101–110 of 564 posts
Anyway. I better quiet down. I'm sure the robotic bricklayers will be here to take our jobs soon enough. No need to rush it.
(Well actually, laying bricks is one of those fiendishly complicated problems at scale...)
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…
Computer people tend to work in office settings. The reason the old joke about threatening to replace people with shell scripts works is because a lot of office jobs can be replaced with shell scripts. This is because, rather than physically working in the real world, most office jobs entail manipulating symbols, which is easy for computers but hard for humans. (That's why we invented computers).
A lot of work in the real world entails some decision-making component that can be expressed in terms of symbol manipulation. This overlaps with the part that many people find difficult, because people are naturally good at physically manipulating the real world. So when we talk about automating driving or picking tomatoes or bricklaying, we are only accounting for the difficulty of automating the symbol-manipulation abstraction of that task.
(This is basically the conceit of "Manna", a science fiction story where a ton of jobs are "automated" by a computer that just gives a continuous stream of verbal instructions to a poorly paid human being.)
If you're measuring the skills of manual workers against the standard of how hard it is to build a robot that replaces them, they are surprisingly hard. The same is true for the skills of trained animals. Maybe we should start worrying about replacing human beings with robots after we've managed to figure out how to replace dogs with robots. Once we have enough bomb-sniffing robots, drug-sniffing robots, livestock guardian robots, police pursuit robots, search and rescue robots, and so forth, to the point where we don't need dogs, then maybe we can start to worry about the human jobs. (Or maybe not--dogs have a really good sense of smell that might be harder to replicate than some human capacities.)
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…
I don't have contempt for the skills; I have great respect for the skills. I have contempt for the prices of things. If construction costs are cheaper than ever (are they really?) why can't I buy a box to live in without spending $300,000? Why is the permits process nationally broken? And despite being skilled, that doesn't mean they're informed: why do contractors not know what they're supposed to do? Why do the peo…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't have contempt for the skills; I have great respect for the skills. I have contempt for the prices of things. If construction costs are cheaper than ever (are they really?) why can't I buy a box to live in without spending $300,000? Why is the permits process nationally broken? And despite being skilled, that doesn't mean they're informed: why do contractors not know what they're supposed to do? Why do the peo…
I used to work in a family construction business and now I do machine learning contracting. When I compare the value you get for 300k worth of construction to what 300k of ML specialist time buys you, it's hard to agree with your comment. I understand the reasons, but generally I'm blown away by how cheap most labor intensive things are, compared to how much people will pay for software projects.
Machine learning is not a high return investment on its own. It is only leveraged as a technical piece of an already cash flow healthy larger pie in most organizations.
The division of labor and supply of various workers makes most labor intensive tasks self-explanatory in cost.
$300,000 can buy you a property that takes years to double in value in comparison. They're completely different categories of capital utilization.
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…
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…
I think this is a rather harsh take. Most of the people working on automating it understand how hard it is and are striving through it. You need some of these irrational believers for progress!
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…
I really disagree that almost anyone who has built tool assistance into someone's workflow will view their workflow as simple and view the employee with contempt - actually getting to know the BS they have to put up with on a daily basis actually deepens my appreciation for what they're doing. Sure I can cherry-pick examples that make folks look bad - employees today, even millennials, are for some reason allergic to learning keyboard shortcuts and will use right-click to paste. That's somewhat on them, but more on the company for not providing training time to teach better data entry habits.
If one of these highly skilled agricultural workers was given a robot that used scent to determine which fruit trees likely had ripe fruit that needed to be harvested - I'm sure they'd appreciate it for what it is, a tool that lets them concentrate on more important things. And, if we as a society are moving into a era where automation becomes so widespread that jobs are much fewer and far between 1) we'll waste a lot more time building freemium games or whatever BS labour sink society comes up with next and 2) we should realize that taxes need to go way up on the people still employed and UBI or other social services are needed to keep us functional as a society. Having too much productivity is such an easy problem to solve - you just don't do what America is doing and let it all coagulate into the pockets of a few hundred billionaires... and then everyone gets to live a good life.
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…
Also, if you speak with people in ML/AI, they will not tell you it's around the corner. They know that physical stuff and robotics in general is hard.
Also, builders and the like often have a great amount of contempt towards any desk job - is that OK? Why?
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…