the true minimum wage for a person is indeed zero - but that's because the cost of their labor isn't worth the product it can produce.
When comparing to a robot, the cost to run a robot isn't 0. If you look at even the simplest industrial robots, an arm is like 40k. And that doesn't factor in cost to program it, monitor it, repair it.
The value of robots is mainly in high precise work where something exactly the same is done repeatedly, like line assembly for a car.
Even for stuff like warehouse picking, when the parcels are different sizes the effort to get things to work is immense, and when things go wrong they can go very wrong
https://i.poastcdn.org/e987fc9b5573600321df679cb0b70ea693764f1d946c3c45cf1c8b8ca580fdc0.png
If it was practical and/or economical to replace all human labor with machine labor, corporations would have already done it. These people are the first ones who would point out that businesses don't hire employees out of charity.
>the true minimum wage for a person is indeed zero
For the kids in a family business maybe. The "minimum wage" is what (enough) people will show up for to do the job you need done, and nobody is going to show up to pick tomatoes for 0$/hour.
I got a PS4 game from Amazon once and the package that arrived was an empty sleeve. Still wondering if a human did that.
Plus it's self defeating. "Pay us $15 an hour to hand someone their hamburger and their change! We need it to afford to live!"
OK, here's $15 a hour. Now we have to raise the price of hamburgers.
"Hey, hamburgers are more expensive now! We need $20 an hour to afford to live!"
We had a robot packer at one of my previous jobs, basically putting square sticks in a square box. It was well over a million dollars and sat unused because it couldn't handle slightly out of square sticks and would happily package defective goods.
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