Can we envision an economic environment in which it makes sense to produce humanoid shaped companion robots? I hope we all agree that utility robots should not look like humans, since the human form is very limiting, and in most cases yields no advantage over industrial robots. It doesn't make sense to employ humanoid androids as assembly line workers, because an assembly line robot is more efficient and cheaper. Therefore, the only use case for a humanoid shaped robot is as a companion. But is it feasible at all to replace humans with companion androids? One would assume the R&D costs and the manufacturing costs of these things are far higher than what it takes to human traffick a desperate Ukranian or Serbian or whatever person to a first world country. So what regulations or technological advancements have to be made, to make humanoid companion robots more viable than flesh and blood humans (from a sci-fi point of view)?
>>16383852>So what regulations or technological advancements have to be made, to make humanoid companion robots more viable than flesh and blood humans (from a sci-fi point of view)?Asimov (the go-to robot guy) reasoned that a humanoid shape boosted the flexibility of androids versus, say, a big immobile arm that installs car doors all day...if you needed to tell a robot to hop into a human-driven forklift and move it out of the way while you do something else in an emergency, it's more convenient that the robot be human-shaped and -sized.The "companion robot" viability will be an outgrowth of the "waifu culture" already manifesting itself in nerds fucking around with LLM local models (see /g/ for more details). In five to ten years, everybody will have a "persistent" companion agent that they created with a computer or phone app. It's only natural that they'll want the aforementioned convenience Asimov conjectured to be combined with that agent so they can bring this AI "friend" or "friend with benefits" into the real world.Thanks to industry becoming more localized by automation and customization, we'll (hopefully) see a reversal of the trend of desperate poor people migrating to wealthier countries for work*...the Chinese (to their credit) are already doing things like modernizing cities on the East coast of Africa so they can have a future offshore labor market ready and available in the next decade. When talking to uneducated third-worlders, it would also be handy to have humanoid robots to interact with them...an AI takes only seconds to "learn" a local language or dialect and it might engage the workers better to chat with a thicc African gynoid instead of a touchscreen.*It'll always be there in one form or another.
Eve is superior
