_nfin

Sometimes I hear people talking about "the future" where most jobs are automated in sweeping waves of corporate greed.

I was just thinking:

Only large corporations can afford the immediate buy-in cost of a fleet of robot workers. The medium to small companies would only be able to do this incrementally. What if instead of marketing robot workers to corporations, companies making robots marketed their hardware to individuals? I have a naive understanding of what is possible with robots these days - but I'm still of the mindset that it's mostly manual labor with repetitive tasks that are easy to automate.

I think it'd be interesting for "the robot company" to market individual robots to blue collar workers that they can use at their job to do their work for them. The company the worker... works for would essentially be leasing use of the robot from the worker. The worker then acts as the robot technician.

To me this would seem like a much easier way to gradually automate everything without companies having to take the brunt of the costs of buying 2000x robots. Buying a robot replacement for your own labor would be like mortgaging a house. You'd pay off owning that robot over 5-6 years like a car.

Maybe this is silly but I could see there being several types of general-purpose robot workers [[someday]] and you apply for jobs based on what robot you have. "Oh yes, I can offer X company the use of my Masonry Model X7 robot..." You negotiate a rate for the work your robot will do, and you as the owner ensure that it operates at capacity for the needs of the company. There's also a component in here that if a robot can far outpace a human, the owner of a robot would have more bargaining power because the company wants that level of productivity.

I'm not sure how you'd handle the problems of having robots and workers working alongside each other. What legal considerations should be outlined for this, etc etc..

Thoughts?