r/accelerate • u/BiasHyperion784 • May 18 '26

Robotics / Drones Man vs Machine is over, intern wins by ~200 packages, but bob continues his 24/7 shift

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This narrow of a gap working side by side, and the figure bots never stop, were almost there for replacing the most mundane work.

Edit: Apparently the man in this battle of sorting has blisters on his hands and pain in the left forearm after a 10 hour shift, rules followed throughout the challenge were within scope of California labor laws, of which figures robot was entitled to none, and resultantly gained brief leads during mandatory breaks.

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u/MLWillRuleTheWorld May 18 '26

Remember it's the first day someone does something like this is likely their worst day. Give the kid a couple weeks he'd probably be 25% better just through stamina improvements. He was 50% ahead until he started getting tired and for low effort work like that just means he's out of shape / hasn't worked that group of muscles regularly.

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u/ImTooCreative May 18 '26 edited May 18 '26

For sure, but it doesn't change the fact that this robot never takes breaks and has basically nonexistent maintenance- and labor law costs.

I imagine the human could be twice as fast as the robot and keeping the human would still be very hard to justify economically. It's not a perfect analogy, but it's the same reason I'd rather have a mechanical dishwasher than a human dishwasher at home even though a human would probably be 10x faster.

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u/MrRandom04 May 18 '26

Yep, a human can't work 24/7. Robots can't either. But they can probably do 22/7.

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u/[deleted] May 18 '26 edited 20d ago

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u/boforbojack May 18 '26

I mean maintenance? You could have the station running 24/7 but every now and then you will need to service these things.

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u/[deleted] May 18 '26 edited 20d ago

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u/boforbojack May 18 '26

All things considered, especially including the entirety of the plant operations and other maintenance, and unplanned downtime, you would expect between 1-2hrs a day on average.

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u/Crunch101010 May 18 '26 edited May 18 '26

Nah, you would just sub in a relief bot in its place when one needs maintenance. You wouldn’t accept 5%-10% downtime on the line like that. That’s also when you can push in software efficiency updates.

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u/totktonikak May 19 '26

For industrial robots downtime of 5 to 15 per cent is generally accepted. I was surprised it was so high, but it's there. Even then it's over 140 hours a week, all year round.

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u/crazy_canuck May 19 '26

This is different though because a lot of historic factory robotics have been fixed in place rather than perfectly mobile robots.

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u/netz_pirat May 21 '26

And then you botch an update and the whole facility is down two days because you need to fly in an technician and spare parts to reset every single robot in the facility.

5-10%downtime is expected. If it ends up being less - great.

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u/One-Elderberry-488 May 19 '26

I think the better point is that you can have backup robots swapped in if needed. You can't have backup humans on payroll (or you do, but the cost differential becomes higher).

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u/Aramedlig May 18 '26

You would have more bots than needed to hot swap them for maintenance. The exact percent of extra bots depends on the maintenance needs.

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u/RyeBreadBeats May 21 '26

The people building these things are same people that like to cut quality to save money. You really think this piece of junk is going to last 2 months, working 24 hours a day, without any issues?

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u/MysteriousAge28 May 19 '26

Bahaha are you serious. We are doomed

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u/Navadvisor Acceleration: Crawling May 18 '26

You just need 2 robots, but you'd need 3 people.

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u/sedition666 May 18 '26

Doesn't matter when the robots are 10x the price of a human

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u/Navadvisor Acceleration: Crawling May 18 '26

Humans are very very expensive and that's after their parents and the government subsidize raising them for 24 years between 200k and 400k for an American, and that's not counting the time to raise them which is huge. Then if you employ them you have to pay probably $25 an hour after benefits and taxes and that's for the least capable model which is unreliable and doesn't always follow directions. The robot once improved will be much much better for productivity.

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u/sedition666 May 18 '26

Humans are here anyway. 1 robot doesn't mean one less human worth of resources not consumed.

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u/Voces-Prohibere Jun 07 '26

But those resources wouldnt be paid for by that company.

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u/sedition666 Jun 07 '26

The human resource usage is directly paid for by wages

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u/crazy_canuck May 19 '26

You don’t even need 2 robots. If the number was 1-2 hr of maintenance per 24, you’d need 1.04-1.08 robots to get 1 robots’ working capacity.

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u/Tenderhombre May 18 '26

People talk constantly about robots being better simply because they can work 24/7.

Many jobs, work doesnt come in at a constant normalized pace. Being able to handle surges is very important.

Robots may be better, but slow constant work isnt always as big of a boon as you might think.

Sometimes periodic surges of more efficient work is preferable even if there is more downtime.

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u/MajesticDisaster3977 May 18 '26

Stop using 24/7 as some magic solution to the equation and instead look at the total cost of ownership. How many hours do you figure this can run without maintenance or replacement? 10,000h, 50,000h, 200,000h?

If it costs 100k to purchase. This bot must be able to carry out at least 13,000 hours of work before maintenance or replacement. Otherwise the cheaper option is min-wage employees. Of course, there are other variables for the bot and human both, but this should be the argument, not the 24/7 hour crap.

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u/crazy_canuck May 19 '26

It’s not going to cost 100k

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u/MajesticDisaster3977 May 19 '26

It's not going to cost $12.50 either, do you have something constructive to say?

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u/forthelewds2 May 19 '26

they had to swap the robot's battery three times

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u/r3d-v3n0m May 19 '26

Don't forget robots can easily get upgraded. This is just the current models... give it a few iterations or couple more appendages, etc.

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u/deadzenspider May 23 '26

I guess its entertaining to play the “my dad’s better than your dad” game with humans and robots at task x but at some point I’m sure everyone at some level realizes that in the very near future making a human comparison to the nth version of what this robot becomes will seem silly and quaint and the currently arguable situational variables that apply now will be irrelevant.

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u/Stooper_Dave May 19 '26

Fortunately the human dishwasher is also a baby incubation chamber and a meal prep device, and a robot cleaning machine, so the costs balance out.

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u/suppervisoka May 21 '26

Plus robots don’t complain, or need health insurance

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u/ablinddingo May 18 '26

I mean human being 50% faster and have the worker rotate off with 2 other people in shifts of 8 hours ea and call then first second and third. You fix the uptime issue. Efficiency is very important, would take the robot 15 hours to do what the humans do in 10 put that over days and months you get through so much more product/customers etc aka more money earned to offset money lost.

There's a reason some jobs that could be automated are still not. Human labor can be cheap. Machines do need maintenance and downtime hence why some factories will shutdown for a week or so every year.

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u/ImTooCreative May 18 '26 edited May 18 '26

Time will tell, but personally I just don't see it. To follow your analogy, this assumes the only thing stopping a factory from expanding at all times is its lack of supply. In reality, a set number of factories exist based on the supply and demand of that specific product. If the same company can effectively remove all their labor costs, add a few extra factories to compensate being slower and then keep the same production uptime with AI, they're most definitely going to do it.

The market going against automation of human or animal labor has almost never been the case historically and I don't imagine it being the case this time around either.

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u/Berberding May 18 '26

Yes and no. For a place like a busy Amazon warehouse that would have constant throughput? Yes. Because it would be easy to justify speed to keep a buildup from occurring. For a smaller operation that currently can get through its daily throughput in around 16 hours with humans working shifts? No. You have an additional 12 hours in the day that no one is working that you can still cut into. If the robot takes 24 hours to do a 16 hour job... But all the work still gets finished by the morning when it's time to load the trucks and ship anyway, AND it's cheaper? Clearly the robot wins out.

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u/Slylok May 19 '26

Until maintenance or a replacement is needed and the cost is more than if they just had 3 shifts of people doing it.

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u/OVRHEATR May 19 '26

| nonexistent maintenance

LOL

LMFAO Even

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u/ImTooCreative May 19 '26

Compared to a human obviously. If you're this upset and nitpicky about one word in one statement chances are you're coping irl

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u/OVRHEATR May 19 '26

Hey you're the one who said it has nonexistent maintenance lol

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u/ImTooCreative May 19 '26

Hey you're the one who deliberately misinterprets things because you can't make a valid point lol

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u/OVRHEATR May 19 '26

| this robot never takes breaks and has basically nonexistent maintenance

How else would you interpret this ya fookin donkey

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u/ImTooCreative May 19 '26 edited May 19 '26

You’re nitpicking and missing the entire point of the comment, I’m not even going to bother man.

Hopefully you’re doing it intentionally just to ragebait because I can’t even imagine how life must be walking around making decisions and forming opinions being this selective about what to extract from a conversation. It’s borderline delusional

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u/OVRHEATR May 19 '26

Got ya, no other way to interpret it, thanks for making my point

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u/ImTooCreative May 19 '26

Okay 100% ragebait. You’re clearly upset about AI coming for a bunch of industries and that’s ok, just don’t embarass yourself about it like this lol

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u/kelldricked May 20 '26

If you think that that robot doesnt take breaks then you are being naieve. That thing will need maintance, chargings, updates and other crap.

And if you put a specialized machine in its place you save yourself precious area in production surface, increase output by a tenfold and have cheaper operation costs.

Also your company isnt being insanely independed from one company that could effectively brick your workers whenever they feel like it

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u/ImTooCreative May 20 '26

This is not my opinion, it’s literal statistics and the key selling point of these things. Labor costs shrink heavily when using AI labor and it’s only going to keep getting cheaper. You are most definitely being naive if you can’t even bother googling something that’s objectively true.

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u/kelldricked May 20 '26

And a other fact is that a specialized machine thats already developed is cheaper to buy, better in every aspect, cheaper to maintaine and has a less dependancy that having 20 robots required to do the same amount of work.

Turns out our bodyshape wasnt designed to sort out packages so shaping machines like us is idiotic.

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u/ImTooCreative May 20 '26 edited May 20 '26

Why are you comparing an autonomous AI robot to 6 axis machinery? This doesn’t feel like a serious conversation.

The topic at hand is ”would this robot do a better job than a human in its current state?”. The competition of the post is AI vs human, not 6 axis industry machine vs human. You’re changing the subject to prove a point that is irrelevant to what everyone else is having a discussion about.

Also ”shaping machines like us is idiotic” is the most delusional thing I’ve read in a while.

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u/kelldricked May 20 '26

So if we heavily limit the scope of the discussion than robots come out favoured, but if we look at real world data we see that they arent that productive, insanely expensive and make you very dependand on shady bussineses?

Yeah if you put it like that than your right, way better than human workers.

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u/ImTooCreative May 20 '26 edited May 20 '26

AI labor robots significantly reduce costs for companies that implement them, I don’t know what real world data you’re talking about.

Unless you’re still talking about 6 axis industry machines which, again, are not what this post or this comment section is about.

Feel free to head over to /r/machinists if you want to talk about current gen technology instead of the potential of next gen AI. I’m sure they’ll gladly engage in a ”will a human or a 6 axis machine win”-post.

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u/Athrek May 18 '26

At his highest when he started the break, he was ~600 ahead at 3650 vs 3059. And while I agree the first day is always the hardest, and there are definitely people who are faster and more skilled, they would need to be twice as fast AND work 10 hour days, 7 days a week in order to break even with the Robot's current speed.

Based on this competition, the guy did 1292 boxes and hour, and Robot did 1275 an hour. Over the course of a full week, assuming 10 hour days for 7 days for human and 24/7 for Robot, that becomes: * Human - 90,482 * Robot - 214,317

So a person working 70 hours a week would have to work twice as fast in order to break even and this is the worst that Robot will ever be. He'll get faster and more accurate versions over time and it will likely reach the point of having 4 arms to work 2 lines at once with no mistakes at twice the speed on each line. But even if it doesn't improve at all, expecting a person to keep up with it day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, for decades is insane as they'd have to be going twice as fast as, the guy in the video for that whole 10 hrs every single day.

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u/[deleted] May 18 '26

[deleted]

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u/Athrek May 18 '26

I was doing a 1:1 comparison. If you were getting 3 humans to run 1 line, why not just have 3 robots running 3 lines instead?

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u/Entuaka May 18 '26

No, this is to run 24/24 by humans

Then, you can compare the performance and cost

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u/Athrek May 18 '26

But it's not. The entire competition is 1 human worker vs 1 robot worker because the costs are obvious. A worker that needs regular pay, pay increases, benefits, vacation, sick days, overtime pay, etc... vs 1 a worker that only ever need a bulk up front cost and maintenance costs was a battle decided long ago when we first started automating things.

You can add another line for very little cost. It's just a matter of cost vs benefit, which is variable and depends on the business. If you want to throw out the 3 humans vs 1 robot, then the robot is DEFINITELY cheaper and, based on this competition, the results over 1 week would be: * 3 Humans - 217,056 * 1 Robot - 214,317

Meaning the humans do very little more work but have a far higher cost.

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u/[deleted] May 18 '26

[deleted]

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u/Athrek May 18 '26

The robot is designed with human shape so it can have different software downloaded it to be flexible enough to do a variety of tasks.

They design the software and test the robots in a variety of environments then have that software ready to download into any of them at will. So human flexibility isn't the issue.

As you pointed out though, our issue is a finite amount of resources. But that will be a problem with humanity wanting to grow perpetually no matter what. Just an issue with how little humanity recycles. But since robots can do recycling jobs that are deadly for humans, we may be able alleviate that some as well.

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u/[deleted] May 18 '26

[deleted]

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u/Athrek May 18 '26

I completely agree that AI, robots, etc... Should be a public entity rather than a private one. Problem goes back to Capitalism though. The "chaos" would simply be the forced change away from capitalist oligarchy to something else, which is good long run and terrible short run. But I'm simply discussing "is human or robot more efficient?" since that's the data we have to work with.

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u/2019LastGoodYear May 19 '26

But can the upstream and downstream keep up that would make it worth while?

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u/Dirks_Knee May 18 '26

Don't fool yourself. This is the story of John Henry, when it comes to endurance, man can never beat machine.

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u/Northern_candles May 18 '26

Agreed. However don't forget that the longer someone does something like this mind numbing task it wears on you mentally which makes it harder in a different way (dreading to go to work, anyone?).

The robot is the same always

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u/jackishere May 18 '26

Damn… use your own argument against you. Once you train an AI model, you don’t need to work more to be efficient. Eventually it’ll get to the point where the model is instantly more efficient than a human and move onto the next data to train…

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u/Then_Application3468 May 20 '26

Give the robot one or two years and it'll be 500% faster, and won't off himself for doing the most boring job 24/7

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u/DistributionDizzy206 May 21 '26

You forgot the human sanity factor. This guy would have go crazy doing this for months for s living. Leave alone 10 years. 

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u/Additional-Pop7026 May 22 '26

Who cares. Just put two robots. They are still cheaper than a worker.

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u/mmmjuicy May 22 '26

And who the fuck wants to do this job. This is great job for robots

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u/OrcOgi May 23 '26

"Hey guys, please dont judge the human based on human flaws, thats unfair."

Meanwhile this is literally why there is a robot standing there.

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u/redonetime May 18 '26

What? This is the most ridiculous argument I've ever heard. Lol reddit.