
Ask HN: Why so much emphasis on robot automation, but not robot remote control? - supercheetah
During this pandemic, and so many people working from home, except for essential workers, it made me wonder about why only some people can work from home.  A lot of essential work is only essential because we can&#x27;t yet build smart enough robots to do them autonomously, but why don&#x27;t we consider building robots that are just dexterous enough to do those jobs, but are controlled by people working remotely?<p>We have surgeons able to do surgery remotely with robots, which is a lot more complex, so it seems it should be possible to build robots that can do less complex labor controlled by a person.  Plus, it would give us a chance to help address the high physical demands of some types of labor.
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Nextgrid
I think one big factor is cost.

A lot of the "essential" labor that you're talking about also happens to be
really cheap labor. Developing a robotic replacement (even if it still
requires remote control) would pay for years if not decades of low-wage labor,
not to mention maintenance of the robots which will need to be done by
relatively skilled (and thus costly) labor.

