at more than twice the national average, it's still less than half as expensive per mile. Although, once again, gentrified. Of course, at those prices, synthetic gasoline made with renewable energy would be cheap.

OK... But why would it need to? I mean, human joints do wear out. When critical ones do, the standard medical practice today is to replace them. You can do exactly the same thing with robots, but it's generally far easier. An efficient system would be modular. That is to say that the part that wears out might be some sort of spring, but the best thing to do would be to take out the entire joint, pop in a replacement and send the joint module back to a central factory to be reconditioned. That would allow for basically all repairs to be done in the field by other robots, even if there is not a robot specialized enough to repair the one damaged component in the field.

Not sure why not. It's pretty common now for delivery to use powered hand trucks that do the stair climbing themselves. Some of them have tracks, but some of them just use wheels. Take out the human operator and you have a wheeled indoor delivery robot that can climb stairs. Various types of stair climbing load carriers, including wheelchairs have been around for something like 70 years now.

Maybe feet would be better, but why not wheeled feet? They could go through woods just fine as well, not to mention probably beat marathon records by a factor of 4 to 5X times the speed. You could also build in fold out foot extenders to increase surface area (basically snow shoes) so they could also do better on soft surfaces like snow, sand, leaves, etc.

Basically, emulating humans is fine and there are niches where we work well, but specialized mechanical devices can do much better. Sometimes it seems like a lot of effort is made to emulate humans in performing tasks when there are better solutions. For example, folding laundry. There's no doubt that getting robots to fold laundry like humans well is an accomplishment. The thing is, when actual humans need to fold lots of things made of cloth fast and efficiently, they use folding boards because it turns out that the custom built mechanical system is faster and better.

Interesting. Their market cap is about the same as their total revenue over those 15 years.

OK. As I suspected. Extremely anecdotal example and not reflective of actual typical pricing at the time. Don't get me wrong, it's a data point, but it's clearly an aberration. Basically, while regional prices vary, they can't typically vary by that much in an open market. The opportunities for some form of arbitrage are too high. So that means some sort of special factor you're not mentioning about where you were buying the gas: extreme geographical isolation (island, mountain community), crisis event (local flooding, fire, earthquake leading to price gouging), externally imposed limitation on where you could buy gas (military base? corporate or government policy limiting where you could buy gas for a fleet vehicle), long highway that is extremely underserved with gas stations and you forgot to fill up beforehand and ran out near the single, extremely overpriced gas station, etc. Otherwise, the basic rules of competition would mean that no gas station could stay in business charging that much of a difference from regional average prices. All of their business would travel further afield to buy gas cheaply and fill up a bunch of ten gallon gas cans while there except for a small few who would buy the gas at that price, despite other options.

In other words, you might have paid that much for gas,but either you were forced into it by unusual circumstance, or you just chose to pay that much despite other options. Either way, it's not a very good example for the discussion at hand.

I think the device's vulnerability to it depended on the revision. Not to mention that, if I recall correctly - and it was a while ago - the problem could actually be with the disks rather than the drive. Or rather, the problem was basically infectious. It was caused by the drive heads overextending, but damage on the disks could cause the drive heads to overextend, damaging the mechanism. The thing is, those damaged mechanisms would then damage zip disks put into them. Then those damaged disks could be damaged in such a way that they would cause another zip drive they were placed in to experience the same damage.

At least, that is my vague recollection of what I remember hearing at the time, which I can't remember the source of, so I can't vouch for its accuracy. It did seem like a decent explanation for serial failures though. Some people would insist that theirs never had a problem while others would complain about them failing over and over again and it is entirely possible that it is because, after they replaced it, they would try to get their files off their disks and then the problem would spread to the new drive.

My understanding is that they were supposed to have fixed it in later versions, but other posts on this article suggests that it was mitigated rather than outright fixed and that some units were simply less vulnerable than others.

Except of course that the parent poster was actually talking about national average gas prices (though they were rounding up to $6 from around $5.50). I am guessing you are talking about gasoline, not diesel but, either way, the national average for those was never as high as $9 or even $8+ in 2022.

You do realize that falls a bit flat because of the fact that Trump was a rich Democrat. There is a significant overlap between that period and his affiliation with Epstein.

Have to comment on that. Natural Gas is by no means more efficient for either cooking or heating. I mean, let's start with heating. With a good electric heat pump in an environment like the UK, you're going to get an average COP of something like 3. So, in terms of energy in the original source compared to the amount of heat energy entering your home, you could look at that as 300%. For natural gas heating, the best you can get is about 98.5% because some heat goes out with the exhaust. Even just electric resistive heating is higher at effectively 100%.

As for cooking, the most efficient way to cook is actually usually small, well insulated electric appliances. Pressure cookers, convection ovens ("air fryers"), etc. Basically systems where the heat is generated from electricity on the inside of an enclosed vessel rather than having to make it from the outside in. One easy way to tell is if you notice your kitchen heating up significantly during cooking. If you use one of those small electric appliances you'll notice that the air in the room doesn't heat up that much because most of the heat energy is going into the food. With the gas oven or stovetop, it does tend to heat up more because a lot of the energy that you want to go into the food is going into the air instead.

On another point you brought up, on what you do with the excess power, I brought this up in more detail in another post so I'll just cover it briefly here. One thing you can do is use it to make methane/natural gas to reduce your need to get it from fossil sources. As for it being polluting, yes it is, but the primary way it is comes from the greenhouse effect of the CO2. In combined cycle plants, most other exhaust cases like nitrogen oxides are eliminated. Coal, despite scrubbing of the exhaust, releases a lot more in terms of both undesirable gases and particulates.

I thought it might be something like that initially, but it seemed likely it would create a compiler error or warning on a system with 16 bit ints.

While having power usage patterns follow generation is a good thing, it's a lot more effectively accomplished with a smart grid/smart appliances. What I don't get is, the UK still uses natural gas. The number one cost factor in the production of synthetic natural gas is the hydrogen and the number one cost factor in the production of green hydrogen is the electricity. Why aren't they using the surplus to make hydrogen which they can then use to make methane and reduce their requirement for things like LNG imports?

The actual equipment for electrolysis can take a pretty wide range of current and there isn't much of a sweet spot where gas production is greater. It's pretty much linear with the current. So, you can have an electrolysis plant that just runs part time generating hydrogen whenever there's surplus. You can store the hydrogen and use it in a methane synthesizing plant that runs pretty much continuously on the stored hydrogen. The cost of the methane from such a system might be more than fossil fuel methane technically, but only by assigning a cost to the surplus electricity that might otherwise just be wasted.

To me, this seems like a better idea. Using the surplus to offset other energy sources. Not to mention that, if you have natural gas plants for generating electricity, then it becomes an electricity storage system. The round trip efficiency isn't great. Maybe about 50%, but the storage capacity can be a lot better than batteries and longer term, so it could function as a back-tier storage system supplementing a primary storage system based on batteries.

Codebase7 pretty much covered it. To make an analogy for my position, if I were to build a house, the jurisdiction I am in and nearly every other one would require plans on file for a number of very good reasons and it would not be allowed for me to build the house instead to secret plans that no-one knows about. Similar logic applies to bioengineered cells, especially ones that will be used medically. I could also compare to right to repair. Or to being a computer repair technician who hacks systems that are dropped off so that they can secretly get in and turn on the microphone and the camera without the light coming on. Etc.

Seriously, that didn't clarify whether this is satire or not. "Information decimation"?

Odd thing to say about someone who is literally questioning you because I don't believe what you're saying can be serious.

And also:

Once again, the stunning apparent lack of self awareness screams satire.