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