We’ve all seen the standard 6 axis robots in a factory.
Each one of those axis has a servo and a servo drive. As a combination they are about £1,500. They will also need a PLC to control them. An industrial grade PLC at the cheaper end is about £1,000. So lets ignore the cost of the metal work and frames and installation and we can see that impressive looking robot is £10,000 in just the motors,drives and control hardware with its 6axis.
In the human body rather than axis, we have a pair of muscles operating together to form an axis. Lets assume for now the £1,500 servo drive combo we find has greater than IP67 dust and water protection like the human body, as well as power/torque/speed/precision comparable. Lets also assume that the noise and EMF interference of our servo is exceptional too like the human body so we really have a steal at £1,500.
There are 650 named skeletal muscles and since each one acts as a pair to form a servo axis, a human could fairly reasonably be replicated on the skeletal muscle front by 325 servos or about £487,500. Lets also make the assumption that our £1,000 plc can infact control 256axis which is quite a bit for a PLC, you need 2 of them so £489,500.
Lets assume you are fortunate to have a pair of working eyes. There are 130 million rods in the human eye and one rod is about the equivalent of one pixel. Currently the Hasselblad H6D-100 has a resolution of 100 megapixels some 30% less than a human eye but we will use that for now. It retails at about £30,000 so with a pair of eyes you would be worth £60,000 even if you could not process them. Usually you need a vision processing system to go with the cameras, lenses to adjust for distances and humans again have self lubricating and cleaning system for the lens mechanism. The refresh time for our eyes is also 25frames a second minimum. Currently there is no vision processing hardware that can do 130megapixel image processing at 25frames a second but 32megapixel (8k) video processing hardware is £40,000 so we will use that for now. Machine vision is very good at tracking but not so good at identifying as every adult has had at least 18years of object identification. With these assumptions lets just say £100,000 to replicate a humans vision by automation. Standing at about £600,000 so far for an adult humans value.
Add a few more sensors like sound,taste and smell which is currently not quite technically developed enough.
And then you still have 1.6trillion skincells… each one being a heat,light and pressure sensor.
We have not even touched in the communications network between humans, nor the memory capacity, energy efficiency and mobility.
The only way a marvellous machine such as yourself could be even more impressive is if it could replicate itself taking the best of the previous versions…
Now is it the best use of a million pound machine such as a human when a £100,000 machine could do the same job?