Boston Dynamics' CEO on Robots and Job Evolution
Make no mistake about it — robots will take on jobs, but not in the way you most fear, said Boston Dynamics CEO Robert Playter at Yahoo Finance's Invest conference. Boston Dynamics, founded in 1992, is a leading robotics design and engineering company that counts Meta (META), Nestle Purina, Anheuser-Busch (BUD), and DHL Express among its clients. Playter said that the company's industrial robots will conduct tasks that humans simply don't want, or aren't well suited to.
"The jobs this robot is performing are so monotonous that people don't excel at them," he said. "Would you want the job where you walk through the factory with a clipboard, recording temperatures, pressures, and gauges repetitively every day, multiple times a day?"
This is the sort of role most people would rather avoid or might end up doing incorrectly out of boredom, making it a perfect job for robots, Playter added.
Developing robots is a long, expensive process — it took at least $100 million to create Spot. There's also a gulf between having a functional robot and a scalable use case. A robot may perform reliably, but it has to fill a real need that drives widespread adoption, such as cost or efficiency savings.
"We are building a new industry here, and you have to cross the chasm with a high-value use case that is scalable and is going to pay for the development of these machines," said Playter.
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