I agree robots breakdown a lot, however if you think robots are more expensive to maintain you may want to take a look at the cost of American medical costs.
>and are far more expensive to repair and maintain than a human being
Fillpy the robot will not:
- need vacations
- go on maternity leave
- call in sick
- steal from work
- be rude to customers
- go to work hungover from drinking
- come in high/stoned at work
- sue you for X,Y,Z
- sexually harass colleagues
- go on strike
- start a union
All those pale in comparison to repair costs. That's why companies are pushing for automation. Because Flippy does its job quietly and diligently 24/7 without complaining.
Didn't they say this about LLMs but we still only have highly advanced slop generators, highly advanced autocomplete, and highly advanced search?
While they're impressively good in each of the aforementioned three fields, they're still not the world-changing technology they were supposed to be, right? (At least, not by themselves. When a very powerful human ties themselves to a slop machine, believing the output to be real, this can change the world)
The main achievement, besides search which is a very useful application, has been in how effectively we can get real people to believe total bullshit.
Mechanical engineering has a lot of practice on looking at failures and changing designs to make those less common or a maintenance item easy/cheap to fix. (they might have other options too, I'm not a ME)
