41–50 of 65 posts
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Along these lines, I still think Marshall Brain is likely to be proved correct, he predicted automation would instead replace middle management, and then direct unskilled labor in his novel Manna[1]. 1: http://marshallbrain.com/manna.htm
Manna is a very underrated story. And it's already happening to some degree: Uber/Lyft drivers don't have managers; they are being directed by a phone app.
Robots taking over the world may not be eminent. However, greedy people taking over the world with the help of robots and AI is already being facilitated for quite some time. Governments acquiring technology to hush the oppositions and free speech around the world is a common phenomena around the world. Usage of data along with AI to pinpoint, target and destroy enemies is being used for over a decade.
It is the usage of data and AI by the greedy community we need to be more concerned about, not silly imitation of life that barely perceives the world.
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The fact aside that you just brought up another platitude, actual data suggests that this is wrong. Automation is slow, has been getting slower as is clearly visible in labour productivity and employment statistics and there's really no indication of a large change in that trend. Billions of dollars are invested annually in technologies with marginal productivity improvements, and it looks like there are more and mor…
Automation will not eat everything in time, but from my work on unmanned shipping, I'm pretty sure that autonomy + automation will. Automation - handles deterministic situations. Autonomy - handles uncertain situations. In my industry (ship design, construction and operation), based on what I'm seeing and have seen evolve over the past 20 years, it feels likely that this paradigm shift to a majority of ships being au…
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Ok. But they have tiny little processors (5?) that each do a tiny little task with a smidgen of RAM. Is the 'vision' feature real, or just a light intensity detector? Can you get a picture out of it? I'm dubious. As for the model/map, how does it sense location? Dead reckoning? Not a very significant feature if it can't find itself on the map, nor use the map to choose a route. Which I doubt (from videos of the Roomb…
It depends on the model, but I think that your impression of Roomba, either through experience or the technology that the author of this article presented is really out-of-date. Even on past models, they have Visual Simultaneous Location and Mapping (VSLAM) tech that is far, far beyond dead reckoning. The even more recent version (not sure if there's been a release since) also has persistent maps, so it actually can…
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Current Roombas are a little more fancy than that.
But not much. You can hardly compare anything Roomba has ever done to even, say, Boston Dynamics.
Anyway, it's an apples to oranges comparison. Boston Dynamics are building incredibly expensive and sophisticated AI systems that will be first of interest to the military, who have very deep pockets and can afford to spend millions if it is deemed a good use of the money.
Roomba are building stuff that can be bought by the average person on the street.
I've been trying to make Buckbee's Law happen for a while: "The more a robot looks like a robot the less useful it is." Take fast food as an example: what's really going to change things are automated systems that reduce the number of people needed to run the place. Look at things like touchscreen ordering systems that cut the number of people talking to you. That's not a "robot" but it is automation of a sort.
These aren't really much of an improvement in efficiency though - self-checkout kiosks for stores have been around since at least the early 2000s, and they're still much slower than minimum-wage cashiers with a little experience (maybe Amazon will finally change this, but the tech my local grocery has is definitely as bad as the kiosk I worked alongside in 2003). It takes me much longer to order using a kiosk at a Mc…
At my supermarket, they replaced 2 regular checkouts with 8 self-checkouts in the same floor space. During rush hour, this greatly increases throughput despite actual scanning time perhaps being slower.
At McDonalds, it means they can higher fewer staff which means a cost efficiency.
I don't think anybody with a serious knowledge of AI, motion planning, computational geometry, real-time sensors (ex. military) or much of anything else things Roomba confers distinction. So why do I care about what this guy things about robots? That's right. I don't.
What's with all the disrespect. I think people are reacting to the link-bait title, and not what was actually written. It's 2020. Realize that the title will be exaggerated and that responding to that is just a straw-man argument.
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Manna is a very underrated story. And it's already happening to some degree: Uber/Lyft drivers don't have managers; they are being directed by a phone app.
Taxi apps don't replace middle managers, they replace dispatchers.
but i'm skeptical; it would be more convincing if GP/GGP provided some of the rationale for why middle managers would be automated away rather than simply referencing a book.
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The fact aside that you just brought up another platitude, actual data suggests that this is wrong. Automation is slow, has been getting slower as is clearly visible in labour productivity and employment statistics and there's really no indication of a large change in that trend. Billions of dollars are invested annually in technologies with marginal productivity improvements, and it looks like there are more and mor…
FWIW, automation is certainly eating jobs in the back office. I push a button and my pivot table gets updated in a few seconds whereas that used to take somebody a couple hours to assemble. Why do I need a second staff accountant, again? I think it's inevitable that the "junior" office jobs (where many get their start) will be/are replaced by scripts & API's.
like fraud detection. before, you just accepted a 3% fraud rate as a cost of doing business and left it at that. now you get that down to 0.5% because the tools let you do it in the same amount of time, and the owners want that sweet, sweet cash. you still want a second accountant to double-check the first, so you expand the work to fulfill that need. it can still be worth it, even so.