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The “mechanical miracle” that ruined Mark Twain’s life

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Re: The “mechanical miracle” that ruined Mark Twain’s life

#71

Post by wongarsu »

arbuge wrote: post #13

> 3) Transformative technologies succeed by redesigning a task, and usually not by simply trying to reproduce the existing forms of human labor. Paige built an amazingly complex mechanical imitation of the human compositor which attempted to repeat a human worker’s actual movements. By contrast, Linotype simplified the problem by doing something humans didn’t already do. That would in fact be the main argument agains…

The counterpoint is that we already exploited a lot of the cases where simplifying the problem helps. We've spent approximately two centuries doing that. That leaves a lot of processes left over where that kind of specialization was either not feasible or not economically attractive

Re: The “mechanical miracle” that ruined Mark Twain’s life

#72

Post by Joker_vD »

arbuge wrote: post #13

> 3) Transformative technologies succeed by redesigning a task, and usually not by simply trying to reproduce the existing forms of human labor. Paige built an amazingly complex mechanical imitation of the human compositor which attempted to repeat a human worker’s actual movements. By contrast, Linotype simplified the problem by doing something humans didn’t already do. That would in fact be the main argument agains…

> The counterpoint is that what humans already do is exactly what's needed in some cases, making those cases the ideal applications for humanoids.

If my old textbook on control theory (printed in 80s) to be believed, there apparently were quite a lot of processes where simply recording the video of hand/arm movements of the human operators, smoothing the trajectories, and then making the mechanical manipulators simply follow them, was precisely the fastest and cheapest way to automate, compared to trying to reimagine the whole process and rebuild a whole manufacturing line with the newly invented machines.

Re: The “mechanical miracle” that ruined Mark Twain’s life

#73

Post by Joker_vD »

wongarsu wrote: post #68
anon-3988 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no reason why an ideal body needs to have such a high center of gravity though? Clearly we are wasting a lot of energy and capacity to maintain that balance. I am pretty the ideal body is actually a spider.

Spiders can't reach as high. Unless you make them really big, but then they take up a lot of space Humans are very space efficient

Something vaguely centauroid is probably would be the most middle of the road design: easy to maintain steady balance with 4 legs without taking too much of the floor space, the central column on top of it can go quite high up and easily have up to 4 hand-like manipulators attached to it with wide range of motion.

Re: The “mechanical miracle” that ruined Mark Twain’s life

#74

Post by cheesecakegood »

melvinroest wrote: post #69
cheesecakegood wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was able to do something probably few have, which is visit one of those small hole in the wall museums staffed essentially by just a single passionate old guy assembled with his life savings, dedicated to the printing press. Incredible experience. Anyways, it’s been about 15 years, but the thing that made an impression on me was that it wasn’t just one invention. Gutenberg basically had to assemble like two dozen s…

What small hole in the wall museum was that? I might travel to it no matter where it is in the world. Sounds awesome, I'm hyped up

The Crandall Printing Museum! Yeah he used to do live demonstrations and everything, to the degree where he would cast a type piece right there in front of you from the liquid metal! Super cool guy, crazy knowledge about even tiny details. Sadly the original near-one man show passed away about a decade ago, but apparently the family has some role still in running it (I think the son runs the tours now?) since they just barely saved it all from being shut down and sold off, so it’s still around! https://www.thecrandall.org/collection https://youtu.be/p9ikfO0MHQE if you wanted to get a glance at what they had/have. Even a linotype machine too!

Really fond memories of my visit, you can tell when someone is passionate.

Re: The “mechanical miracle” that ruined Mark Twain’s life

#75

Post by anon-3988 »

wongarsu wrote: post #68
anon-3988 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no reason why an ideal body needs to have such a high center of gravity though? Clearly we are wasting a lot of energy and capacity to maintain that balance. I am pretty the ideal body is actually a spider.

Spiders can't reach as high. Unless you make them really big, but then they take up a lot of space Humans are very space efficient

The mechanical spider can simply extend its torso or body up. You are only bounded by your imagination!

Re: The “mechanical miracle” that ruined Mark Twain’s life

#76

Post by cubefox »

jrflowers wrote: post #62
cubefox wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My lovely pocket calculator, he says these are lessons for us, for the present. And, since he is talking about technology in general, presumably for the future. The past events were only the inspiration.

I don’t think this article about Mark Twain, a famous guy one hundred and fifty years ago, lost all of his money betting on the wrong thing is about chat bots. He lost his money before all that We will never know if Mark Twain would have or would not have lost his money betting on chat bots because he lost it all on a different machine that didn’t work

> Twain’s vision of hundreds of thousands of human-like language machines taking over the world would have to wait a century or two. (...)

> I’d argue that there’s a clear line connecting the automation of typesetting and counting in the late 19th century to the rise of electrical computers a generation later, and then the early Internet and AI research a generation after that. (...)

> I think there are three transferrable lessons we can pull from this story: (...)

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