I Toured Unitree's Factory. I'm More Bullish on the West

1) Unitree robots are largely made by hand.

2) Labor is approximately 8% of cost of manufacturing these robots. Because these costs are not prohibitive, there is little incentive to automate.

3) Labor costs are higher in America.

4) Therefore, American companies have higher incentive to automate.

5) Therefore, the West will capture most of the robotics opportunity.

Arguments 1-4 are reasonable, but 5 is a non-sequitur. Higher incentive to automate does not imply a better ability to automate & scale manufacturing.

I believe Unitree is currently assembling robots by hand for practical reasons:

1) Labor is still relatively cheap.

2) Humanoids and robots are evolving rapidly, changing every few months.

3) Custom assembly lines are expensive, and become obsolete when the product changes. It's difficult to maintain an assembly line when the product is rapidly evolving.

4) Tooling is inadequate. Some robotic parts are delicate, complicated, and difficult to automate manufacturing of. American companies have hit the exact same problem: Tesla is assembling the hand/forearm of Optimus by hand because it hasn't figured out how to automate manufacturing them. https://www.theverge.com/tech/1016492/tesla-optimus-robots-p... . Apparently, Tesla has hundreds of handless Optimus robots just standing around, waiting for hand manufacturing to catch up.

5) Demand is still relatively niche, these are not mass market products. Unitree only sold 5,500 robots last year. There is not enough demand to justify massive automated lines.

The author also ignores the biggest counterpoint: the Chinese have already demonstrated mastery in automated manufacturing, and have proven they can run dark factories (factories without humans) at a better scale than the west.

When humanoid robots become a mass market product (they are not ready today because the software side is majorly lacking), Chinese manufacturers are in an excellent position to rapidly automate.

“”” America has run this experiment before. In 1964 about half a million Mexican farmworkers were shut out. In 1965, 20% of California's tomatoes were picked by machine; by 1970 the figure was 99.9%.“””

I honestly had not considered closing down (legal) immigration as a forcing function for automation. Industrial policy as immigration law.

But I don’t think I get the rest …

Higher costs onshore mean machines give us an advantage - i get that. The rest I may be missing

(I'm not affiliated with the site in any way; I just found it useful and thought I'd share it here.)

The conference venues have concrete flooring, so I just suddenly hear loud rhythmic thumping as these things stomp around a corner.

After the initial "huh that's a cool robot thing" thought, it really started giving me the heebeejeebees.

I’ve really become fascinated by the hypothesis that outlawing slavery supercharged industrialization, and that the global crusade against slavery is why we had this whole technology explosion.

Rome knew about steam power. There’s some tantalizing evidence some ancient cultures played with electricity and maybe even simple forms of electric lights. There’s Greek stories about automatons. But why try to build machines to do real work? Just have a slave do it.

If we’d abolished slavery in ancient Roman times maybe we’d be looking at photos of habitable exoplanets from probes arriving in the Tau Ceti system by now.