AI-guided robots are ready to sort recyclables • Hacker News Board

Re: AI-guided robots are ready to sort recyclables

#71

Post by PakG1 » Tue, Jun 28, 2022, 1:40 PM UTC

IshKebab wrote: post #70

PakG1 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So nobody in the world has good centralised sorting. That's our reality. So what does that imply then as to people not wanting to deal with the pain of presorting? You say that it's the proper thing to do in that reality. I'm welcome to using a word other than maturity to describe the phenomenon if you can suggest one. I'm not married to that word.

> So nobody in the world has good centralised sorting. That's our reality. Yes. That's what people are trying to solve. But that's irrelevant. Your original comment was claiming that manual sorting isn't a pain because it's the proper thing to do. That's just nonsense. It's the proper thing to do (for now) but it's also a pain. Would you have said washing clothes wasn't a pain in the 1800s? It's basically the same th…

I think this is overly getting into semantics now. But if we must, when I was a child, cleaning the floor was a pain. As an adult, not cleaning the floor creates the pain, having a clean floor is great, and the act of cleaning itself is just a natural thing to do, just as breathing and sleeping is. Natural acts aren't painful. I think a border gets crossed for those who can make something natural. For people just getting started exercising, exercise is painful. For people who exercise regularly, exercise is enjoyable. In fact, I recall one Olympian Simon Whitfield saying that his body would experience pain if he didn't exercise.

Perhaps different people also have different thresholds for pain. I'm not sure people in the 1800s would have thought, "Gee, washing these clothes is such a pain, I wish something could be invented to do it for me." I think they rather would have thought this is just a natural part of life. Perhaps the super rich who could afford servants could have the luxury to afford such thoughts. I'm betting many people in the 1800s wouldn't have even been in that headspace.

Again, you said that presorting is the proper thing to do in a reality without centralized sorting. At this moment, I can't really think of anything that I'd consider both "proper" and "painful" if I have managed to seriously make my mindset consider that thing to be "proper". Before making the switch, I would consider it "painful", yes. Looking at the before and after, I can only see maturity being the dimension that really changed. Maybe commitment is another word that could be used too. But if I really think about it, I think commitment would be so heavily moderated by maturity to the point where it might as well override commitment in terms of effect. Again, I'm open to alternative words if any can be suggested.

Re: AI-guided robots are ready to sort recyclables

#72

Post by soco » Tue, Jun 28, 2022, 11:39 PM UTC

suby wrote: post #56

ycombiredd wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t disagree at all. The point is I never really stopped to consider those folks who really will have a hard time moving up to better things, or even laterally. The video I linked, a commercial about a human doing the very job the AI/robotics project aims to do so instead. It’s short. I hope all commenters take 30 seconds to watch it, and maybe within the discussion in this thread, someone will make a salient poi…

I agree that it's generally been true up until now that we've invented new jobs to replace those which we've automated away, but I don't think that is the whole story. Going back to at least the industrial revolution with for example handloom weavers, people who have had their jobs automated away were often impoverished for the rest of their lives. I don't have any statistics to back this up, but I'd argue that this…

The wealth produced by those robotic replacements will not go to the replaced humans, or it will go in small pieces as social services, doubling down on the frustration. This sounds volatile to me.

Re: AI-guided robots are ready to sort recyclables

#73

Post by darepublic » Wed, Jun 29, 2022, 12:58 AM UTC

ackbar03 wrote: post #35

darepublic wrote: post #2

I worked at a mid sized startup where this idea was floated for developing a prototype. Neat to see it has become production level software somewhere

I don't think this is a particularly complicated idea actually. Why didnt you guys pursue it at the time?

ML was not the focus of the company, we didn't really have any qualified devs to pull off a project like that. It became a prototype for a sales pitch and I don't know what happened to it after. Though I disagree about it not being a complicated/difficult endeavour.

Re: AI-guided robots are ready to sort recyclables

#74

Post by ycombiredd » Fri, Jul 01, 2022, 12:58 PM UTC

Melting_Harps wrote: post #58

ycombiredd wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t disagree at all. The point is I never really stopped to consider those folks who really will have a hard time moving up to better things, or even laterally. The video I linked, a commercial about a human doing the very job the AI/robotics project aims to do so instead. It’s short. I hope all commenters take 30 seconds to watch it, and maybe within the discussion in this thread, someone will make a salient poi…

> For the record I am a cynical technophile by any measure. I have been called callous (and much worse) for statements like “starvation is a self-solving problem. Eventually there will be enough food for all, as the population decreases”… don’t think me anti-automation; this edge case is a thing that makes me go “hmmm…” Here is the thing, this isn't as linear as you make it out to be and is seemingly not taking into…

Thanks for the thoughtful reply.

One point I would like to respond to is that the only specific instance I mentioned where I said we should be “automating ourselves out of” jobs, was in the context of those systems/network/devops roles; roles I myself have held.(Incidentally, automation at the enterprise level involves far more than “writing scripts for IT departments” that you reduce it to, and that is somewhat what I was referring to when. I mentioned that there would be bigger and more important business processes to support as infrastructure becomes commodity, and some automation framework(s) become SOP. Sorry, I digress.)

I did not suggest anywhere - at least I didn’t mean to - to wield a techno “iron fist” (although that does conjure a pretty cool image in my head ) and I don’t think I suggested that every job everywhere should be automated, and in fact the memory of an 80’s PSA coming to mind giving me an immediate feeling of sympathy for that guy in the video, was really the whole point of why I posted.

Also, I wasn’t born into high-paying tech jobs. I was once young, and indeed have worked some pretty shit jobs. I don’t however, think they were meaningless. They may have meant nothing to me, but obviously someone thought they were worth paying me for. So aside from “dig a hole and refill it” type work, I don’t view anyone’s job as not having worth.

It does beg the question, “what will the shit jobs be for future teenagers?”, which I will for the sake of simplification lump into the same category as the glass-sorting job in the PSA. I don’t have an answer for that, at least not yet.

Perhaps this is tangential to the existential crises you describe, but, like you, I have been learning ML/AI, since about 2016 (whenever that “A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style” paper was published) and I do have some fears about AI, superintelligence, etc and what bad things will (not just may) come of it, though admittedly my fears of the negative are far outweighed by my excitement for the positive potential. This is why I own paperclipmaximizer.ai though admittedly my tongue was firmly in my cheek when I bought it. We can only hope our super intelligent AGI overlords are as optimistic as the GPT-generated quote from Maximo on that site.

I appreciate everyone’s input and time taken to provide it. I have been reading HN for a long time, but never registered or posted until last week. It is really great to have a community of intelligent people not trolling or shitposting and I was pleasantly surprised that you all actually watched the video and came back with real points of conversation. Thanks!