When the tree of costs that make up a product are traced, surely all the leaf nodes are human labour? As in, to make the actuator, I had to pay someone to assemble it and I had to buy the parts. Each part had a materials cost and a labour cost. So it goes for the factory that made the fasteners, the foundry that made the steel, the mine that extracted the ore.
Shudder to think of how to regulate resource extraction in a future where AI humanoid robots are strip mining and logging for free.
What about energy, real estate and taxes?
Even at the extreme end of automation, if you want iron ore, you need to buy a mine from somebody, pay taxes on it, and power the machines to extract the minerals and transport them elsewhere for processing.
If I were writing a sci-fi novel about this I don't know how I'd handle something real estate (or mineral rights or water rights). You already need permission from the government to extract resources.
As for taxes, why does the government even want the money? What are they going to do with it?
> As for taxes, why does the government even want the money? What are they going to do with it?
There are websites that break down how e.g. different national/federal budgets are divvied up in the real world. Alternatively, I suggest a good book on macroeconomics; I am partial to Steve Keen's "Debunking Economics", but there are many others.
I had always assumed that such a robot would be very specific (like a cleaning robot) but it does seem like by the time they are ready they will be very generalizable.
I know they would require quite a few sensors and motors, but compared to self-driving cars their liability would be less and they would use far less material.