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Everyday robots are slowly leaving the lab

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Re: Everyday robots are slowly leaving the lab

#61

Post by copo233 »

amelius wrote: post #46
danpalmer wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My washing machine does a lot better job than I could. My oven is much more reliable at heating than I am at building campfires. My computer is much quicker at maths than I am. My TV is cheaper than going to the theatre. Automation is great when it works well, we just forget about it when it does, so we generally only recognise the bad.

Perhaps, but your dishwasher is probably not be better than a person dedicated to washing dishes. My dishwasher often leaves dirty spots and stripes, which would easily be noticed and removed by a dedicated person.

Mine doesn't.

Re: Everyday robots are slowly leaving the lab

#62

Post by OneTimePetes »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #17
dahfizz wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"__If__ machines produce everything we need..." People have been asserting that machines imply post scarcity since the communist manifesto in 1848. I am not convinced.

Even if machines produced all goods, that still doesn’t imply post-scarcity. Some things are inherently scarce: front row tickets to a show, reservations at a hot restaurant, or a certifiably original piece of art.

A bowl of rice for a day of labour in the rainforrest sawmill that produced the front row seats.

Re: Everyday robots are slowly leaving the lab

#63

Post by dotmacro »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #17
dahfizz wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"__If__ machines produce everything we need..." People have been asserting that machines imply post scarcity since the communist manifesto in 1848. I am not convinced.

Even if machines produced all goods, that still doesn’t imply post-scarcity. Some things are inherently scarce: front row tickets to a show, reservations at a hot restaurant, or a certifiably original piece of art.

Exactly. Even in Star Trek, where (almost) anything can be replicated, there are still restaurants that serve home-cooked meals.

Re: Everyday robots are slowly leaving the lab

#64

Post by blueflow »

martythemaniak wrote: post #51
dgritsko wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feels a little hyperbolic - did we read the same article? I'm looking at a GIF of a robot pushing a chair a few inches, and fail to see how it could come across as "an insult to life itself." What provokes such a strong reaction for you? As someone who knows very little about this space, the concept of using a virtual world to rapidly train on various tasks seems fascinating. I had a similar reaction upon hearin…

People's opinions are in many circumstances driven primarily by the current zeitgeist. Less reasoning and more reflection and amplification of large scale moods. GP mentions in a sibling comment that they've been working with computers for decade, as if that's a long time. Some of us have been at this for many decades, long enough to see the zeitgeist shift and things really change. The current tech backlash mood sta…

Please don't accuse me of having my stance on robots taken from others.

Re: Everyday robots are slowly leaving the lab

#66

Post by wpietri »

ehnto wrote: post #45
wpietri wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why you're getting downvoted. It's a real risk. For example, Saudi Arabia, which practices UBI [1] and otherwise transfers a lot of oil wealth to citizens, also is pretty low down on ratings of citizen freedom. [2] Many observers see it as Saudi royalty buying political compliance. Given that the US is now on the list of backsliding democracies [3], and given the era in US politics where government money was…

Through this lens I'm kind of surprised it's not a more popular policy, I'd never thought about it like this.

There are certainly ways to do it that are less risky than others. I think the closest thing the US has now is the Child Tax Credit: https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/Treasury-and-I...

That's relatively hard to corrupt, in that it's a federal program with clear numeric criteria drawn from a system that is robust because it's a big slice of government revenue.

Also, as far as popularity goes, at least in the US there's a strong allergic reaction to The Wrong People getting government money. So the mortgage tax credit is seen as fine and reasonable, but "strapping young bucks" getting food stamps is a deep outrage. So I think UBI won't become truly popular until politicians can find a way to get enough control over who gets it such that only the right people (wink, wink) get it.

Re: Everyday robots are slowly leaving the lab

#67

Post by MontyCarloHall »

joey_bob wrote: post #57
deadbunny wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Poor people can't afford to live. This leads to all kinds of shit we should have -as a species - eliminated decades ago; kids with Rickets, parents that skip meals so their kids can eat, foregoing heating so they can eat, working 3 jobs just to pay the rent, having zero healthcare. And that's just in developed countries. Poor people don't care that they will never own a Ferrari (or even a car newer than 15 years old,…

So if misery of the poor and inequality largely aren't the same, there might be a path where inequality increases while the quality of life of the poor also increases?

Globally, at least, we appear to be well along that path. The number of people living in extreme poverty has declined precipitously over the last few decades [0].

Philosophically, why is inequality an inherently bad thing? If the poorest among us universally had the standard of living of today’s millionaires, why should we be bothered by the existence of trillionaires or quadrillionaires?

For me, it comes to a differential in political power. The greater the magnitude of inequality, the easier it is for the quadrillionaires to put the plebeian millionaires back into abject poverty.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty

Re: Everyday robots are slowly leaving the lab

#68

Post by jjkaczor »

guerrilla wrote: post #48
epberry wrote: post #6

How can you not think this is great? Freeing humans from menial tasks is the way forward. Remember when people (mostly women) would spend hours washing? Machines and automation freed them.

It really depends on who owns the robots. As it is now, the richer you are the more robots you'll be able to afford and the less labor you'll need. When labor isn't in demand anymore and most people don't have robots, then most people won't have income anymore, forcing them into poverty and revolution. Robot police and military could make successful revolution impossible.

Capture them, hack them and re-program them...

Re: Everyday robots are slowly leaving the lab

#69

Post by hairofadog »

blueflow wrote: post #64
martythemaniak wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People's opinions are in many circumstances driven primarily by the current zeitgeist. Less reasoning and more reflection and amplification of large scale moods. GP mentions in a sibling comment that they've been working with computers for decade, as if that's a long time. Some of us have been at this for many decades, long enough to see the zeitgeist shift and things really change. The current tech backlash mood sta…

Please don't accuse me of having my stance on robots taken from others.

This is the quintessential Hacker News comment.

Re: Everyday robots are slowly leaving the lab

#70

Post by lnsru »

yourapostasy wrote: post #53
lnsru wrote: post #22

I wish, we will not create world with robots as shown in movie Elysium. I wish we could create a world with universal basic income where warehouse slaves are replaced with robots and people can do something better than picking orders in constant fear of being too slow.

A current fully-automated restaurant uses 46 different types of robots [1], costs $29M USD [2] to deliver a 600 seat venue serving a 200 dish repertoire. The opex costs on that alone are going to draw out the capex payback quite a bit, before even getting into how the startup cost was around 5-10X conventional restaurants' startup costs. There isn't a Moore's Law for robots and their opex costs that lets us wait arou…

I can only speculate, but the 40 robots does not like to cost more than $4M: https://cobotsguide.com/2016/06/universal-robots/ The software can be reused in 2nd restaurant reducing the cost dramatically. And then buying another 10 set of robots reduce unit cost by another ~30%.
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