[NoHaveMSG]

Originally Posted by Irace86.2.0

This was more of a personal question than an industry question or than a question about if technology exists that could replace your job. Like I said, much of my duties could be replaced, but I don't see it happening for myself based on the rate of adoption. Will you be replaced, and if so, when?

You also say a lot of businesses can't afford automation, but you should be more specific. For instance, why did pizza and other restaurants employ delivery drivers, but Chipotle and many McDonalds didn't? How did that change with Doordash, and how many more customers did the restaurant industry gain who lacked drivers? How would delivery services change with drones, and could a small business use a third party service like a drone-based Doordash to deliver their goods without any investment capital?

A mom and pop store with one person behind the cashier desk may not need a self-checkout, but could a future Atlas stock the shelves, run the register/self-scanner and secure the premises, and would that be cheaper than hiring a person to work for a year? Even at minimum wage of $15.5/hour, at 40 hrs/wk that is $32k/year, so a single robot might be cheaper. Boston Dynamic's spot is $75k, but I would expect robots to drop significantly in price making a future robot not only affordable to the average business/person, but a significant savings.

For a small custom shop, I don't think I would ever be replaced. They make machines that can do my job from start to finish, but we would be talking 5+ million per machine on average, at least 3 of them, maybe 4. Now granted they only need somebody to load the material into it and it does the rest at a minimum wage, but you also need someone who can repair and calibrate it and program it which is above my pay grade. Unless you are replacing a hundred people at my level it doesn't pencil. We have me, and two shop hands. My customers can't buy 10 of something from a big company who is automated, it's not worth their time. So we exist along with about 4-5 custom shops across North America. This isn't unique among what we do either. I run into this a lot trying to find companies to produce parts for our other product lines.