technology

I'm gonna quote what I already said elsewere on this issue:

The appeal of humanoid robots isn’t just automating production (because if it was just that specialized robots would be far better than any generalist humanoid), instead I think the appeal of humanoid robots is as a tool to manage the balance between employment and production output.

As a socialist society you want to become able to guarantee jobs and access to the products of labor to your citizens. Which means you have to balance level of automation with necessary output: too many robots and there’s not enough work for everyone, too few and there might be shortages of certain things due to underproduction. This means that ideally you want to be able to retire a few machines when there are peoples in need of a job and bring more machines in when workers retire or stop working for whatever other reasons.

But you can’t make the switch quickly enough with specialized robots because these require conditions so vastly different from human workers that you need to refit the entire factory floor or at least part of it both to bring robots in or to get them out, which can take months to years. With humanoid robots though, they can work with the exact same factory floors the human workers use, meaning switching between robots and humans is as easy as ordering the robots to walk in or out of the factory. That’s the best argument for humanoid robots in my opinion, and because of that I think it makes a lot of sense for a socialist country to develop the technology.

I'd like to add on top of that: the framing of a binary choice between either specialized robots or generalist humanoid robots is wrong. Humanoids will without a doubt work alongside specialized robots, just like human workers currently do.