Once robots can do physical jobs, how quickly could they become a significant part of the work force?
Here's a couple of fermi estimates, showing (among other things) that converting car factories might be able to produce 1 billion robots per year in under 5 years.
Nothing too new here if you've been following Carl Shulman for years, but I thought it could be useful to have a reference article. Please let me know about corrections or other ways to improve the estimates.
On one side: Humanoid robots have much more density of parts requiring more machine-time than cars, probably slowing things a bunch.
On the other, you mention assuming no speed up due to the robots building robot factories, but this seems like the dominant factor in the growth. Your numbers excluding that are going to be way underestimating things pretty quickly without that. I'd be interested in what those numbers look like assuming reasonable guesses about robot workforce being part of a feedback cycle.
Yes - if anyone reading knows more about manufacturing and could comment on how easy it would be to convert, that would be very helpful.
I also agree it would be interesting to try to do more analysis of how much ASI and robotics could speed up construction of robot factories, by looking at different bottlenecks and how much they could help.
I'm not sure a robot workforce would have a huge effect initially, since there's already a large pool of human workers (though maybe you get some boost by making everything run 24/7). However, at later stages it might become hard to hire enough human workers, while with robots you could keep scaling.