Where are the robotic bricklayers?

Post by chrisco255 » Wed, Aug 04, 2021, 2:38 AM UTC

Grakel wrote: post #79

colordrops wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having respect for the skills of a worker and also believing that they are possible to automate are not mutually exclusive. It's no different from people saying the same thing about chess and chess players, or go and go players, before the problem was solved. And it's not just blue collar workers that are a target of this idea. We are already starting to see automated programming moving out of the research lab and in…

Programming will be automated long before brick laying. We can barely print a document with confidence.

Post by bumby » Wed, Aug 04, 2021, 2:41 AM UTC

sudosysgen wrote: post #128

willbw wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is different from people saying we couldn't automate chess or go. The difference is between a purely data domain, chess or go, where it can both be translated 1-1 into a computer simulation of the game AND the inputs are data. I realise that you could define everything as data - laying a brick, you take the inputs of where to position the brick, etc. However I think we can make the distinction between ches…

A big part of ML in robotics is actually making nearly 1:1 simulations of the world and the actuators. It's fairly sucessful. We can simulate for example driving a car really well. Simulating human behaviour is harder, but simulating brick laying is not that hard, we have the technology to do so already.

Post by bumby » Wed, Aug 04, 2021, 2:44 AM UTC

munk-a wrote: post #115

Overton-Window wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Programming is the conversion of ambiguous human requirements into machine readable instructions. To automate, computers would need to understand ambiguous human requirements. This is AGI. By comparison, brick laying is trivial.

This plays exactly into the OP's comment - but if that is your sincerely held belief there are ~4,000 bricklayers~[1] in America today and you could make a whole boatload of money if you could automate their work. 1. According to the BLS link below it's actually closer to 50,000.

Post by bumby » Wed, Aug 04, 2021, 2:48 AM UTC

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #132

munk-a wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This plays exactly into the OP's comment - but if that is your sincerely held belief there are ~4,000 bricklayers~[1] in America today and you could make a whole boatload of money if you could automate their work. 1. According to the BLS link below it's actually closer to 50,000.

No one is even thinking about trying to completely automate coding. There's tons of "no code" solutions - but these are all just different versions of coding and programming languages - usually with GUIs and pictures instead of words. There's more than 60,000 SWEs that work in my company. Amazon, Google, Apple, and MSFT could make >$10Bn/year each if they could automate coding. The fact that none of them are even try…

Post by mbesto » Wed, Aug 04, 2021, 2:49 AM UTC

cgrealy wrote: post #76

egh wrote: post #28

The great contempt that computer people have for the skills that every human brings to the jobs that the do is always on display here. We haven't automated driving; we haven't automated picking tomatoes; we haven't automated bricklaying; we can't automate cooking a fucking hamburger. But they are completely convinced that it's just around the corner, because they are full of contempt for the skill and intelligence of…

> We haven't automated driving Yeah, we pretty much have... it just hasn't been widely adopted yet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjztvddhZmI And honestly, from a business perspective, most people really don't care about the skills ordinary people have. Look at the wine industry for example. Top shelf wine is hand-picked, for exactly the reasons you outline, and some people are willing to pay top dollar for that en…