Yes, there are. But that's not caused by lack of humanoid robots, but because these humans are rediculously cheap.
There's absolutely no way that automation and tech can undercut (effective) slave labor.Though already this is happening: your tshirts and socks are probably not hand-knitted by "Bangladeshi children" or Chinese "prisoners", but by machines tailor-made (pun intended) for t-shirt and sock-knitting. This is happening slowly, and in the supply chain there's still loads of manual labor - cotton picked and processed for these socks is more and more automated, but still requires armies of cheap farm-hands.
And then it's really hard to undercut the price of cheap "western" labor with full automation in many sectors. Part of that is due to some form of 90/10 rule: the last 10% of automation is magnitudes more expensive. And many automation leads to a higher TCO, as the people programming, maintaining and optimizing the robots are far more expensive than an "army" of low-wage workers.
Humanoid robots may be an answer in some future, but currently and in near future will certainly not solve these economics. If ever.
Yes, there are. But that's not caused by lack of humanoid robots, but because these humans are rediculously cheap.
There's absolutely no way that automation and tech can undercut (effective) slave labor.Though already this is happening: your tshirts and socks are probably not hand-knitted by "Bangladeshi children" or Chinese "prisoners", but by machines tailor-made (pun intended) for t-shirt and sock-knitting. This is happening slowly, and in the supply chain there's still loads of manual labor - cotton picked and processed for these socks is more and more automated, but still requires armies of cheap farm-hands.
And then it's really hard to undercut the price of cheap "western" labor with full automation in many sectors. Part of that is due to some form of 90/10 rule: the last 10% of automation is magnitudes more expensive. And many automation leads to a higher TCO, as the people programming, maintaining and optimizing the robots are far more expensive than an "army" of low-wage workers.
Humanoid robots may be an answer in some future, but currently and in near future will certainly not solve these economics. If ever.