Humans are efficient, but not across the board. Trivial counterexample: walking is incredibly energy inefficient vs a bicycle or other wheeled conveyances whose primary dissipater is rolling resistance.
There might be more efficient ways to move but we are pretty well equipped by evolution.
Agreed, but it was gp that brought up the human vs. machine efficiency argument. Machines can have wheels.
It's not strange at all, I was responding to a specific, incorrect claim. I even quoted the wrong claim in my earlier comment , and I'll repeat it again, with added emphasis
>>> humans are incredibly efficient, from an energy perspective, in anything we do, compared to machines
I simply provided contrary evidence to a well-defined, falsifiable claim. How is that strange?
Then to boldly claim that humans are more efficient at anything compared to a machine, just does not follow.
But annoyingly pedantic.
Might this just be selection bias? I mean, if humans can't do a task efficiently, we're not going to do the comparison with a machine.
Some actions we do seem (to me) very inefficient when compared with machines. For example: grating carrots and brushing teeth.
Electrochemical reactions in your muscles combined with the mechanical advantage from the geometry of your joints and ligaments is simply more energy efficient than most mechanical or electromechanical systems. On top of that, our learned and evolved kinematic algorithms result in vastly more efficient control. Humans tend to be pretty good at using only exactly as much energy as required for a given action. Overshoot is quite limited compared to robots.
Your suggested actions seem inefficient, but if you look at the actual energy expenditure, mechanical means are much worse simply because mammalian muscle is so efficient.
I read efficiency as "Energy inputted to accomplish a task", in which case, biological systems are far more efficient than current-day mechanical ones. It's a tradeoff.
Humans cannot fly.