Not really. You would still need to, you know, build drones or automated factories to actually perform the salvaging. But the point is that nobody DID, because capitalism values profit over human life. Nobody who “matters” is interested in solving that problem.
Actually that’s not true at all, there’s lots of interest in robotics (check out Boston Dynamic) but it’s a really really hard problem. The main issue is developing a controlling intelligence sophisticated enough to be able to use the robot to do a diverse range of tasks. The actual physical mechanical building of the robot isn’t that hard.
Of course the way you get that controlling intelligence is AI. So he is complaining about people developing a solution to the problem he’s demanding that they solve. He’s not happy because they’re not magically skipping steps.
This idiot wants fully sapient robots without developing AI in the first place, not sure how on earth he expects that to happen.
I think you’re underestimating the mechanical and chemistry problems that still need to be solved before autonomous robots that can perform a task like ship salvage effectively. There’s a very good reason that basically all industrial robots spend their lives plugged into a wall socket.
Not true. We have capable robots now. See Boston Dynamics like the other commenter said. Plus we have had industrial robots making cars and stuff forever now. To make robots that can handle a wide variety of things (every ship is bound to be different) is hard and we don’t have data to train such models (see reinforcement learning, imitation learning, “sim2real” problem etc)