Ryan Salame

Robotics

About 1½ hours · Last updated October 2026

The machine that moves: sixty years of the factory and the failure at the kitchen, the AI turn that lets a robot learn instead of being programmed, the five million robots in factories and the million in Amazon's warehouses, Waymo's half a million paid rides a week, the humanoids, the cheap drone's remaking of war, and the arguments over jobs and China. Three worked examples: a humanoid's hardware costs, a factory line's payback in Ohio and Shenzhen, and a robotaxi's costs per ride. Opens with a dated table of the state of the art and a Who's Who.

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