131–140 of 431 posts
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How long ago was your robotics experience? An Amazon warehouse or Tesla factory tour would likely change your mind. I had to do both of these in the last year and not a lot of humans around…
automotive workers unions started around 1918 and became major political players in the 30s -- a fact that i'm sure is wholly unrelated to why there are so many un-automated tasks in that industry.
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> Everything that could be done by a purpose specific robot arm bolted down to the factory floor is already done by a purpose specific robot arm bolted down to the factory floor. Hah! Hardly. I say this as someone whose first "real job" was in applying robotics research to automotive assembly - there are still a ton of assembly tasks that could be performed by a fixed-base robot arm, or a robot arm on a linear rail/f…
How long ago was your robotics experience? An Amazon warehouse or Tesla factory tour would likely change your mind. I had to do both of these in the last year and not a lot of humans around…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Everything that could be done by a purpose specific robot arm bolted down to the factory floor is already done by a purpose specific robot arm bolted down to the factory floor. Hah! Hardly. I say this as someone whose first "real job" was in applying robotics research to automotive assembly - there are still a ton of assembly tasks that could be performed by a fixed-base robot arm, or a robot arm on a linear rail/f…
How long ago was your robotics experience? An Amazon warehouse or Tesla factory tour would likely change your mind. I had to do both of these in the last year and not a lot of humans around…
This is over the last decade at one of the largest automakers in the world. Naturally there is significant variation between individual lines and plants; some are newer and more automated, some are older and much less automated. Are some cars being built on more automated lines? Yes. But a great many, probably the vast majority, are being built with fairly low assembly* automation.
* There is a significant split in automation between "body weld" stages and "assembly" stages. Body weld is very heavily automated basically everywhere (although there are some surprising exceptions in places), while assembly is much less automated.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Shazeer
Can we go on a small tangent and wonder how we don't know when the guy was born?
Back in December 2020, Hyundai purchased an 80% controlling interest in Boston Dynamics from SoftBank for $880 million, part of a transaction that valued the robotics company at $1.1 billion. That agreement included a put option allowing SoftBank to sell its remaining stake to Hyundai at a later date. SoftBank has now exercised that option.
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Why would they do that? It just seems like such a bad business move without really affecting anything.
Some MBAs probably calculated that it saves more money than they would lose by pissing off used car buyers. And they want people to buy new cars.
Seems like the effect would be to take off a significant chunk of value off your used car in a way that makes it more difficult to buy a new car.
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> Everything that could be done by a purpose specific robot arm bolted down to the factory floor is already done by a purpose specific robot arm bolted down to the factory floor. Hah! Hardly. I say this as someone whose first "real job" was in applying robotics research to automotive assembly - there are still a ton of assembly tasks that could be performed by a fixed-base robot arm, or a robot arm on a linear rail/f…
"Could be in principle" and "could be in practice, under technical and economical considerations in play" are two very, very different beasts. Everyone in the industry learned that the hard way. At a certain point, the tasks that remain stop being "dexterity" problems and start being "AI" problems. That is: a robot could do the task - if you either spent big $$$ on redesigning the entire task around the robot's intel…
The auto industry is notorious for making incredibly myopic choices to save money/make money in the near term versus long-term investments. The relationship between automakers and their suppliers/vendors is basically a century-plus of the automakers trying to (1) outsource anything they can for a quick buck, and (2) grind the supplier/vendor margins down to nothing. (This is part of why the newer Chinese automakers with much greater vertical integration are such a threat to the traditional automakers; vertical integration has a high up-front investment but the payoff in flexibility and speed is significant).
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How long ago was your robotics experience? An Amazon warehouse or Tesla factory tour would likely change your mind. I had to do both of these in the last year and not a lot of humans around…
> How long ago was your robotics experience? This is over the last decade at one of the largest automakers in the world. Naturally there is significant variation between individual lines and plants; some are newer and more automated, some are older and much less automated. Are some cars being built on more automated lines? Yes. But a great many, probably the vast majority, are being built with fairly low assembly* au…
Back in December 2020, Hyundai purchased an 80% controlling interest in Boston Dynamics from SoftBank for $880 million, part of a transaction that valued the robotics company at $1.1 billion. That agreement included a put option allowing SoftBank to sell its remaining stake to Hyundai at a later date. SoftBank has now exercised that option.
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They're just one of today's lucky ten thousand. https://xkcd.com/1053/
According to this widely cited comic strip, if you are over 30 and didn't know it, you should be ashamed.
The comic strip is saying if above is true, then people still have to learn at some point so on average it would be around 10k people per day.
I think the math is this:
For people born in a given year: 4000000/365/30 = 365 people per day
but you have 30 sets of those people (those born this year, those born last year, those born two years ago, etc.) So 365 * 30 = 10950. 10k is easier to say for viral purposes.