11–20 of 65 posts
I'm not worried about a grad-school project picking up a gun and using it against me. I am worried about something like this, which, while a parody, is not long off: https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/robots/a29610393...
Tl;dw, mini weaponized AI drones get loose and mass havoc ensues. I'm sure the feasibility behind these isn't close but still, it's an interesting design fiction.
If I want to know what robotics will look like and the future of deep reinforcement learning, I'd rather ask Covariant.ai than a guy whose expertise is little vacuums whose AI is "while true, spin in a circle and go forward at random".
So OK, it's a good criteria for robotics companies: Do a valuable task, do it today, do it for less. And companies following that, and i'll add - aiming for B2B, even when failed, we'll see their competitors and industry succeed. You can see it from his list of failed companies, where only Unbounded robotics(smart robot hand), Rethink(collaborative robotics), Blue workforce(collaborative), Aria insights(drones) have…
Perhaps this is because the business is already slave to its function. The exact separation and makeup of businesses reflects efficient ways to split up problems and integrate with other businesses. It's possible to refactor that given a robot that can perform a certain kind of action that is not directly equivalent to one person's job right now.
But my home is my home, it serves me, I do not serve it. For instance, one could imagine redesigning clothing to make robotic cleaning and folding of clothing feasible. I'm not going to do that! But redesigning PPE for that process in a hospital is not at all unreasonable.
There is no point made here that robots won't take over the world, he just belabors the point that it is hard to make robots replicate exactly what humans do. Automation will eat everything, it's just a matter of time. Even his problem of 'visually identifying weeds and uprooting them' does not come across as a massive problem, but one that can probably be solved with enough time and demand. Platitudes like these giv…
One thing I didn't quite realized needed teaching until I taught my daughter: how do you tell when a screw is going in right? It might have resistance because of gunk or rust, or it might be misaligned. Determining the right action is incredibly sophisticated, the difference between the slight easing of resistance with old oil or the springiness when the threads are pushing against each other and deforming. In response you might draw out and try again, or push harder, all while still trying to feel out what's really happening. Automation is great for screws in factories.
We don't have anything on the horizon that has the physical flexibility and power of a human. To the degree we can reconfigure problems to match a robot's capabilities, then yes, automation may be inevitable. A lot of problems aren't like that.
If I want to know what robotics will look like and the future of deep reinforcement learning, I'd rather ask Covariant.ai than a guy whose expertise is little vacuums whose AI is "while true, spin in a circle and go forward at random".
Current Roombas are a little more fancy than that.
There is no point made here that robots won't take over the world, he just belabors the point that it is hard to make robots replicate exactly what humans do. Automation will eat everything, it's just a matter of time. Even his problem of 'visually identifying weeds and uprooting them' does not come across as a massive problem, but one that can probably be solved with enough time and demand. Platitudes like these giv…
> Platitudes like these give false hopes to workers who should be training and preparing for the next phase of industry
These seem incompatible to me. If automation will eat "everything," what exactly is the next phase of industry that we should all be preparing for? What's left after everything has been eaten?
My resolution to this conundrum is: automation will not actually eat everything. It's not like automation is a new concept; we started automating things over 100 years ago, and contrary to fears back then and along the way, automation drove tremendous job creation. There are far more human beings with well-paying jobs (even in May 2020) than there were 100 hundred years ago.
There is no point made here that robots won't take over the world, he just belabors the point that it is hard to make robots replicate exactly what humans do. Automation will eat everything, it's just a matter of time. Even his problem of 'visually identifying weeds and uprooting them' does not come across as a massive problem, but one that can probably be solved with enough time and demand. Platitudes like these giv…
There is no point made here that robots won't take over the world, he just belabors the point that it is hard to make robots replicate exactly what humans do. Automation will eat everything, it's just a matter of time. Even his problem of 'visually identifying weeds and uprooting them' does not come across as a massive problem, but one that can probably be solved with enough time and demand. Platitudes like these giv…
Hah. Visually identifying weeds and uprooting them is exactly what I’m working on. I’m designing a farming robot for work. Funny that he says it’s a massive problem. At least in a commercial farming context it seems pretty tractable to me.
Don't get me wrong; its terribly useful. I own a knockoff. But not a model of what robots could be, today. Think of facial-recognition drones delivering voice messages to people in a crowd. Think auto-drive cars and the terabytes of data and kilowatts of energy they command. Think of the Netflix algorithm for suggesting movies. Lightyears beyond Roomba.
Yes, automation will eat our lunch. Because automation is eating our lunch. Factories, city planning, scheduling, diagnosing - all sorts of automated processes are in industry and consumer space right now. Just ask Siri about it if you still have doubts.
"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.