I recently spent $100,000 on some automation for my factory. The first $60,000 was for a machine that will take an outside supplier cost of $5000 per month, and replace it with a machine payment of $1000 per month. I now need to supply an operator, space, electrical and consumables, but I save $4000 to do that with. My 'new' worker will be just one of the existing workers (or myself) who will push the buttons on this mostly automated machine. The human still needs to load and unload the machine.

The other $40,000 was spent on NEW machines that automatically do NEW processes which we could never do before. I have a lot of pressure from the market to deliver new goods, and I have a lot of competitors both in the USA and in China and India copying my existing products. So this investment is about new streams of revenue (and I like toys/equipment!) . This is a $500 per month investment on the lease.

I have a reasonable expectation that the new machines could help us achieve a sales doubling in the next three years.

So in my case, 18-24 months salary replacement was never the thought process. It was honestly more about getting rid of a supplier, bringing it in-house to control quality and output, and saving money. I have a lot of automation, and I think the bigger concept most don't get is that the automation is way way more accurate and repeatable than a human. Quality goes up as costs go down. The quality part is a big big part of it.

The factor is availability- you need three of these workers for a around the clock shift. AI does not sleep.

Ok, so you have 3 employees working 24/7 for an average of a $20k salary (33% more than minimum wage). That's $60k/year or $120k over 24 months (based on Bartweiss' ROI estimation).

Do you think it's possible to deliver an automated gas pump that services 4,800 trucks per day (~1 truck every 3 minutes) for $120k? I don't.

I don't think 3 humans can service 4800 trucks per day either.

At least, not without more automation than existing pumps have.

Eventually I think it could happen. It simply requires economies of scale--the hardware is not the expensive part of an automated gas pump.

Yes, its the software. And the software needs data to have the machine learn, given this data, a machine designed for fitting niches, can squeeze itself into even unlikely corners.

Except the employees are going to need breaks in between working and I'm going to just guess that manning a gas station in the middle of desert alone makes you insane pretty fast. So at least double that salary estimate if you truly want to keep things rolling with 1 truck every 3 minutes.

I'm not so sure - presumably these are going to be highway truck stops/gas stations. You're not going to leave one guy there alone and shut everything down when he goes on break, you're going to add another 1-2 people to the daily shift at an existing gas station, and share the extra load across them.

My numbers do break down in that one guy per shift probably can't fuel everything, so we might need to double it. (In states with locking pumps, he probably can, though.)

But again what if he needs to take a shit? I don't know about you, but I can't do my business and wipe well in less than 3 minutes, so the trucks stand there. Then there's the ~30min lunch break, that's 10 trucks just idling in the worst case scenario. Then just plain human interaction.

It's not just a factor if he can possibly fill every truck by himself, there are other human factors to consider. You need at least two men manning the station all the time for the autonomous trucks to refill there + maybe a spare guy for regular folk who come to visit.

Not the first year, but the next pumps come with automated fueling as standard equipment, and we can write off the upgrades over the next few years for tax savings.

Track per 3 minutes is 480 tracks per day.

Rentier economy dynamics now encroaching on human capital.