• UnspecificGravity@piefed.social
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    1 day ago

    Its not though. They have had robots that can mirror humans for more than a decade. They don’t use them for hazardous work for one REALLY simple reason:

    They are worth more than humans.

    Seriously. Anything that is so dangerous that it is prohibitively expensive to safely do with humans just gets exported to the third world where humans aren’t worth anything. Why use million dollar robots when you can can just use brown guys in sandals for a nickel an hour instead?

    Take auto battery recycling. That is a dangerous job that requires a lot of PPE and a ton of environmental mitigation efforts for the factory doing it. You have tons of vent hoods and lots of training and tons of inspections and oversight. Of course, that is only if you want to recycle batteries in a country that has workers rights, which is why no one recycles batteries in those countries. Instead, those batteries all get shipped to Africa where dudes break them apart with hammers in a field and cook out the metals in open pits and dump the acid into their water supply. Sure, those dudes are going to be dead in a 3 years, but who cares? Battery companies make a ton by getting the cheap recycled materials back and selling new “recycled” batteries.

      • Hacksaw@lemmy.ca
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        13 hours ago

        You don’t understand capitalism if you seriously think anything but the most profitable option is viable.

        • DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social
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          4 hours ago

          The existence of more than one brand of any given product would indicate one of us doesn’t understand something.

          Capitalism exists to funnel wealth upward through ownership of the means.

          It isn’t immediately and perfectly efficient at anything it does, creating a market of perfectly optimized and perfectly profitable goods like your comment accidentally implies.